Hell's Gates

by Paul Collins

  Once Pearce was sent to Macquarie Harbour he was beyond the pale. Because there are so few forest wildernesses left on earth, we tend to forget how claustrophobic, destabilising and debilitating a rainforest can be for those who are not used to moving through it. Because it is so alien there is an ever-present sense of unspecified threat and unarticulated danger. In such a place we are always unsure of what menace may lie in the thick undergrowth, or behind the trees and tangled jungle-like vegetation. This was reinforced by the propaganda of the prison authorities at Macquarie Harbour, and the office of the Principal Superintendent’s Department in Hobart Town, who assured the convicts of Sarah Island that they were surrounded by the most inaccessible forest country in the world, as well as by ferocious Aborigines. They were told that they would surely perish if they tried to escape across country. The simple fact was that this was true, and that Sarah Island was a prison in which nature itself provided the walls. In fact, part of the underlying theory of ‘secondary punishment’ was to take evil-doers and recidivists out of their day-to-day world into the isolated wilderness, where they could be psychologically destabilised, reflect on their sins, be broken by detachment from normal society and the use of the lash, and ultimately resolve to amend their criminal lives.

  Miller & Piguenit, Hell’s Gates, Davey River, 1886, wood engraving. Lower right corner was removed to accommodate text. (Courtesy Tasmaniana Library, State Library of Tasmania.)

  But the problem with Macquarie Harbour was that it took many of the convicts too far; it placed them in situations beyond their ability to cope.This was why men were prepared to do anything, including killing each other, to escape. This sense of alienation and the loss of any feeling for normal moral, human parameters certainly affected the Pearce party.

  Even those who are experienced and at home in the rainforest landscape still experience something different and destabilising in it. Few people have loved and protected Australian rainforests more than the poet Judith Wright, but even she is aware of their ambivalence:

  To reach the pool you must go through the rainforest –

  through the bewildering midsummer of darkness

  lit with ancient fern,

  laced with poison and thorn.

  You must go by the way he went – the way of bleeding

  hands and feet, the blood on the stones like flowers . . .

  The comparison with Jesus’ way of the cross is striking. Just as he was rejected, misunderstood and had to surrender his life to pass through the process of death to come to resurrection, so the rainforest with its ‘midsummer of darkness’ plunges you into a process that takes you far beyond the experiences of normal life, beyond what can be comprehended and controlled, into a region of vulnerability and mystery where it is so easy to become lost and die. Rainforests are places where our fragile assumptions are exposed, where all the flimsy and superficial foundations of modern, ‘civilised’ life are challenged, and where in the profoundest sense we are confronted with the Other. So confronting are they that many of our contemporaries feel that the only way to deal with them is to destroy them. In the process they are destroying our profoundest source of spirituality.

  But there is also a frightening aspect of otherness that can quickly destroy a person’s grip on reality. This is expressed above all in the earth’s sheer neutrality, its absolute lack of concern about our personal fate. It is this that can drive you over the edge, as I think it did the Pearce party. In other words, the escapees were literally out of their minds when they killed and ate each other.

  Throughout the narrative the Aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land have stood there, quietly observing the vicious and destructive doings of Europeans in their country. They were to be forced to surrender to the imperialistic whites, and in this they were rather like the natural world.This does not mean that they were passive. As Henry Reynolds has shown in his book Fate of a Free People (1995) the Aborigines of Tasmania resisted white settlement with all their strength.They observed the settlers and the convicts and they could accurately pinpoint the movements of the Europeans. They would have observed every move of the Pearce party, especially once it crossed into the Big River tribal lands to the east of the King William Range.

  The British authorities knew that there were Aborigines in the Macquarie Harbour area throughout the 1820s, and it is likely that many of the escapees from the penal settlement were killed by Aborigines, probably members of the South-West tribe who lived right along the south-west coast from Macquarie Harbour in the north around to Cox Bight and De Witt and Maatsuyker islands in the south. Humankind arrived in Australia probably as long ago as 60,000 years, and some scholars say 70,000 years or more. There is good archaeological evidence for human occupation in Tasmania from about 35,000 years before the present (BP). Humans first arrived in Tasmania during the late or terminal Pleistocene era while the land bridge between Bass Strait and the mainland was still open. It was submerged for 9000 years between 29,000 and 20,000 BP, and then reappeared for another 11,000 years until about 8000 BP.

  One of the most interesting archaeological sites in Tasmania is Kutikina Cave (formerly Frazer Cave) in the valley of the Franklin River. This cave was saved from destruction by the court decision to prohibit the building of the dam on the Gordon River below its junction with the Franklin in the early 1980s. The rich deposits in the cave show that it was occupied by humans in the depths of the ice age for 5000 years between 20,000 and 13,500 BP, the southernmost human beings in the world in that period. During this time the area was largely a grassy alpine tundra, just like today’s Arctic landscape. Australia’s greatest historian of the pre-European settlement period, Professor John Mulvaney, told the Senate Select Committee on Southwest Tasmania in 1981 that ‘the degree of preservation, the range of artefactual and biological remains and their correlation with environmental data, makes [Kutikina Cave] possibly the most important site yet excavated in Australia’. Mulvaney says that the cave offers a unique testimony to the adaptability and persistence of the human spirit. Subsequently several other caves have been found in the southwest with evidence of human occupation going back to almost 35,000 BP.

  There has been an assumption that the Aborigines only occupied the coastal areas and that after the abandonment of Kutikina Cave they never went near the interior of the south-west. Rhys Jones, Richard Flanagan and Jon Marsden-Smedley have all argued that this is incorrect, and that local Aborigines used much of the south-west for millennia before European settlement. Marsden-Smedley shows how they engaged in widespread seasonal burning using low-intensity, self-extinguishing fires, mainly in spring and autumn, in order to flush out the pademelons and other animals on which they lived, and to gain easier access to areas which they wished to penetrate. These fires would burn up to the edges of the rainforests, which were too wet to burn. There is also ample evidence from the earliest European explorers who visited the south-west that the Aborigines engaged in what Rhys Jones calls a form of ‘fire-stick farming’.

  At the time of white settlement in September 1803 there were nine tribes of Aborigines in Van Diemen’s Land, each made up of several separate ‘bands’ who shared a common language or dialect and who intermarried. Each band was further broken down into individual ‘hearth-groups’ or perhaps what we would call ‘families’. It is estimated that there were between seventy and eighty-five people in each band, and about fifty bands all together, which gives a total Aboriginal population of between three and four thousand. The west coast of Van Diemen’s Land was occupied largely by two tribal groups, the north-west people (the Peerapper) and the south-west people (the Toogee). Probably much of the interior of the south-west was not permanently occupied, although there is much evidence that both tribes often crossed the mountains, valleys and plains. The area was also entered from the east by the Big River tribe (the Larmairremener) from central Tasmania.

  It was probably not until the escapees had got further east and closer to Big River territory that they came under
Aboriginal observation. The fact that they were not picked off and killed indicates either that they had not breached any significant Aboriginal land, or that in their debilitated state they were not perceived as a threat.

  In the early 1820s the conflict between black and white had not reached the pitch it did in the latter part of that decade and in the early 1830s. Both Goodwin and Broughton reported seeing small parties of Aborigines, and boasted about stealing food from them. Goodwin also reported that they ‘saw a number of native fires on the hills and the grass appeared to have been burned recently and frequently’. As already noted, Pearce’s claims that he and Greenhill charged wildly into native camps and scared off large numbers of Aborigines are unbelievable. It is most unlikely that the Big River people would have tolerated such outrageous behaviour. This is the false boast of someone whose story could not be checked and who hoped to gain kudos from suggesting that he was superior in strength and courage to the Aborigines.

  But even in Pearce’s time the pressure on the tribes was immense. From the early 1820s onwards, European settlement increased as more and more convicts and settlers arrived on the island. By 1826 the European population was about 15,000, of whom 11,700 were males and 3300 females. There were about 7200 convicts, about half the population of the colony. The demand for land for sheep was increasing, and in that same year the British government granted the Van Diemen’s Land Company 250,000 acres in the north-west corner of the island. At the time there were about 450,000 sheep and 40,000 head of cattle in the colony. By May 1835 the European population had climbed to 37,779, of whom about 15,500 were convicts.

  Inevitably this put enormous pressure on land. Naturally the Aborigines reacted as the Europeans seized their traditional hunting ranges for sheep and cattle grazing.The Tasmanian frontier was violent. Many of the incidents we know about were recorded by George Augustus Robinson, both the conciliator and captor of the Tasmanian Aborigines. The treatment of Aboriginal women was particularly bad. Outrages against the Aborigines increased after martial law was proclaimed by Arthur on 1 November 1828. The proclamation declared that ‘the Aborigines have, during a considerable period of time, evinced and are daily evincing a growing spirit of hatred, outrage and enmity, against the subjects of His Majesty, resident in this Colony’.Arthur’s purpose was ‘to bring about a temporary separation of the coloured from the British population of this territory, and that therefore the coloured inhabitants should be induced by peaceful means to depart, or should otherwise be expelled by force from all settled districts therein’. To achieve this, settlers were permitted to use ‘whatever means a severe and inevitable necessity may dictate’. In other words, it was open season on the Aborigines, and the whites on the frontier knew that they were free to do what they liked. However, serious questions were asked, and Chief Justice Pedder recognised that it was white barbarities that had led to the Aborigines attacking the Europeans.

  Right from the beginning Aboriginal resistance to white incursions was strong and intelligent and, despite the good intentions of the Colonial Office, which instructed governors to try to protect indigenous populations, guerrilla war was inevitable between the Europeans on the frontier and the Aborigines who were fighting for their lives, as well as their culture and land. Many Aborigines learned English and observed the customs and habits of the whites. In the early 1820s conflict between Aborigines and whites was sporadic, but by 1828 attacks on both sides had reached the point where the Lieutenant-Governor, George Arthur, instructed the military to protect settlers and martial law was proclaimed. A long drawn-out guerrilla war followed. The Europeans outnumbered the Aborigines six or more to one, and they had guns. But as anyone with any knowledge of both the country and the tribes could have predicted, the Aborigines had the superior tactics. They had already learned much more about the settlers than the Europeans knew about them.Their tactic was to hit and run, and the military found itself engaged in utterly frustrating warfare that drove tidy-minded bureaucrats such as Arthur to distraction. The strong resistance of the Big River tribe was at the centre of white concern. So it was decided that an all-out campaign was needed.

  In late 1830 the military campaign took the shape of a massive dragnet organised by the Lieutenant-Governor aimed at pushing all the Aborigines out of the southern half of the island into the Tasman Peninsula, the isolated, south-eastern extremity of the colony. Arthur took personal control of the campaign in the field, and 5000 men, including troops, police, volunteers and armed convicts were used. From 4 October to 26 November 1830 the ‘black line’ was organised to flush out all Aborigines – men, women and children – and drive them like fish into a net. A picnic atmosphere prevailed as gentlemen of influence and property mixed convivially with the lower orders of settlers and convicts, manifesting an appropriate noblesse oblige. It was a great plan on paper, but it bore no relationship to the realities of the bush or the intelligence of the tribes. At night the whites lit massive fires to illuminate the landscape, but the weather soon turned bad, and once the Aborigines realised what the Europeans were up to, they brought all their ingenuity and knowledge of the country into play.

  The net result: total failure, with only two Aborigines caught. The whole affair cost the government about £30,000. It was a massive humiliation for the whites generally and Arthur specifically. Nevertheless, good politician that he was, Arthur tried to put the best gloss on the miserable affair by saying that it created ‘a cordial and unanimous feeling’ throughout every class in the community, and that ‘the knowledge which has been acquired of the habits of the Natives’ will in the future assist in ‘capturing the Savages’. But despite His Honor’s spin-doctoring, it was an utterly humiliating defeat and a vast waste of public money. The Lieutenant-Governor was smart enough not to try any more large-scale military adventures.

  One of those taking part, the Danish adventurer and onetime ‘monarch’ of Iceland and, after transportation to Van Diemen’s Land, convict constable, Jorgen Jorgensen, spells out why the ‘black line’ failed so spectacularly. ‘The rock on which our expedition split was a dense scrub of vast extent and impervious character. It was found impossible to penetrate it and keep the line of march intact as hitherto. All our efforts to preserve the continuity of the ranks were baffled, and the Aborigines were thus afforded opportunities, which they did not fail to utilise, of noiselessly gliding through the unavoidable gaps in our line.’ Anyone with the most basic knowledge of Van Diemen’s Land should have been able to work that out!

  But where direct action failed, European guile and deception succeeded. Arthur appointed Robinson a ‘Protector of Aborigines’, who travelled throughout the island between 1829 and 1834, attempting to round up peacefully the remaining people. Robinson was one of the few Europeans who could speak local languages, and by 1835, by dint of hard work and much help from individual Aborigines, he persuaded the 200 or so surviving Aborigines to accompany him to Wybalenna on Flinders Island in Bass Strait where, he promised, they could at last be at peace. These people had survived two decades of guerrilla warfare, murder, a low birth-rate because so many women had been stolen or taken by the whites and, to a lesser extent than on mainland Australia, European diseases. But for most of those who went to Flinders Island the only peace they were to find was that of death. In 1847 a group of forty-seven men, women and children returned to Van Diemen’s Land. Wybalenna today is a profoundly sad place whose feel is reminiscent, on a tiny scale, to that of the concentration camp memorials at Auschwitz-Birkenau. I have visited both places.There is a profound ‘absence’ or ‘emptiness’ about them, a sense of loss, forfeiture and failure.

  This book began with the young warriors of the Braylwunyer and Larmairremener clans of the Big River tribe quietly observing Travis, Greenhill and Pearce from the bush. They had a chance to observe the brutality of the Europeans toward each other and they should have been warned. Within a couple of years they too would encounter, experience and oppose the appalling violence of the convict shep
herds and free settlers.Yet, by 1834, all of these warriors were dead, the victims of murder, warfare and disease. A correspondent of The Times of London has left a description of the incredibly sad end of the Big River tribe. He describes on 7 July 1835 a small party that had been captured in late 1834. It consisted of ‘three women, one man, and some little children, called piccaninnies . . . They inform us that they are the last of their tribe, once 500 strong, which was long dreaded under the name of the Big-River tribe. They say that, by innumerable affrays with the white men, they were at last reduced to three men, exclusive of women and piccaninnies, and that, a few months since, they were surprised and two of the men were killed; that they wandered all over the island for the purpose of joining some other tribe, feeling themselves too weak to exist, and under constant dread that the remaining man would be killed . . .To look on that fine, tall, and somewhat solemn-looking savage, the last of his tribe filled me with emotions which it would be in vain to attempt to describe “Sic vos non vobis”’.