The Sea Inside

by Philip Hoare

  The Tasman Peninsula is a great mass of Jurassic rock, the highest sea cliffs in the Southern Hemisphere, a spectacular wall of black dolerite. Somewhere behind them lies Port Arthur and its prison ruins. Tim, our twenty-two-year-old skipper, clad in board shorts and boots, brings the nine-hundred-horsepower rib to an abrupt halt and hands the controls to his first mate Ben, who is even younger than his captain.

  ‘This is awesome,’ Tim enthuses, as we look up at the ancient strata and crevices. Everything is open and sharp here, as if the world were still being built. Fur seals loll on every ledge, slipping into the water to arc in and out of the waves. Their name, Arctocephalus pusillus, ‘bear-headed little one’, perpetuates an error, having been first described from an illustration of a pup. In truth they’re the largest of all fur seals, and seem to revel in their status, with their upturned noses and haughty profiles – for all that they are forever picking fights with one another, flashing their eyes and baring their teeth. Were I foolish enough to approach one, I’d soon discover that a fur seal can move fast, even out of the water. Faced with such a situation – so the pages of my field guide tell me – I should maintain eye contact and slowly back off, since bull seals see an upright human as a threat.

  Perhaps they have good memories. In Tasman’s and Cook’s wake came the sealers, supplying the Western world with fur. The elegant ladies and gentlemen who preened themselves on Piccadilly or the Unter den Linden had no idea of the desperation that lay in the sleek pelages which protected their necks on a chilly winter’s afternoon. Nor could they know the nature of the men who peeled the pelts from their still-living owners: lawless men, many of them escaped convicts who kidnapped Aborigine women, keeping them captive as sex slaves on places such as Kangaroo Island.

  Sealing began in Australia in 1798. Such was its ferocity that within thirty years, three species – the New Zealand fur seal, the Australian sea lion and the Southern elephant seal – were all but extinct. Three-quarters of a million animals died, many skinned alive. Only the Australian fur seal remains in Tasmania. As we sail around the cliffs, ledge after ledge is filled with these restive animals, lying belly to belly, disputing the perfect spot. Tim steers the rib into the fractured, barnacled shore. Peering down into the clear water, in the opening and closing gap between rock and boat, I can see huge stems of swaying brown kelp, twenty metres tall, a playground for the seals that anchor themselves to the stems with their surprisingly dexterous hind limbs. We drift dreamily over the thick fronds as though over a gelatinous forest.

  A Shy albatross soars out of the sky – the first I’ve ever seen. No other bird could be so shaped to the sea, ‘a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and with a hooked, Roman bill sublime’, as Melville wrote when he saw his own first albatross, flying on ‘vast archangel wings as if to embrace some holy ark’. Like any other reader after The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Melville was alerted to the bird’s romance by Coleridge’s poem. But the poet (who called himself a ‘library-cormorant’) drew his story from George Shelvocke’s A Voyage Round the World by Way of the Great South Sea, published in 1726.

  Most sailors regarded the sight of an albatross as auspicious. As it ages – and it may reach one hundred years old – the wandering albatross becomes almost entirely white, not unlike the Risso’s dolphin or the beluga whale: a ghostly soul-bird, invested with the spirits of departed sailors or the whiteness that appalled Ishmael. Shelvocke’s second captain, Simon Hatley, saw the black albatross as an evil sign, ‘observing, in one of his melancholy fits, that this bird was always hovering near us, imagin’d, from his colour, that it might be some ill omen’. As Hatley took aim –

  ‘God save thee, ancient Mariner!

  From the fiends, that plague thee thus! –

  Why look’st thou so?’ – With my cross-bow

  I shot the ALBATROSS.

  – his commander looked on in a kind of wonder, as if himself stupefied. ‘That which, I suppose, induced him the more to encourage his superstition, was the continued series of contrary tempestuous winds, which had oppressed us ever since we had got into this sea … [he] shot the Albitross, not doubting (perhaps) that we should have a fair wind after it.’

  There’s a fearful symmetry in the fact that albatrosses are now among the most endangered of all seabirds. They may spend a decade in the air never touching land, sleeping on the wing; like whales, they are able to nap with one hemisphere of their brain still active, in what is known, fittingly, as slow-wave sleep. And like the other procellarids, they also have an intense sense of smell. The ocean may seem a featureless expanse to us, but to an albatross it is a vast, multilayered web of odours. They can smell phytoplankton from miles away; and since the plankton’s presence indicates invisible upwellings and seamounts, it not only leads them to sources of food, but allows them to navigate their way, orientating themselves to an olfactory seascape.

  Yet even as they ride the updraughts on their exquisitely narrow wings, flying so free, they are susceptible to the activities of the human-altered world. Accidental death now haunts these birds, snagged by longlines or caught in nets. From the artificial islands of trash gathered by the Pacific gyre, albatross parents forage for bits of plastic that look like tasty morsels of squid and feed them to their chicks. Their bellies filled with drink loops, used cigarette lighters and tampon applicators, the chicks starve to death, leaving plastic-stuffed skeletons as modern memento mori.

  As the albatross glides out of sight, we swerve into a feeding frenzy of short-tailed shearwaters, ‘mutton birds’ to the locals who still prize their oily flesh. Their teeming shapes turn the sky into a living, squawking cloud, plucking at the sea with their wings. In his History of Tasmania, published in 1850, the Reverend John West reports on such immense flocks, as seen by Matthew Flinders, who first charted these waters in 1802. ‘Captain Flinders … says that when near the north-west extremity of Van Diemen’s Land he saw a stream … from fifty to eighty yards in depth, and of three hundred yards or more in breadth … during a full hour-and-a-half this stream of petrels continued to pass without interruption, at a rate little inferior to the swiftness of the pigeon. On the lowest computation he thought the number could not have been less than a hundred millions.’

  Out of the bird-cloud comes a trumpeting blow, followed by a subtler whoosh, an intensely familiar sound to me: a humpback whale, travelling with its calf. They’re stragglers in the spring migration, dawdling on their way to the feeding grounds – despite the mother’s hunger, as evident from the vertebrae visible beneath her reduced blubber, having given all her energy to her calf. Her kind, like the southern rights, have been swimming this route for centuries. The Aboriginal people, to whom the sea was only an extension of their Dreaming, and who, like the whales, had no home, only a deep sense of their connection to their environment and a forty-thousand-year-old culture, would ‘sing up’ the whales, prompting them to breach in joy for the calves they were about to bear, or those they brought back with them. They also believed that when whales stranded themselves, they did so to feed human tribes in ‘an act of courtesy, an act of promise’.

  In ten years of whalewatching off Cape Cod, I’ve seen dozens of humpback mothers and calves. But there is something different about this pair. Perhaps it’s the way they feed, lunging on their sides rather than gathering up their bait-fish in a net of bubbles. Or perhaps it’s the female’s flukes, much whiter than those of her northern counterparts. The image of the pale mother against the black rocks is as stark and elusive as the solemn portraits of native people I’d seen in Hobart’s museum; as if neither were really made for me to see. A promise, and a courtesy.

  Just north of Adventure Bay, on the narrow neck that links North and South Bruny, is a sandy stretch where blue penguins waddle ashore at night to feed their chicks, running the gauntlet of the open beach to reach their young nesting in burrows in the dunes. High over this slender strand stands a stone cairn with the bronze relief of a woman’s face; her name
, Truganini; her dates, 1812–1876; and nothing else.

  Truganini was the daughter of Mangana, chief of the people of Lunawanna-alonnah, as Bruny Island was known to her tribe. Their ancestors had lived there for thirty thousand years. But at the age of seventeen, Truganini watched her mother being stabbed to death by men from a whaling ship. Shortly after, sealers abducted her two sisters and took them to Kangaroo Island as slaves. Her brother was killed and her stepmother taken by escaped convicts. Then she and her betrothed were kidnapped by lumberjacks and taken to the mainland. During the crossing her husband-to-be was thrown overboard; as he tried to climb back on board, the men cut off his hands, leaving their victim to drown. Truganini was then repeatedly raped. Her shocked father, Mangana, died soon afterwards.

  Truganini was witness to brutalities which the Reverend John West could hardly bear to iterate. ‘If it were possible in a work like this to record but a tithe of the murders committed on these poor harmless creatures, it would make the reader’s blood run cold at the bare recital,’ he wrote, attaching a single footnote as if to spare the sensitive reader:

  *One case may suffice. A respectable young gentleman, who was out kangaroo hunting, in jumping over a dead tree, observed a black native crouched by the stones, as if to hide himself. The huntsman observing the white of the eye of the native, was induced to examine the prostrate being, and finding it only to be a native, he placed the muzzle of his piece to his breast and shot him dead on the spot. Hundreds of similar cases might be adduced.

  One white man, however, appeared to have the native people’s best interests at heart. On 30 March 1829, in the middle of the Black War between the settlers and the settled, George Robinson arrived on Bruny Island to create a new refuge, a new colony.

  George Augustus Robinson, born in Lincolnshire in 1791, had emigrated to Australia in 1822. He set up a successful building company in Van Diemen’s Land, but as a man of faith he was also drawn to good works, and with them, perhaps, social ascendency; even his friends found him pompous and vain, ‘more patronizing than courteous and somewhat offensively polite than civil’. By that point the settlers’ cruel treatment of the Aboriginal tribes – usurping their hunting grounds, kidnapping children and killing adults – had reached the point at which a final extermination was suggested, or at least the removal of these unwanted people from the lands which the settlers required. As a Christian, however, Robinson believed conciliation was possible. Appointed by George Arthur, he established a model village in order to redeem the Aboriginal people who, he had to admit, ‘rank very low in the savage creation’, yet were possessed of ‘many amiable points which glitter like sunbeams through the shroud of darkness by which they are enveloped …’

  In pursuit of his task, Robinson undertook a series of expeditions deep into western Tasmania, a place which even now remains a wilderness. With him he took a following of indigenous people, including Truganini, with whom, rumour suggested, he had formed a sexual relationship. Robinson attempted to persuade the people of these remote areas to join the proposed sanctuaries on Swan Island, Gun Carriage Island and Flinders Island, off the north coast of Tasmania. It was during this so-called Friendly Mission that Truganini saved Robinson’s life when he was under attack on the Arthur River; the roles of the vaunted protector of the Aboriginal people and his childlike charges had become reversed. The story was widely reported in Hobart, thrusting Truganini’s image into the public eye as the acceptable face of the savage.

  Among her portraitists was Thomas Bock, himself a transportee (his crime had been to administer drugs to a young woman back in England). Now a well-known artist in Tasmania, he was commissioned by the new governor’s wife, Lady Jane Franklin, to paint its native people. His work is poignant, since it shows how these people looked before their appearance was influenced by the coming of the colonists. In his watercolour of 1837, Truganini appears as a young woman in her twenties, with shaven head and carefully arranged tribal dress; an Antipodean Eve, her breasts bound by a piece of twine. But in his oil painting, Benjamin Duterreau – born in London of French parents, he had emigrated to Van Diemen’s Land in 1832 – created an evanescently beautiful, almost fairy-like portrait of Truganini, painted in recessive blue, green and brown against a crepuscular sky, as if she were already disappearing. It is an image only pretending to be real. Swathed in a kangaroo skin in lieu of ermine, with a shell necklace instead of pearls, she becomes a mythic, regal figure, like an Elizabethan princess in an alien land.

  Was the artist painting his lover? She could be fourteen, or in her forties, this indigenous Mona Lisa. In his sketchbook, Duterreau added a note that summed up her rescue of Robinson in a similarly poetic, if not telegraphic manner:

  Truggernana/A native of the southern part of V.D. land & Wife to Woureddy/was attach’d to the mission in 1829/Truggernana has render’d very essential service to the/expedition on many occasions & in a most remarkable manner/Saved Mr. Robinson’s life by swimming & propelling/at the same time a small spear of wood to which Mr./Robinson was clinging while endeavouring to cross/the river Arthur to get away from some natives/who had form’d a plan to kill him. but not being/able to swim he owes his life to Truggernana.

  The artist attempted to create a realistic portrait, but succeeded only in painting a dream. In his soft-focus and almost symbolist images, Duterreau depicted Tasmania’s dwindling inhabitants in lush, highly composed and posed pictures. It seems fitting that his best-known work is incomplete, a study for a greater canvas. The Conciliation is a conversation-piece in the manner of Zoffany; Duterreau called it a ‘national picture’. It shows George Robinson in his white duck trousers and navy cutaway coat and floppy cap, set against the elegant nakedness of the native people with whom he is portrayed in an unequal alliance, wagging his finger as if to lecture or admonish. He seems inappropriately, flamboyantly overdressed, while their loincloths are a modest invention by the painter. In reality, their naked bodies were protected from the elements by ochre and animal fat, and their heads decorated with dried mud. They are accompanied by the dogs brought by white men, now used by the Aboriginal people to kill kangaroos; one hound sniffs provocatively towards a grey wallaby.

  As I look at it, in the parquet quiet of Hobart’s museum, the canvas seems to transcend its history; what it meant at the time, what it means now. The entire arrangement has a mortal definition; it is divided by lines. The whiteness of its central figure asserts itself over the darkness of the others. Thin shafts of spears which could kill bisect the composition, giving it a modern tension. At its centre, next to Robinson like a dark mirror, is Truganini, pointing to her protector and lover, and to the future of her people.

  But it was already too late. The island asylums to which they were led by Robinson were little better than penal colonies. His vision was betrayed by reality. In 1803, when it was first settled, there were about ten thousand Aborigines in Tasmania; by 1835, when Robinson took charge of Flinders Island, fewer than one hundred and fifty remained.

  In their unnatural confinement, disease took its toll. Even the clothes they were forced to wear, partly to inhibit any attempt at escape, caused them to catch cold when they got soaked in the rain, and as with Native Americans, fabric was the conduit of infection. ‘Among savages, the blanket has sometimes slain more than the sword,’ wrote the Reverend West. Some would bleed themselves to assuage their pain, blood streaming down their faces; it was the only way they could react to the helplessness of their fate. Others simply gave up the will to live. ‘They were within sight of Tasmania, and as they beheld its not distant but forbidden shore, they were often deeply melancholy,’ wrote West; he claimed that more than half those held on Flinders Island had died from ‘home sickness, a disease which is common to some Europeans, particularly in the Swiss soldiers’. Many starved themselves; healthy spouses who were bereaved ‘would immediately sicken, and rapidly pine away’.

  (Nor were their white visitors immune to such subtle suffering. In 1826 another of my d
istant cousins, Isaac Scott Nind, had sailed to Van Diemen’s Land as an assistant surgeon in the 39th Dorsetshire regiment. Sent to the remote settlement of King George Sound in Western Australia, he became fascinated by the local tribes and later wrote a report on their culture for the Royal Geographical Society. But after five years in the wilderness, isolated with fifty others, two dozen of them convicts, Isaac was slowly going mad. He told the sergeant he’d rather see the back of a man than his face, and one day grabbed the commandant’s hand and, in tears, began to blurt out an account of his past sins – then repeated his confession in the soldiers’ barracks. Meanwhile, another man climbed a nearby mountain every Sunday to pray to God for relief. Soon after, Isaac was sent home to England, suffering from a nervous breakdown.)

  The settlers had no vocabulary or context for what they faced; that which they did not understand, they ignored, or destroyed. The Aboriginal people had both, but in their despair, seemed to prefer to die. In a charity shop in Surrey I once found a 1950s edition of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Slipped into the pages on sympathetic magic, among accounts of Aboriginal people mimicking cockatoos and dugongs, I discovered a yellowing newspaper clipping which, to judge from its typeface, appeared to have come from a contemporary edition of The Times. The dateline was Darwin, April 16. ‘A 19-year-old Aborigine who was said to have been put under a spell known as “singing him to death” by tribal women, was taken from an iron lung here to-day for 25 minutes and asked for food and water for the first time since he was admitted to hospital on Tuesday,’ it reported. ‘He cannot breathe voluntarily, and he cannot eat or drink. Doctors can find nothing organically wrong with him.’