Heaven’s Command

by Jan Morris

  Equally nobody knows where they had come from in the first place. Victorian anthropologists much enjoyed ‘the Tasman problem’, and spent many happy evenings debating possible migratory routes, or ethnic progenitors. Since the Tasmanians were unquestionably distinct from the mainland natives, it was assumed that they had originated somewhere in the north or central Pacific, and had worked their way southwards over the millennia. They were smallish but long-legged people, red-brown rather than black, with beetle-brows, wide mouths, broad noses, and very deep-set brown eyes. The men had rich beards and whiskers, and the women were hirsute too, often developing incipient moustaches. Many Europeans found them unattractive. Mrs Augustus Prinsep, writing in 1833, thought they all had a ‘most hideous expression of countenance’, and George Lloyd, thirty years later, found the women ‘repulsively ugly’. To modern tastes, if we are to judge by surviving photographs, they might not seem so disagreeable: they look homely, but oddly wistful, like elves, or perhaps hobbits—there is something very endearing to their squashed-up crinkled faces, which never seem actually to be smiling, but look suggestively amused all the same.

  The Tasmanians did not by and large wear any clothes, except for loose cloaks of kangaroo skin, but they smeared their bodies with red ochre, and wore necklaces of shells or human bones. They slept in caves or hollow trees, or beneath rough windbreaks of sticks and fronds, and their staple foods were kangaroos and wallabies, supplemented by shellfish, roots and berries, fungi, lizards, snakes, penguins, herons, parrots and the eggs of ants and emus. Physically they seem to have lacked stamina: their senses were uncannily acute, and they were adept at running on all fours, but they were not very strong, nor very fast, nor even particularly agile. They made crude boats of bark or log, but never ventured far out to sea: instead they roamed incessantly, pursuing the fugitive marsupials, through the dense bush forests of their island, over its wide downlands, or down to the shingle shore to eat oysters.

  A touching sadness surrounds them, from our distance of time. They seem an insubstantial people, Polygamous by custom, they were affectionate by disposition, and merry, singing in a sweet Doric harmony, and dancing strenuous, hilarious and frequently lascivious animal dances. But living down there on the edge of the world, they seem to have been on the edge of reality too. Their small tribal bands seldom strayed outside their own hunting circuits, and they inhabited a little inconstant world of a few families. If they met another tribe they generally fought it, but the moment a man on either side was killed, the battle ended. If they had a religion at all, it was concerned only with local sprites and goblins: few had any conception of an after-life. Some were apparently able to count up to five, others never went further than two. Their only system of government seems to have been a patriarchal authority tacitly invested in the head of a family, or the bravest hunter of a tribe. Their only visual art consisted of rings chipped out of boulders, and striped patterns in red ochre. Even their language was rudimentary, being a series of disconnected words with no grammar. This is one of their dancing-songs, in a Victorian missionary translation:

  It’s wattle blossom time,

  It’s spring-time.

  Bird whistle.

  The birds are whistling.

  Spring come,

  Spring has come.

  Cloud sun,

  The clouds are all sunny.

  Bird whistle,

  The birds are whistling.

  Dance.

  Everything is dancing.

  spring-time.

  Because it’s spring-time.

  Dance.

  Everything is dancing.

  Luggarato, Luggarato, Luggarato

  —Spring, Spring, Spring.

  Because it’s spring-time.

  Luggarato, Luggarato, Luggarato! There was a haunting naivety to the Tasmanians. They lived all by themselves, like children in the woods, and they seem to have thought of life as essentially provisional. The old and the sick they often abandoned, when they moved on to new hunting grounds. When somebody died he was usually cremated without ceremony, the tribe seldom staying to watch him burn: or he was placed upright inside a hollow tree, with a spear through his neck to keep him there.

  And when a man was gone, he was gone. His name was never mentioned again. It was as though, having lived his short hard life of wandering, having fathered his sons and eaten his feasts of parrot or emu egg—having appeared briefly upon the foreshore of the world, his life had been expunged retrospectively, and he had never existed at all.

  4

  Once it was realized that Tasmania was an island, it acquired a peculiar usefulness to the British. It would form a convenient outstation, they thought, to their penal settlements on the Australian mainland, so sending a group of convicts and soldiers to the south-east corner of the island, in 1803 they had claimed it all for the Crown. By the 1820s there were European settlements at both ends of the island, called in those days Van Diemen’s Land, and by 1840 there were more free settlers than convicts. A fine road connected Cornwall in the north with Buckingham in the south, by way of Melton Mowbray, Bagdad and Mangalore, and many free settlers were living in distinctly gentlemanly style in those substantial country houses we have already visited. Yet the basis of its society was punitive: this was a place of exile, a criminal island, and its life was organized around the fulcrum of its penal purpose. In a suggestive way it remained so throughout the century. Though transportation to Tasmania ended in 1853, much the most compelling sight in the island remained the celebrated penal settlement of Port Arthur, on the Tasman Peninsula in the south.

  This had never been the severest of the several prisons. The worst, abandoned in 1832, had been at Macquarie Harbour, on the inaccessible west coast, where the prison buildings stood on a reef unapproachable by land except at low tide, and recalcitrant convicts were sometimes confined alone for weeks at a time on uninhabited rocks in the estuary: the hinterland there was so terrible that of the 112 prisoners who ever escaped from Macquarie Harbour, 62 died of starvation in the bush and nine were eaten by their comrades. Port Arthur, though, was much larger and better-known, and was a famous sight almost from the start—a railway used to take official visitors part of the way down the peninsula from Hobart, the capital, its trucks being pushed along by manacled convicts.

  The first thing one saw was the square English tower of the inter-denominational church, looking rooky and rural, surrounded by English elms and oaks, and by the neat verandahed houses of the Governor and his assistants. Just around the corner, however, beyond a discreet stretch of green with an ornamental fountain, the granite buildings of the prison were grouped with a terrible dignity beside their harbour. Here was the watchtower, around whose ramparts the sentries perpetually tramped, and here the flogging-wall, and here the lunatic asylum. In the building called the Model Prison were practised the latest techniques of criminal reform, imported direct from Pentonville: notably the silence system—a system so absolute that the warders wore felt slippers, and prisoners were held in such utter lonely silence that even in church they wore masks to preserve their isolation from humankind, and worshipped in single shuttered cubicles. All the buildings were grey, and a grey suspense hung over the scene like a vapour, even on a bright summer morning, when the visitors walked bonneted and cotton-frocked from block to block, led by an attentive officer.

  Port Arthur was starkly insulated from the rest of Tasmania, guard posts with dogs watching the narrow spit, Eaglehawk Neck, which was the only land approach to the peninsula; but the very presence of the settlement there, with its hundreds of helpless men numbed or animalized in despair, pervaded the whole of the island, and doubtless made society everywhere else coarser by the experience of it. Many of the settlers outside were themselves emancipated convicts—very few of those freed in the Australian settlements ever went back to Britain. Nearly all the others employed convict servants. When food ran short in the early days of the settlement, convicts were allowed to go into the bush to
forage for themselves: some became bush-rangers or bandits, founded a desperado tradition, and graduated often enough to be the romantic heroes of local legend. They lived with the symptoms of imprisonment—the chain gangs and the clank of irons, the terrible rumours of torture, insanity and suicide: in Hobart convict women could sometimes be seen wearing iron collars padlocked around their necks, with long iron prongs protruding each side like the horns of cattle. Society was polarized between an authoritarian establishment on the one hand and a huge criminal population on the other, and at either extreme was instinct with violence. A coat of arms suggested for the colony in 1852 was defined in rhyming heraldics as ‘Two posts standant, One beam crossant, One rope pendant, One knave on the end on’t’, and sensitive visitors to Tasmanian homes were sometimes chilled to remember, as they sat among the samplers, the Chelsea figures, the auntly water-colours and the grand-fatherly cricket groups, that men in chains built those amiable English houses, prisoners milked the cows in those fresh white-washed dairies, and that the little daughters of the family, demure in pantaloons and hair-ribbons, were growing up in the intimate knowledge of whip and manacle.

  5

  Inevitably this harsh community, gradually spreading from its seashore settlements, came into contact with the elusive aboriginals of the forest. It was known from the start that they were there. When Tasman, the island’s discoverer, arrived off the south-east coast in 1642, his crew heard ‘certain human sounds’ and ‘sounds resembling the music of a trump or small gong’. In 1777 Captain Cook found the natives trustful and unafraid, while the Frenchmen of Nicholas Baudin’s expedition, in 1802, seem to have been enchanted by them. ‘The gentle confidence of the people in us, the affectionate evidences of benevolence which they never ceased to manifest towards us, the sincerity of their demonstrations, the frankness of their manners, the touching ingenuousness of their caresses, all concurred to excite within us sentiments of the tenderest interest’. The Europeans felt no threat from such guileless primitives: the aborigines thought the peculiar pale strangers might be the ghosts of their own dead, and perhaps welcomed their appearance as a break in the immemorial monotony of hunt, sex and corroboree.

  But when the British settled in Tasmania, the relationship changed. Almost at once the original Tasmanians were defined as enemies, actual or potential, and found themselves treated more and more as predators or vermin. The free settlers wanted land, and ruthlessly drove the nomads from their seasonal hunting-grounds. The shifting riff-raff of bushrangers and sealers used the black people as they pleased, for pleasure or for bondage. By the 1820s horrible things were happening in Tasmania. Sometimes the black people were hunted just for fun, on foot or on horseback. Sometimes they were raped in passing, or abducted as mistresses, or as slaves. The sealers of the Bass Strait islands established a slave society of their own, with harems of women, employing the well-tried disciplines of slavery—clubbing, stringing up from trees, or flogging with kangaroo-gut whips. We hear of children kidnapped as pets or servants, of a woman chained up like an animal in a shepherd’s hut, of men castrated to keep them off their own women. In one foray seventy aboriginals were killed, the men shot, the women and children dragged from crevices in the rocks to have their brains dashed out. Bushrangers used to catch aborigines in man-traps, and use them for target practice. A man called Carrotts, desiring a native woman, decapitated her aboriginal husband, hung his head around her neck, and drove her home to his shack.

  It is true of course that these horrors were committed by white men of the lowest sort, many of them criminals. Even so, it was not long before almost the entire European community behaved little better towards the aborigines. The black people, in their turn, understandably responded with violence. Gone were those sentiments of tender interest. ‘I well know that these undiscriminating savages,’ wrote Governor Collins in a report to his superior on one fracas, ‘will consider every white man their Enemy.’ He was right. Despised, debased and brutalized themselves, their numbers precipitously declining, now they were often the aggressors. Stockmen were murdered. Cattle were speared. Farms were burnt. In 1827 the natives actually raided Launceston, the second town of the island.

  It did not take long for the white community to convince itself that the Europeans were the aggrieved party, and soon the classic settler-native syndrome was far advanced. The gentlemen in their country houses, the rich merchants in their Hobart mansions, the local administrators preoccupied with penal affairs and orderly government—all were reaching the conclusion that life in Tasmania would be much happier if there were no Tasmanians. In language the decrees of Authority remained irreproachable, and frequently warned the colonists that they must not mistreat the natives. In intent they became ever less tolerant. The Reverend Thomas Atkins, after a visit to Van Diemen’s Land in 1837, usefully rationalized the attitude in Christian terms. It was a universal law in the Divine Government, he explained, that when savage tribes came into collision with civilized races of men, the savages disappeared. This was because they had not complied with the divine conditions for survival—‘For God blessed them, and God said unto them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it”.’

  6

  Authority could not sanction the extermination of the natives. Public opinion in England would never stomach genocide. As one Whitehall directive observed, ‘the adoption of any line of conduct having for its avowed or for its secret object the extinction of the native race could not fail to leave an indelible stain on the character of the British Government’. Anyway, God would doubtless arrange such a consummation in his own time—‘it is not unreasonable to apprehend that the whole race of these people may at no distant period become extinct’. Meanwhile, what could be arranged with a clear conscience was the removal of the entire race somewhere else. There were several suitable lesser islands around the Tasmanian coast, and extensive unsettled tracts of mainland too. ‘Really it is high time’, remarked the Launceston Adviser one day, ‘they were either removed out of the Island, or driven by force of arms to the uninhabited districts”

  But first they had to be found. By now they could be counted in hundreds rather than thousands, but they were a slippery will-of-the-wisp people, moving dappled through the eucalyptus groves, or blending indistinguishably with the seashore rocks. Unsuccessful attempts were made to lure them into Hobart and the paternal arms of Government: in 1830 it was decided that they must be flushed, like game upon some vast estate, methodically from their nests, and beaten before an inescapable cordon mile by mile down the length of the island into the Tasman peninsula at the bottom. There they would be rounded up and taken away to convenient reservations for ever.

  Colonel George Arthur, the Governor, himself assumed command of the operation, and planned the cordon—‘the Black Line’—on the most orthodox military principles. He called upon every farm to send an able-bodied volunteer, he conscripted tickét-of-leave men, and he mustered the three regiments of redcoats available on the island. In all some 2,500 men were engaged. In case the settlers took the operation too frivolously—some of them were after all accustomed to chase aboriginals in innocent blood-sport—the Government publicly warned the participants that it was ‘not a matter of amusement or recreation, but a cause of the most important and serious kind, in which the lives and property of the whole community are more or less at stake’. Martial law was proclaimed against the native population, and Arthur himself, ordering his charger saddled, rode away from Hobart to lead his soldiers into action.

  It was perhaps the most farcical campaign in the whole history of British imperial arms. The plan called for a steady advance on a front that began by being 120 miles wide, but would narrow in the course of the action until its two flanks were united like a noose in the peninsula. No man was to be farther than sixty yards from his neighbour, and strict military precepts prevailed. Dispatches were sent back to Hobart by equerry; requisitions were signed for ammunition, food, clothing and 300 pairs of manacle
s; when a sceptical civilian expressed doubts to one officer about the scheme, ‘Oh’, the colonel replied, ‘this is an entirely military manoeuvre, which you as a civilian would not understand’.

  Sometimes they did see an aborigine—once they briefly glimpsed a party of forty. More often they mistook clumps of trees, or black swans, or the rustle of leaves, or kangaroos, for the presence of the black people. For seven weeks the Black Line struggled down the island in increasing confusion, soaked through by incessant rains, its clothes wet and torn, its rations inadequate, its whereabouts distinctly uncertain, its soldiers and volunteers chiefly interested, after a week or two of this discomfort, in getting themselves dry, fed and settled at the next bivouac. When at last they closed upon Eaglehawk Neck, assuming that a mass of black fugitives must be moving somewhere before them into the trap of the peninsula, they found nobody there at all. Not a single aboriginal had crossed the Neck. Like ghosts the black people had slipped through the cordon, crouching in brambles while the soldiers stumbled past, or scuttling away on all fours into the shadows. The final assessment of the operation showed that while four British soldiers had been accidentally killed in the course of it, only two of the original Tasmanians had been caught. One was a small boy, and the other very soon escaped.

  7

  Now there enters our story a resolute evangelical, George Augustus Robinson, ‘The Conciliator’, whose destiny it was to organize, when all else had foiled, the disappearance of the Tasmanian race from the face of the earth.

  Robinson was a Londoner, a non-conformist builder who had emigrated to Van Diemen’s Land with his wife and seven children, and become well-known for his good works on the Hobart waterfront. He was in all ways a man of his time, a Dickensian figure transplanted from Hard Times or Dombey and Son to these incongruous environments. He was infinitely pious, humourless and indefatigable—a thick-set, red-haired, florid man, whom one can imagine running some particularly grim and improving school for indigent waifs on the outskirts of Manchester, or perhaps supervising, with Mrs Robinson of course, a reformatory for London harlots. He was an uneducated man and correspondingly dogmatic, and his bent was for redemption.