The Forgotten Islands

by Michael Veitch

  Finding a knife, I climbed onto to a nearby rock and wrenched open a couple of unsuspecting limpets for bait, threading them through the single hook attached to a silver lead with a free sinker (I would never have known the correct rig myself), then rushed along the ancient boards of the old jetty and hurled it in a long arc over the water, watching the satisfying splash as it broke the surface.

  It was a brilliant start. I felt a tug almost immediately, then another, and a third before I had the wherewithal to yank the thing, set the hook and start reeling in. Whatever it was was fighting hard, the line making crazy crisscrosses in the water as it swam this way and that in panic. Then it broke the surface and a flapping, medium-sized wrasse lay writhing on the wharf’s old timbers at my feet. I looked at the bluey-green creature in disbelief. Never had I had such a fishing expedition as this! This wonderful island was truly a Shangri-La, an unspoiled paradise where nature’s bounty was waiting to be plucked from the sea. I dashed back to the shed to fetch a bucket for my catch (I hadn’t anticipated needing one) before re-baiting, casting in again, and settling in to what promised to be a spectacular session of fishing.

  For the next two hours, I experienced not so much as a single, solitary bite.

  Later that evening, I proudly presented my lone fish, cleaned as best I could, to my providers at dinner. We baked it in the oven, but the thing seemed to melt rather than cook, leaving a crumbling white mass liquefying around the bottom of the baking dish. The wrasse, I learned later, is not generally regarded as a fish for the table, and I could see why. It sat for the rest of the evening on a serving plate next to the remains of some garlic bread – a crumpled fishy pile with a couple of lemon quarters placed on top for appearance, but which instead made it resemble a small rubbish heap. A couple of us picked at it, but most, including me, left it well alone. At the end of the dinner, I was overcome with foolish remorse for the poor, inedible parrot fish I had ripped from its home under the jetty.

  This was also the night I told them Ron’s story of the boy who vanished. Over the course of many months, I would tell it to many different people in all sorts of places. Upon finishing, I would watch carefully to gauge the variety of responses that it engendered, from wide-eyed amazement to summary dismissal. The three intrepid people I told that night in the kitchen of the caretaker’s cottage on Three Hummock Island did something more unusual and a little unsettling. Gasps of horror or eye-rolling dismissal I could deal with, but Robert, Kate and Chris all shared an identical response: absolute silence followed by thoughtful analysis. ‘Hm, interesting,’ they all seemed to answer in their own time. An academic discussion then ensued about large sea creatures in general, the places they have been found or captured, and the possibility of them existing in Bass Strait. At what depths do they live? What would be their normal diet? How many known species? Are the stories of them attacking old sailing ships purely apocryphal or does the legend have its basis in some empirical evidence? ‘Hm, interesting …’ someone said again. No one, though, had heard it before, or anything like it. After an inconclusive conversation, it was time to say goodnight once again.

  ‘I meant to tell you that story from Black Pyramid,’ Robert began as we made our way down the hill after dinner. It was by now dark, and we felt our way back down the paddock under a starless sky. As the dim light from the caretaker’s house receded, we became enveloped in almost total darkness, save for the weak beam of a tiny and underpowered torch I had been surprised to discover in a pocket of my toiletry bag. It was actually worse than useless, its feeble light failing to illuminate anything while preventing our eyes from adjusting to the dark. I turned it off.

  ‘… you remember in the plane over we said that no one had ever been onto Black Pyramid? Not entirely true. It was back in the sealing days …’ he began, and my ears pricked up, knowing that virtually any story of Bass Strait’s brief sealing history involved chaos, murder and bloodshed. Again, it was all Matthew Flinders’ fault.

  At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were said to have been several hundred thousand seals in Bass Strait. Thirty years later, they had been all but wiped out. Even today, only the fur seal exists, in greatly reduced numbers, the bigger elephant and hair seals having been exterminated from the strait completely.

  In the report of his famous voyage of Bass Strait’s discovery in 1798, Flinders reported large populations of seals inhabiting the islands, adding an account of his own experiences in reducing some of their numbers:

  … the terrors of the young cubs (seals) who had not yet dared take to the water afforded a great deal of amusement; they huddled together in among the rocks, putting up a dozen noses through the cavities, and expressing their fears of their tormentors by piteous looks and moans … we killed as many large ones as there was time to skin.

  The sensation this news caused back in Sydney had little to do with the callousness of Flinders’ attitude to these creatures, but the opportunities it afforded to hunt them. In a new and struggling colony, sealing represented wealth, with skins worth five shillings a piece and seal oil fetching a shilling a gallon in Sydney at the turn of the nineteenth century. By 1803, the floodgates were open. Some 200 sealers had descended on Bass Strait, slaughtering as many as they could in as short a time as was humanly possible.

  In the first five years of the nineteenth century, almost 100 000 sealskins had been taken from the Bass Strait Islands. The wholesale slaughter was so patently unsustainable that American sealers who had come to cash in on the spree soon left again, realising the industry would quickly devour itself.

  New South Wales’ third governor, Philip Gidley King, saw the prospect of the industry being wiped out in its infancy and attempted to assert some control:

  From the different communications I have received I shall find it expedient to restrain Individuals from resorting there in too great numbers … to prevent the destruction of that commercial advantage.

  The truth was, however, that the islands were soon out of control. The killing was such that even today, Robert told me, there are places on many of the islands where, for no apparent reason, seals refuse to go, a lingering imprint, perhaps, on their collective memory.

  The most common method of hunting was for gangs of men to be put ashore with a small amount of provisions, to be collected some time later when enough skins had been gathered and prepared.

  ‘Sometimes the ships didn’t come back,’ said Robert, still a voice in the darkness next to me as we fumbled around the edge of the large pond we knew was at the bottom of the long slope. ‘What with storms and shipwrecks and things. Sometimes they just forgot about them, or got a better offer. It was quite lawless.’

  ‘Yes … out on Black Pyramid …’ he continued. ‘They reckon the sealer had been there for months. Possibly years. He’d been left out there by himself, so it seems. They found him in a cave among all the skins which had been made ready. The salt had embalmed him and apparently he was quite recognisable. That’s how they found him, long dead. Like he was laid out ready for some kind of burial.’ I pictured it in my mind, the seas and the wind pounding that lonely place, and a brief note of terror passed over me at the idea of being out on it at night.

  Patsy Adam-Smith recounts the very same story in her book Islands of Bass Strait (1978). ‘The spray of the sea had broken over him and he was, as it were, cured and looked quite fresh.’ The sailors who found him were, she says, spooked for years after.

  9

  THE SEALERS

  The sealers, often former or even escaped convicts, shunned by the mainlanders, formed their own semi-permanent island settlements. Early accounts describe them variously as escapees, ships’ deserters, social outcasts, rude wife-snatchers, freebooters, slave-drivers, murderers, rum-swillers, sea wolves and sea rats. Says historian LC Murray:

  It was the chief aim of desperate convicts to escape to Bass Strait, where they could pursue a career of violence unchecked … deeds of violence of every description were com
mon and murder as a novelty soon lost its charm.

  No science or even logic was applied to the hunting. Colonial ships would spend large amounts of time in the strait, killing and preparing the seal skins to trade or barter with passing vessels. Sealing was carried out at all times of the year. Breeding females were killed, with pups used as decoys, carried up the shore to lure the females into the open, where they would be set upon and slaughtered.

  A government report of the time warned of the dire prospects of this unchecked industry, stating that ‘the whole of this valuable trade is threatened with a speedy and total annihilation’.

  The increasing numbers of prisoners escaping to Bass Strait, where they could eke out a living beyond the reach of the law, also became an issue. The report continued:

  The islands afford constant shelter and secure retreats for runaways and Villains of the worst description. Almost every rock throughout the Straits has become the habitation of some one or more amongst the most desperate and lawless of mankind. The whole of the Straits seem to present one continued scene of Violence, Plunder, and the Commission of every species of crime.

  When the sealers had all but killed the golden goose, they traded kangaroo pelts for what they could wheedle from passing vessels. Shipwrecks, their cargoes and the dead souls who inevitably washed up along beaches were picked over where they were found. Questions arose about some sealers’ inexplicable wealth, and just how they were able to spend up as they did in the hotels of mainland towns they occasionally visited. Another report in 1831 stated:

  … these people have no visible means of support and as they spend a good deal of money for people in their situation in life, it is supposed they obtain it principally by various forms of robbery and smuggling.

  Within a few years, rumours abounded of shipwrecks being caused by the signalling of false lights, or replicating with lanterns a ship riding safely at anchor, making others founder on the rocks. These reports reached a crescendo in 1839 with the disappearance of the 243-ton brig Britomart, near Preservation Island in the Furneaux Group, said to have been lured to her demise by sealers, her passengers murdered, stores plundered and the ship pushed back to disappear in deep water. An investigation is said to have found incontrovertible evidence of the crime, but no charges were ever brought. Jack Loney tells of it in his book Victorian Shipwrecks:

  Rumours and veiled references to the pirating of the Britomart … caused considerable dissatisfaction throughout the colony. The government of the day seemed strongly disinclined to determine whether the passengers and crew of the ship were drowned or murdered or whether they landed alive or were plundered after being washed ashore. Soon after the vessel disappeared, its log book, register, compass, various pieces of wreckage and a number of personal items were reported in the hands of persons living on the Bass Strait Islands, and sealers well flushed with money boasted openly that they knew the whereabouts of the wreck.

  It was thought that a female passenger from the Britomart had survived and been brought to the Victorian mainland where she had been taken to live among the Aborigines, a horror too ghastly to contemplate for the sensibilities of the time. An enquiry was launched, expeditions were undertaken and notices nailed to trees, seeking her out. For years, stories and supposed sightings of this (in all likelihood mythical) woman abounded.

  The sealers resorted to other forms of banditry. Like brigands of old, they would set out in small boats to make raids on the settlements of Tasmania’s northern coast, stealing sheep and anything else they could find from grazing properties. More infamously, they also ushered in the darkest, and still today least discussed taboo of the Bass Strait Islands, the story of the abduction of Aboriginal women.

  George Augustus Robinson, the self-proclaimed saviour of the Tasmanian Aborigines, gives one of the few decent firsthand accounts of the plight of some of these women, stolen often as children from their people and forced to live as captives to the sealers who used them as slaves and concubines, or to be bartered like cattle.

  Robinson was one of those remarkable men occasionally tossed up by nineteenth-century empire-building: a flawed visionary, but undoubtedly courageous and in many ways, fearlessly ahead of his time. A builder by trade, he had arrived in Hobart in 1824 aged thirty-two as a free settler, and in his diaries reveals himself to have been (in the opinion of at least one academic) ‘somewhat pompous and self-opinionated’. A devout Methodist, Robinson gave up his lucrative trade after a decade or so (artisans were in short supply in the colonies) to devote his life entirely to the service of society’s downtrodden, and in colonial Australia, none were more downtrodden than the Indigenous population of Tasmania.

  ‘My mind had become early and deeply impressed,’ he tells us, ‘with the deplorable state and condition of the aboriginal inhabitants.’ In 1838, therefore, he began a long, oddly messianic campaign for their ‘moral, religious and material improvement’, starting with the already depleted Aboriginal peoples of Tasmania’s north-east. Among their number he counted seventy-two males, but, to his horror, only three women. The prime reason for this disparity, he concluded, was the continuing abductions of Indigenous women and girls by the sealing gangs then at large in the islands, a running sore which caused friction between local tribes and the colonists, as well as depriving, literally, the Aboriginal population of its future.

  Robinson learned something of the brutality of life for these women from some of the ones who had managed to escape, prompting him to record his encounters in his journal, in which his disgust seeps through the economy of his language. One woman, known only as ‘Jumbo’, Robinson describes as good looking, intelligent, with ‘a pleasing aspect, and speaking good English’:

  She said a sealer called Munro and others rushed them at their fires and took six, that she was a little girl and could just crawl, that she had been with Munro ever since. She said the white men tie the black women to trees and stretch out their arms – at this point the woman demonstrated – and then they flog them ‘very much; plenty much blood; plenty much cry – this they do if the girl take biscuit or sugar.

  Others he encountered were:

  Tib (24): Abducted when a girl by James Parish who sold her to John Smith for four sealskins.

  Sall (20): Abducted by McKenzie when a little girl. After McKenzie’s death by drowning, Thompson seized her.

  Jumbo (19): Removed from her country when a child by James Munro. Said to have aborted a half-caste child by beating on her belly.

  Margearet (20): Abducted by McKenzie when a child and sold her to Thompson who later lent her to Maynard.

  ‘I like a white man like a do a black snake,’ one woman called Walyer told him. This loathing often extended to the children they bore by their captors and, as Robinson discovered, many were destroyed by their mothers soon after birth.

  Bet Smith had killed two boys, one a big one. She murdered them by thrusting grass into their mouth. Boolroi since killed a girl on the Furneaux Islands. She burnt her. Jumbo killed one child on Preservation Island before its birth by beating her belly … I am informed that numerous children have been thus destroyed …

  Enlightened to a degree, Robinson was quick to blame this infanticide not on the women, but on the brutality of their male captors who, he writes, ‘encouraged them to do these murders’.

  I would learn more about Robinson later at the site of his well-meaning, but misguided and ultimately doomed, attempt to ‘save’ the last remnants of the Tasmanian Aborigines later, at a particularly ghostly spot in Bass Strait’s east, on Flinders Island.

  10

  NETTLES

  Already it seemed like a month had passed. We were off to explore a part of Three Hummock Island that held particular significance for Robert, the beach named after his mother, Eleanor. We were all in the truck bumping along a relatively well-maintained, one-lane bush track when we came across a fine, tall stand of eucalypts. After the monotonous banks of low trees and foliage I had so far encountered, it was a
surprising change. I glanced up to see healthy populations of birds scattering at the rare sound of our approach. It was just the type of bush I love and I would have been quite happy to walk in it for hours, but plans had been laid.

  ‘Where do you think it might be, Rob?’ Chris asked, fixing the two of us seated in the back in the rear-view mirror. Robert peered out a little anxiously at the quickly passing montage of green. ‘Um, near here, I think. Not far anyway.’ Kate, in the passenger seat, turned and gave me a look of concern. ‘How’s your leg today?’ she said. It was in fact not quite back to normal, but given the pain I had been in a day or so ago, had recovered remarkably well. I put it down to some magical healing tonic the island works on all who come here. I gave her a confident thumbs-up, hopefully putting an end to the matter once and for all.

  ‘Oh, here!’ says Robert suddenly. ‘Turn here!’

  Seemingly without dropping speed, Chris turned the wheel and steered us at 90 degrees into what appeared to be a solid wall of low, tangled shrubs. A series of loud spindly whacks was heard and suddenly we were on another track – even more disused than the last – taking us down a long slope towards the sea.

  I was, today, much better equipped for the day ahead. The trousers with the almighty rip had been, if I say so myself, deftly repaired with some orange nylon packing strands I had picked up on the beach and a fortunately placed darning needle I discovered at the bottom of an old Erinmore Flake tobacco tin on the mantle-piece at the cottage. They looked a little silly, but were more or less intact. I had double-checked my water, and had even created some cheese biscuit snacks from a previously missed packet of crackers not too many months past its use-by date at the back of the pantry. The cheese, admittedly, had come from Chris and Kate, but when handing them generously around later, I trusted this minor detail would be overlooked.