In Tasmania

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Meanwhile, Meredith and Amos had each sent a party to the river mouth, ‘expecting, of course, that the Civil Power would be on the spot, to decide and legalise their proceedings’. Meredith advised Arthur that he was busy alerting William Lyne and other settlers on the coast to drum up every available man in order to keep the Aborigines hemmed in.

  By Friday evening, a total of 84 soldiers and farm-workers had gathered at Meredith’s whaling station, leaving a skeleton force to guard various properties. Fires were lit every 100 yards or so across the isthmus, three men sentried at each, and they sat down to wait. The isthmus ‘being nearly a mile’, they clearly thought the game was in the bag.

  Acting in lieu of the police magistrate, Swansea’s local doctor had taken upon himself the surprising step of handing out rations from the Commissariat. He gave to each man the same per diem as Arthur had allowed for the Black Line: two pounds of flour or biscuit, one and a half pounds of meat, half an ounce of tea, three ounces of sugar. ‘The tobacco and soap I have not furnished.’

  On Sunday, there was a new moon. Dogs were heard howling and there was a rustle in the silver wattle. At sunrise, Meredith discovered fresh footprints on a patch of burned ground and some dogs feeding on the carcass of a whale. He also found 12 spears left behind under a rock. The number of footprints suggested that there were between twelve and 20 people, some of them children. But it was clear that a ‘slab’ of Aborigines were still hiding in the rocks and caves. Two settlers told Meredith that ‘they observed the blacks on a rock not far distant, endeavouring to escape’.

  By now, Meredith was concerned that he did not have sufficient men ‘to form scowering parties as well as to maintain the line’. He sent urgent messages to Spring Bay and Little Swanport, which he expected to produce another 40 people. Once these arrived, ‘more effective measures may be entered upon’.

  But before Meredith’s reinforcements turned up, Tongerlongetter and his people did indeed escape.

  They darted through the line at 10.00 on Tuesday evening, between two huts about 80 yards apart. The night was dark – the new moon had only just risen – and the fires were becoming low due to a shortage of wood. The soldiers did not see them coming.

  The first to hear the alarm was William Lyne’s eldest son John. Fifty-six years later, as Member of Parliament for Glamorgan, John Lyne would introduce the bill that attempted to eradicate the Tasmanian tiger. Towards the end of his life he remembered the pitch-black night when he tried to trap a band of the last Tasmanian Aborigines. ‘It was my turn to patrol. I was at the time [urging] the men Keep a good watch as the native dogs were seen amongst the fires in front and after passing one of the soldiers on duty about 50 yards I heard him call ‘Halt’. He comes there firing off his gun to give the alarm and on my running quick I heard a rustle like as though a mob of wild cattle were passing but could see nothing for it was very dark except near the fires and the low scrub had been previously burnt making the ground of the like colour of the natives. Next morning we tracked their footmarks very plain, the ground being soft from previous rain.’ Apart from their footprints, the Aborigines had left behind one bloody piece of evidence. Lyne told his niece that ‘the next day was found a large piece of the scalp of a black on a wattle stake, quite low, the poor thing had raced past and struck the tree.’

  The wattles were restless with honey-eaters on the afternoon I crossed the isthmus. I walked out along Cook’s Beach, pleased to see no-one on it. ‘All we have in April are our own footprints,’ a guide had told me on my first visit. On that occasion, she pointed out an ancient hut hidden in the gums. I had not been inside it, but now I could not resist opening the door. Inside, old copies of the Mercury insulated the walls, and seeing that one page, dated February 1958, had an advertisement for a horror movie starring Boris Karloff, I read it.

  I escaped onto the dazzling white sand. A flight of yellow-tailed black cockatoos moved very fast and high over the tops of the gums, uttering loud harsh cries. The same casuarinas. The same orange-lichened rocks. The same cerulean sea. The Aborigines had been coming here for 40,000 years and yet the only traces of their presence were a few flint tools and a midden of white shells. I watched the tide hiss up past a mud oyster on the sand and come away rolling it over and over, and tried to think of Truganini. She was a member of the Bruny Island tribe, but I had an odd notion that she might have visited this beach, ever since reading Sarah Mitchell’s memoir. ‘My father and I went to see her in Hobart and he asked her if she were of the East Coast tribe and she was. She went down with a basket to gather oysters and said, “Plenty of shark there.” Father said, “What did you do with the shells?” She looked at him as if he were stupid and said, “Why throw them on the bank sometimes.”’ But I could not get out of my head the advertisement on the wall of the hut. ‘Can you take it? Shock! From the dead they come to haunt and terrify you.’ It was no more melodramatic than the events that occurred here on a Tuesday evening in October 1831. Or the fate that awaited Tongerlongetter and his people.

  XI

  TWO MONTHS AFTER ESCAPING MEREDITH’S CORDON, THE OYSTER bay chief was found camped in thick bush a few miles north-west of Lake Echo where he and 13 others had joined up with the Big River tribe. The man who discovered him was George Robinson, a tubby 43-year-old sycophant with a head of wavy auburn hair, most of it a wig. When Tongerlongetter spied this puzzling Englishman, he advanced towards him crying his war whoop and shaking his spear. But the noise died away as Robinson stood his ground.

  Robinson was a Wesleyan and former bricklayer appointed by Governor Arthur to negotiate peace with the Aborigines. A remarkable though vain and flawed man, he shared a passion for the fate of the Aborigines that was equalled only by his ambition to rise in his own society. He sometimes used one concern to promote the other. Calder knew him well: ‘He was more patronising than courteous and somewhat offensively polite rather than civil.’ His dispatches to Arthur, wrote Calder, were interminable and ‘in magniloquence of style throw into the shade altogether the official bulletins of such men as Napoleon, Wellington and others’.

  An Aboriginal woman in Swansea told me 170 years later: ‘Robinson, as far as I’m concerned, was a weak, egotistical do-gooder who did real bad!’

  Mark Twain, however, was impressed. ‘It may be that his counterpart appears in history somewhere, but I do not know where to look for it … Marsyas charming the wild beasts with his music – that is fable; but the miracle wrought by Robinson is fact. It is history – and authentic; and surely there is nothing greater, nothing more reverence-compelling in the history of any country, ancient or modern.’

  Robinson had his extraordinariness and his journal at least rivals Baudin’s report as the richest source of knowledge concerning Aborigines.

  As Robinson described it in his journal: ‘I then went up to the chiefs and shook hands with them. I then explained in the aborigines’ dialects the purport of my visit amongst them. I invited them to sit down and gave them some refreshments and selected a few trinkets as presents which they received with much delight. They evinced considerable astonishment on hearing me address them in their own tongue and from henceforward placed themselves entirely under my control.’ In words that Tongerlongetter’s descendants remember to this day, Robinson wrote: ‘I have promised them a conference with the Lieut. Govr and that the Governor will be sure to redress all their grievances.’

  On January 7, 1832, Robinson led Tongerlongetter into Hobart. The two tribes had shrunk to a total of 26: 16 men, nine women and one child. Along with them followed more than 100 dogs. They walked down Elizabeth Street with their dogs, watched by citizens such as Kemp ‘with the most lively curiosity and delight’. At Government House, Governor Arthur greeted their arrival with a military brass band and gave each Aborigine a loaf of bread. A large front door was then hauled onto the lawn so that they could demonstrate their ‘wonderful dexterity’. Among the observers was Jorgenson. ‘At the distance of about 60 or 70 yards they sent
their spears through the door, and all the spears nearly in the same place. ‘Then one Aborigine stuck a crayfish onto a spear, retreated 60 yards and hurled two out of three spears through the bright orange shell. The fact that they were in ‘the greatest good humour’ reflected their understanding that they were celebrating a treaty, not a defeat.8

  Ten days later Tongerlongetter boarded the Tamar. He had agreed to Arthur’s complex negotiation to exchange Van Diemen’s Land for Flinders Island. Robinson wrote: ‘They are delighted with the idea of proceeding to Great Island [as Flinders was called], where they will enjoy peace and plenty, uninterrupted.’

  XII

  I FLEW TO FLINDERS, A 35-MINUTE FLIGHT IN A SMALL PLANE FROM Launceston with two other passengers. The sky was grey as a beard and Flinders rose into it, a bleak spine of rock springing sheer from the sea. Forty miles long and 23 wide, this was where Tongerlongetter allowed himself to be removed in exchange for his ancestral lands. The airstrip was surrounded by scorched meadows and at the empty terminal building there was a warning: ‘European wasps are active in this area – please dispose of rubbish with care.’

  Robinson had promised Tongerlongetter that if he came here his people would be able to keep their way of life. Instead, they were forced into Christianity and trousers, and told by the superintendent to scrub the mud and rust from their hair.

  The Aborigines camped at an unsuitable lagoon near Whitemark while convicts built the settlement of Wybalenna for them, and in 1833 they moved there. The name Wybalenna meant ‘Black Man’s Houses’. For many, it was their last home.

  Flinders is geographically to Tasmania what Tasmania is to the mainland. A young man in the pub at Lady Barron tried to explain it: ‘Sometimes you think in Tasmania: “This is the best kept secret.” Then on Flinders you think: “This is the best kept secret of that secret.”’ Its history lies close to the surface. A woman told me that her father, as he was putting down a cattle-race at Prime Seal Island, found a leg in leg-irons. He said: ‘I moved it further away.’ For more than a century, that is how many settlers on Flinders tried to deal with what happened to the Aborigines at Wybalenna.

  I found the bricks still scattered in the damp grass: the foundations of eight houses for the military, the sanatorium and dispensary, and, behind a mound, the L-shaped terrace of 20 cottages built for the Aborigines.

  The only building standing today was a brick chapel built by George Robinson in a grove of casuarinas. It was here that Greg Lehman had got married in 1985. He told me that not long before my visit two Aboriginal women had tried to enter, but the door refused to open. They pressed their ears to it and what they heard made them walk away, very fast. ‘Inside, they said, they heard a roaring, blowing wind.’

  No-one escapes the wind on Flinders. Almost the first thing I noticed on the road from the airfield were the doubled-back trunks of the paperbarks, sculpted by the Roaring Forties to resemble trees from a children’s book. The latitude splits the island in half. ‘You are now passing the 40th parallel,’ read a white signpost on another deserted road. Below it, someone had scribbled: ‘Oh, what a feeling.’ I lodged nearby with an old Scottish woman who complained how the wind transformed all her vegetables into propellers. ‘I’ve watched from my bedroom window a cabbage plant being blown round and round and then spin right off out of the ground.’

  I arrived on Flinders shortly after the wind had fanned a forest fire across the island. The fire blazed for three weeks, driving flames from the hills in every direction and leaving the fields in their wake a dramatic rust colour. Clumps of ti-trees stood out like puffs of solidified smoke, and already in the forks of the burned branches the shoots were coming back in feathery green stems.

  At Wybalenna, it had stopped raining and on the mound above the chapel the crickets were shrilling. But it was on a day like today, windy and damp, that Tongerlongetter caught his cold.

  He sat in his wet English clothes, no animal fat on his massive body – the superintendent discouraged that too – and shivering.

  On the evening of June 19, 1837, he was joking with his wife when he collapsed in ‘excruciating agony’ and started vomiting. Earlier he had complained of a rheumatic pain on the left of his face, but now his chest was so inflamed that he howled when Alexander Austin, the medical attendant, touched his skin. Austin immediately bled him, taking 50 ounces from his arm, and administered an enema. ‘For the first six hours he was perfectly sensible and his cries of “Minatti” piteous.’

  Robinson had already that winter watched 14 Aborigines die from pneumonia. The prospect of losing the chief whom he had renamed King William was too much for him. ‘Poor creature!’ he wrote in his journal. ‘I turned from the appalling scene. It was more than my mind could endure …’ He left the room without saying goodbye. Later, he heard the lamentations and knew.

  Not until the wailing died down did Robinson go and see the corpse. ‘Oh, what a sight,’ he wrote. The Aborigines stood in silence, tears streaming down their cheeks. He left the room, shaken. ‘The death of King William has thrown a halo over the settlement.’

  On a remarkably fine morning two days later Robinson led the mourners at the Christian funeral. Tongerlongetter’s body lay in a gum plank coffin on two trestles in the schoolroom. At 11 a.m., the Aborigines in new dresses sang an improbable hymn: ‘From Egypt lately come/Where death and darkness reign/We seek a new a better home/Where we our rest shall gain.’

  Then Robinson addressed them: ‘When I first met him he was in his native wilds, those parts where white men never trod. He was then at the head of a powerful tribe. Their very name spread terror and dismay throughout the peaceful settlements of the colony … It was to subjugate this man’s tribe and that of his colleague that the famous military operation was entered upon, namely the cordon of the island commonly called the Line.’ But as the eulogy went on, Robinson faltered. He looked into the faces around him and thought of how Tongerlongetter’s people had since been treated after relying ‘with implicit confidence on my veracity’. He battled to console himself that at least they had discovered Jesus. ‘My sable brethren,’ he told them, ‘you now not only have a knowledge of God, but you have a knowledge of the principles of Christianity.’ But his heart was heavy. He had portrayed himself as a Pied Piper, promising to lead Tongerlongetter to safety and civilisation. In a letter he wrote to the surgeon, he could not contain his bitterness: ‘He is no more and the white man may now safely revel in luxury on the lands of his primeval existence.’

  I could see the cemetery through the chapel window. One half contained the graves of Europeans; the other half was an empty field. The 100 or so Aboriginal graves were once indicated by wooden pegs painstakingly laid out on the mowed grass, but one night a farmer ploughed them up.

  The crickets added to the sense that Wybalenna was a haunted place. On a clear day, Tongerlongetter’s widow would climb up to Flagstaff Hill and peer with longing towards Tasmania’s north-east coast, 60 miles away. I thought of another ghost story that Greg Lehman had told me. ‘In the early 1980s, some Aboriginal kids went and sat on the hillside above the graveyard to watch the sun set. They sat up yarning, but when it got dark they were terrified to see a number of lights rising from the graves.’

  On June 22, 1837, Tongerlongetter was buried somewhere beneath the undulating strip of grass. His widow followed soon after.

  Jetty at Wybalenna

  XIII

  AT THE TIME OF KEMP’S ARRIVAL ON THE TAMAR IT IS THOUGHT that there were nine tribes of Aborigines in Tasmania, with between 250 and 700 members each. It is impossible to know accurately their total population, but educated estimates range between 3,000 and 5,000. There were some 400 alive in December 1831, the month that Tongerlongetter submitted to Robinson. When Kemp died in October 1868, there were 103,000 Europeans on the island, but only one full-blooded male Aborigine.

  In the museum at Wybalenna there was a photograph of William Lanne. He was dressed in a waistcoat and a canvas shirt with leg-of-
mutton sleeves, and wore a colourful neckscarf. But the energy seemed punched out of him. He stared at the ground, unsmiling, his brow furrowed. The face of a man sick of being looked at. Sick of what he had seen.

  He was brought to Wybalenna when he was seven, but ended his days in Hobart. At a regatta some years before his death, he was introduced to the Duke of Edinburgh as ‘the king of Tasmanians’. He stood on a podium with Truganini and watched her present a prize for the crew of Duck Hunt – and then, ‘delighted with his share in the proceedings’, called for three cheers. His spirit had been crushed several years before. In 1847, the Aborigines were removed once again – from Wybalenna to a settlement south of Hobart. Lanne’s impotence shrieked out between the lines of his complaint that the women, including Truganini, were receiving inadequate rations: ‘I am the last man of my race and I must look after my people.’

  He died on March 3, 1869. He had come off a whaling ship and taken a room at the Dog and Partridge Hotel in Barrack Street when he fell ill with choleraic diarrhoea. At 2 p.m., he got up, began to dress and collapsed. He was 34, known by the locals as a drunk who escaped his sorrows in pubs along the wharf, but remembered by his people as ‘a fine young man, plenty beard, plenty laugh, very good, that fellow’.