Heaven’s Command

by Jan Morris

  He had entered the Government service as an intermediary with the natives. Out he would go into the bush, with his couple of servants, his Bible pack, and a tame native woman, Black Moll, dressed up in gay ribbons to attract attention—they called her Robinson’s decoy duck. He learnt the aboriginal language, and over many months of wanderings throughout the island he had made contact with most of the surviving tribes, and gained the confidence of many. He approached the natives kindly, often entertaining them upon his flute, and sometimes spending weeks at a time in their company: for he knew that God had called him to save them from their sinful ways, and lead them towards the truth.

  This was the man to whom a baffled Government, after the fiasco of the Black Line, turned for an alternative solution. Robinson willingly accepted the charge. He undertook to persuade all the surviving Tasmanians out of the bush and into Government control, and almost single-handed he succeeded. For five years he came and went, sometimes by boat around the coast, generally on foot with a little band of native helpers—notably Truganini, a redeemed sealer’s mistress, who was to become the most celebrated Tasmanian of all. Each year he brought out a few more aboriginals—63 in 1832, 42 in 1833, 28 in 1834—until at last there were none left in the bush at all, and the whole Tasmanian population, an entire race of human beings, was safely in the care of authority.

  Robinson had approved for their final destination Flinders Island, in the Bass Strait, some forty miles north of Tasmania, and in January 1832 the first of the expatriates were shipped there. The Hobart Town Courier, whose reporter watched one party embark, declared that the aboriginals showed themselves delighted at the idea of going to the island, ‘where they would enjoy peace and plenty uninterrupted’, and their removal would greatly benefit Tasmania too. ‘The large tracts of pasture that have so long been deserted owing to their murderous attacks on the shepherds and stock huts will now be available, and a very sensible relief will be afforded to the flocks of sheep that had been withdrawn from them and pent up in inadequate ranges of pasture—a circumstance which indeed has tended materially to … keep up the price of butcher’s meat.’

  Flinders was, as it happened, a singularly beautiful island, at least to northern tastes. It was a place of windswept silence, bare on its central hills but thick with aromatic foliage along its shores—like an amalgam of Orkney and Corsica. The flies and mosquitoes were troublesome, as in so many otherwise idyllic corners of Empire, but there were many butterflies, too, and bright tropic birds, and wallabies, and a constantly changing southern light. To the aboriginals, though, it looked desolate and depressing. They may have seemed happy as they boarded their ship at Hobart, smiling their child-like smiles and ‘going through feats of their wonderful dexterity’, but eye-witness accounts of their arrival at Flinders read very differently, ‘When they saw from shipboard the splendid country which they were promised, they betrayed the greatest agitation, gazing with strained eyes at the sterile shore, uttering melancholy moans, and, with arms hanging beside them, trembling with convulsive feeling. The winds were violent and cold, the rain and sleet were penetrating and miserable … and this added to their foreboding that they were taken there to die.’

  So they were. Authority would not admit the fact, even to itself, but like unwanted old relatives consigned to an institution, the aboriginals were taken to Flinders Island to expire. After a couple of false starts they were housed in a settlement on the southern shore, named for them Wybalenna—Black Man’s Houses. It was set on the neck of a promontory: from the heights above it, which looked like stretches of English downland, one could see the sea on either side, and on a clear day even make out the hills of Tasmania itself. Wybalenna had its own jetty, convenient for the Bishops and Governors who occasionally came to observe the progress of the natives’ salvation, and its own chapel, and naturally its own cemetery. The aborigines lived in an L-shaped terrace of cottages, the staff in houses nearby.

  Some 200 Tasmanians were sent to Wybalenna, and there, slowly, far away and out of sight, forgotten by the settlers, guarded by second-rate officials and homesick soldiers, the race wasted away in tedium. At first the aboriginals seemed cheerful enough—they were pleased with the warm clothing the Government gave them, and the hot food: but gradually they sank into apathy. They needed to wander, and pined for the limitless forests and beaches of their larger island. They died by the dozen from chest complaints, stomach troubles and plain home-sickness: there was nothing for them to do but to brood, forlornly dance and sing, listlessly look for opossums and kangaroos, or dig potatoes in their garden patch.

  Presently Robinson himself, having rounded up every last aboriginal, arrived at Flinders Island to preside over their decay, and added to other causes of death a sort of sacred insemination. In his Wesleyan zeal he wanted to reform them still. He dressed them in European clothes. He forbade their corroborees. He was helped by a catechist named Robert Clark, who had declared it among the dearest objects of his life to disseminate moral and spiritual light among the natives, and the two of them worked assiduously to explain the ways of God to those benighted agnostics, Robinson at the same time recommending to the Lieutenant Governor the construction of a lock-up.

  Now a Wybalenna Sunday became a day full of purpose. ‘There is no strolling about, all are expected to attend the divine service, none are exempt except through illness, such is the way the Sabbath is kept since I have had the honour to command.’ Well though he knew his charges, Robinson remained appalled at their religious indifference. Their mental darkness was truly shocking. Some actually thought they had been created by their own mothers, and one woman believed her brother had done it. As for the afterlife, the aboriginals were now inclined to suppose that when a black man died his soul went to England, where it ‘jumped up whitefellow’. A Sunday school was founded to correct these misconceptions, and a visitor who attended one of Mr Clark’s addresses thought it ‘very evident from the anxious and searching looks of these people that they were really yearning to know and to feel that there is a God and that God is something powerful’. Soon seven natives knew the Lord’s Prayer by heart, decorum reigned at Wybalenna, and the ‘yells and monotonous chanting which at one time … frequently hurt the repose of the white inhabitants is no longer heard’.

  Here is an extract from one of Robinson’s sermons, in his own English version of it:

  ‘One good God. One good God. Native good, native dead, go up in sky. God up. Bad native dead, goes down, evil spirit fire stops. Native cry, cry. Good native stops God sky, no sick, no hungering.’

  And here are some of the questions, with the prescribed answers, from a Wybalenna catechism class:

  Q What will God do to this world by and by?

  A Burn it.

  Q Who are in heaven?

  A God, angels, good men and Jesus Christ.

  Q What sort of country is heaven?

  A A fine place.

  Q What sort of place is bell?

  A A place of torment.

  Q What do you mean by a place of torment?

  A burning for ever and ever.

  Robinson also inculcated in his wards, dependent during the past few millennia entirely upon the hunt and the scavenge, a more suitable sense of property. He put English copper coin into circulation, stamped on one side ‘F.I.’ for Flinders Island, and he made the aboriginals pay for their European clothes and comforts, to teach them the meaning of money. He started a weekly market, every Tuesday at II, at which they could sell the game they caught or the few poor artifacts they made, and buy in return pipes, tea caddies, crockery, fishing rods or straw hats.

  But despite it all they wasted, declined to have babies, and grew thinner, and more morose, and more helplessly melancholic. The Tasmanians were literally losing heart. Even the Conciliator now complained of their feckless indolence, and Mr Clark sometimes found it necessary to flog girls, ‘in religious anger at their moral offences’. By 1850 there were only forty-four aboriginals left alive, and th
e Government, deciding them to be no longer a danger to the European community, abandoned Wybalenna and shipped the hangdog survivors back across the Strait to die in Tasmania. Having thus arranged all things to the divine satisfaction, Mr Robinson took his family home to Bath, where he died in. genteel circumstances in a hill-top villa overlooking the city: he was 78, and his death certificate, in the column headed ‘Occupation’, described him simply as ‘Late Protector of the Aboriginees, Tasmania’.1

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  Now the end was near for the Tasmanian race. The survivors— twelve men, twenty-two women, ten young people—were taken to a disused penal settlement at Oyster Cove, twenty-five miles from Hobart, and only fifteen miles from the spot where, two centuries before, Tasman’s sailors had first heard those ‘certain human sounds’. There they lingered for a last decade. They no longer posed a threat to anyone, nor even provided hopeful material for the evangelicals, for they were generally drunk and shamelessly immoral. Sometimes people went to look at them, and itinerant anthropologists, recognizing them as ultimate specimens, measured their spines and estimated their brain capacities. By 1855 only sixteen Tasmanians were still alive, and all attempts to redeem them had been abandoned. By 1859 Oyster Cove was a slum, the handful of survivors camping in verminous filth among the derelict buildings, and sharing their food with their dogs.

  A few were adopted by settlers, as pets or curiosities. One pretty girl, almost the last of the young aboriginals, was befriended by Lady Franklin, whose husband Sir John, after great adventures in the Arctic, had come to Hobart as Lieutenant-Governor, Gaily dressed in European clothes, Mathinna went everywhere with her patroness, high-spirited in her carriage on afternoon drives, cosseted by ambitious aides at Government House balls. But when the time came for the Franklins to go home, Lady Franklin was advised that the change of climate might kill her favourite, so Mathinna was placed in an institution called the Queen’s Asylum. There the young men at Government House did not habitually call, and the other inmates teased and taunted her: so in the end, since she seemed to be wasting away, they kindly returned her to her inebriate and syphilitic relatives at Oyster Cove. We do not hear that Lady Franklin ever wrote to her there, and she soon picked up the local habits, drank heavily, prostituted herself with the timber-workers of the surrounding woods, and was eventually found drowned in a creek.

  The last male Tasmanian was an alcoholic whaling seaman, ‘King Billy’ Lanney, who became a public spectacle in his later years, was shown off at Government functions, photographed by scientists, and introduced to Queen Victoria’s son Alfred when the prince visited Hobart in 1868. When King Billy died in 1869, of chronic diarrhoea in the Dog and Partridge, he was carried to his grave by four comrades from his old ship, with the ship’s flag, an old opossum rug and a clutter of native weapons placed upon the coffin: during the night, though, the grave was re-opened and the skull snatched—probably at the instigation of the Royal Society of Tasmania, whose savants badly wanted the skull for their collection.

  The last of all was Truganini, Robinson’s faithful follower, whose association with the imperial culture had been long and varied. Her mother had been shot by a soldier. Her sister was kidnapped by sealers. Her intended husband was drowned by two Europeans in her presence, while his murderers raped her. In 1839 she was one of a group of natives taken by Robinson to New South Wales: there she, two other aboriginal women and two men were charged with the murder of two Europeans, the men being found guilty and publicly hanged, the women acquitted and returned to Tasmania,

  Long after the end of Oyster Cove Truganini (whose name meant ‘sea-weed’) clung to life, the very last of her people. For nearly twenty years she lived with a kindly European family in Hobart, and she became a well-known and popular figure in the capital. Short and stout, with staring eyes and a hairy chin, she liked to wear bright red turbans, and loved a good chat, a glass of beer and a pipe of tobacco. She was terrified that, like King Billy before her, she would be exhumed and dissected after burial. ‘Don’t let them cut me up’, she pleaded on her death-bed. ‘Bury me behind the mountains.’ So when, 73 years old, she died in May, 1876, her body was taken secretly, in a shoe-blacked pauper’s coffin on a cart, through the night to the Cascades Female Factory—the women’s reformatory, that is—in a cleft in the hills behind Hobart. There she was buried to the tolling of the reformatory bell, wrapped in a red blanket, in the presence of the Tasmanian Premier (for in the course of these events Tasmania had graduated to self-government). ‘I regret the death of the last of the Tasmanian aborigines,’ wrote a correspondent in the Hobart Mercury next day, ‘but I know that it is the result of the fiat that the black shall everywhere give place to the white.’

  Truganini’s life had exactly spanned, to the year, the association between Europeans and Tasmanians. In her own time her people, confronted by the strange white newcomers from over the sea, had been humiliated, degraded and finally utterly extinguished. They buried her within the reformatory compound: but before very long she was dug up anyway, and her skeleton, strung upon wires and upright in a box, became for many years the most popular exhibit in the Tasmanian Museum.1

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  ‘The sad and untimely destruction of this interesting primitive race,’ wrote the ethnologist H. Long Roth, ‘is one of the greatest losses Anthropology has suffered.’ But though the majority of the Empire-builders viewed their coloured subjects with something less than fraternity, throughout the Victorian century, even in the most ferocious episodes of Empire, there were honourable exceptions—men to whom race really was irrelevant, and colour added only variety to the human scene. Some were practising Christians. Many more were just people of decent instinct—sometimes tempered, especially in Irishmen, Scotsmen, and Welshmen, by hereditary experiences of their own. In Hong Kong the poor Chinese called the maverick John Pope-Hennessy, Governor of the colony in the 1870s, ‘Number One Good Friend’. In Bermuda the black people were still using the Well of the Black Watch, beneath its little wooden shelter beside the sea, which was ‘sunk by some soldiers of the 1st Battalion … for the sake of the poor and their cattle in the long drought’. When Cetewayo was imprisoned in Cape Town Castle after the Zulu war, he pined for the green rush mats he had always slept upon: William Butler, of Wolseley’s Ring, made a special journey from Natal to take him some, reducing the king to tears of gratitude—‘it was the same’, said Butler, ‘as putting a bit of green sod into the cage of a lark’. And this is how Arabi Pasha, the Egyptian nationalist overthrown and deported by the British in 1882, wrote to his Welsh gaoler, Major Baldwin Evans:

  In the name of God, the Merciful and the Compassionate, my good and Honourable Friend, Mr Evans: I beg to offer you my devotion for the great zeal and trouble you have taken on our behalf during the examination of our case, and also for your frequent visits to us in our prison cell. I pray God to reward you for your great kindness to us in our hours of grief and darkness, and we beg of you to accept our most grateful thanks. I have done this in my own hand to be a remembrance and a lasting sign of the great esteem and friendship I have for you.

  Ahmed Arabi, The Egyptian1

  1 Of which my favourite is ‘Beetle-fuck’, the East Indiamen’s nickname for the Arabian coffee town of Bait-al-Fakih. Other agreeable examples are ‘Sam Collinson’, which is what the soldiers called the Chinese general San-ko-linsin in the China war of 1860—a predecessor of the well-known Soviet general Tim O’Shenko—and ‘Mr Radish and Mr Gooseberry’, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s eponyms for the French explorers Radisson and Groseilliers. When a Bombay plutocrat named Radah Moonee erected a public drinking fountain in Regent’s Park, London, the grateful British public neatly christened him Mr Ready Money.

  2 But the Chinese in particular sometimes answered in kind. ‘The dispatch written on this occasion,’ declared the Chinese authorities in answer to a British ultimatum in 1860, ‘is in most of its language too insubordinate and extravagent for the Council to discuss its propositions more than
superficially. For the future the British Minister must not be so wanting in decorum….’

  3 ‘I never did hold with foreigners,’ Harold Nicolson’s housekeeper told him in 1940, complaining about aliens sheltering in the London underground during the blitz. ‘My father was an Indian Mutiny veteran and always warned me against them since I was a child.’

  4 It was only in 1911 that the India Museum, now part of the Victoria and Albert Museum, first acquired an Indian artifact for its artistic merit.

  1 Wybalenna soon crumbled into dereliction, and wistfully derelict it remains. Robinson’s house there is now a farm, and washing flutters in its garden on Mondays, but the only other sign of human habitation is an old black car, abandoned on the hillside above. The chapel is now used as a shearing shed, and beside it are the overgrown remains of the aborigines’ living quarters. Nearby is the cemetery, but the bones of its native corpses, so a persistent local tradition says, were dug up years ago and sent to England hidden in bales of wool for the edification of anatomists.

  When I searched out Robinson’s Bath villa in 1971, I found it occupied by Mr Arnold Haskell, the authority on ballet, who was unaware of his dour predecessor there, and used the house I fear a great deal more elegantly.