They had known no other people for 9,000 years, ever since Van Diemen’s Land was cut off from the mainland. Patsy Cameron is a Tasmanian Aborigine from Flinders Island. ‘How would we perceive strangers coming off a spaceship that looked like us – but had skin coloured purple?’ Her ancestors, she thought, understood Kemp to be Num, an Aborigine who had returned from the home of the departed, a heavenly island that he called England and they called Teeny Dreeny, to which he had travelled on the back of a seal. One day they, too, expected to jump up on an island as white men. ‘They would have seen him as a spirit, but they wouldn’t have known whether evil or good.’
Kemp had returned from a previous life because he knew the country, and if he behaved in a strange way it was because the trauma of dying had affected him so that he had forgotten how to behave. To begin with, the Aborigines treated him as a child. As he began to learn their language, scattered with whatever words Bennelong had taught him, it was as though he was recalling it. As he began to recognise them, they thought: ‘Oh, he’s remembering us, the journey to England has wiped out his memory, and gradually it’s coming back.’ Meanwhile, they looked at Kemp for some resemblance, some mark or gesture that gave him his kin place. ‘They think in kin terms,’ Henry Reynolds says. ‘Everyone is related to everyone. They would try and decide who Kemp had been in an earlier life and then assume that position.’ Only much later, when it was too late, would they say: ‘We realise you’re nothing but a man.’
Kemp watched his men hoist the flag on Lagoon Beach on November 11, 1804. A royal salute was fired from the Buffalo plus two volleys from the soldiers. Perhaps attracted by the noise, the first natives appeared the following day, a body of about 80, who approached to within 100 yards. The men were stark naked. The women wore kangaroo skins over their shoulder. Their black hair was woollier than Bennelong’s, resembling, to one observer, ‘the wig of a fashionable late eighteenth-century French lady of quality’. It was streaked with marrow grease and red ochre, and the reddish-brown skin on their arms was patterned with scars.
Kemp was all set to make friends. He ordered them to be given a tomahawk and mirrors. They looked into the glass and ‘put their hand behind to feel if there was any Person there’. Tantalised, they stepped closer to the tents – making a grab for tools and clothing. Then disaster. They hauled away a Royal Marine sergeant and were on the verge of throwing him into the sea when he or one of his privates fired a musket, killing one Aborigine and wounding another. The dead man’s was the ‘very perfect native’s head’ that Paterson sent in a box to Joseph Banks. Although not on the same scale as the episode at Risdon six months earlier, the incident marked, as Paterson predicted, a transgression. ‘This unfortunate circumstance I am fearful will be the cause of much mischief hereafter, and will prevent our excursions inland, except when well armed.’
Almost the next casualty was Kemp’s utopian brother-in-law, Alexander Riley, whose belief that he had come to a latitude ‘conjointly equal to any other spot on earth’, and perfect for growing rhubarb, was about to be challenged. Frantic to find a more suitable place for the settlement, Paterson sent Riley off to look for better pastures, but after walking for four hours Riley found his path blocked by 50 Aborigines who made a lunge for his cravat, exclaiming ‘walla, walla’, and then speared him in the back. He managed to crawl 15 miles to his boat, but he remained in a fever for several weeks. ‘Mr Riley has not been well since,’ wrote Paterson. ‘I rather think the Spear has penetrated close to the spine.’
Months later, Paterson appointed Kemp acting Lieutenant Governor. These were the instructions that he passed on regarding the Aborigines: ‘You are to endeavour by every means in your power to open an intercourse with the natives, and to conciliate their goodwill, enjoining all persons under your Government to live in amity and kindness with them; and if any person shall exercise any acts of violence against them, or shall wantonly give them any interruption in the exercise of their several occupations, you are to cause such offender to be brought to punishment according to the degree of their offence.’
How much Kemp abided by his orders is hard to tell. But there is evidence to suggest that he continued to take the Aboriginal side, despite their assault on his brother-in-law. The surgeon who dressed Riley’s wound was Jacob Mountgarret, who had arrived from Hobart with an Aboriginal boy, three or four years old, with ‘nice’ table manners. Mountgarret had adopted the boy and named him Robert Hobart May. Robert was able to tell Kemp his story without any ‘fear or apprehension’: how his parents were killed in front of him at Risdon by soldiers with whom Kemp had served in Sydney.
Risdon Cove on the east bank of the Derwent was the site of the first settlement in Hobart. What happened there on an autumn day in May 1804 was, wrote Mark Twain, out of all keeping with the place: ‘a sort of bringing of heaven and hell together’.
Twenty-six years after the event, a former convict Edward White testified that he was hoeing ground near the creek when there suddenly appeared a circle of 300 Aborigines, including women and children, hemming in a mob of kangaroos. ‘They looked at me with all their eyes,’ White remembered, suggesting that the sight of him turning the soil was the first indication that they had had of any English settlement on the island. The Aborigines reportedly belonged to the Oyster Bay tribe. White was positive, he said, ‘they did not know there was a white man in the country when they came down to Risdon’. The Aborigines did not threaten him and he claimed not to be afraid of them. Even so, White reported their presence to some soldiers and resumed his hoeing. Then, at about 11 a.m., he heard gunfire. The great difficulty is to imagine what happened in the next three hours until, at about 2 p.m., troops under the nervous command of Lieutenant Moore apparently fired grapeshot into the crowd, who had, Moore claimed, turned hostile.
According to White, ‘there were a great many of the Natives slaughtered and wounded; I don’t know how many’. Nor can anyone else know how many. The truth floats between the written record – which is that three Aborigines died, including Robert Hobart May’s parents – and the oral record, which is that up to 100 died. But the incident stuck in the historical memory and, likened frequently to Eve’s bite of the apple, came to be understood as the original transgression.
In September 1830, at a time of maximum tension in the colony, Kemp remembered Robert’s composed testimony when chairing an urgent meeting in the Hobart Court House. The hall was packed with the colony’s most prominent citizens and Kemp was first to address them. What he said, although prolix, was not quite what anyone expected. ‘Mr Kemp commented at some length upon the aggressions committed by the blacks, which he attributed in a great degree to some officers of his own regiment (the late 102nd) who had, as he considered, most improperly fired a four-pounder upon a body of them, which having done much mischief, they had since borne that attack in mind and have retaliated upon the white people whenever opportunity offered …’
Henry Reynolds says: ‘It’s a pretty extraordinary thing to say about your own regiment. A regiment is like a club. Even a cad doesn’t badmouth his own regiment.’ Kemp went further in his condemnation when speaking to the historian James Bonwick. Although referred to only as ‘a settler of 1804’, he is the probable source of Bonwick’s story that Robert Hobart May’s parents were shot at Risdon during ‘a half-drunken spree … from a brutal desire to see the Niggers run’. Kemp repeated his version to a commission of inquiry in 1820 as a way to explain the bitter attitude of the Aborigines: ‘the spirit of hostility and revenge that they still cherish for an act of unjustifiable violence formerly committed upon them’.
And yet what is perhaps remarkable about the first 20 years of European occupation is the absence of clashes. Following Riley’s spearing, colonists settled into a relatively amicable relationship with Aborigines. Kemp’s protégé Jorgen Jorgenson, for instance, thought them ‘inoffensive and friendly’. The two groups traded with each other, the settlers offering sugar, tea and blankets in exchange for kan
garoos, shellfish and women. As late as 1823, Godwin’s Emigrant Guide to Van Diemen’s Land wrote of the Aborigines that ‘they are so very few in number and so timorous that they need hardly be mentioned; two Englishmen with muskets might traverse the whole country with perfect safety as they are unacquainted with the use of fire-arms.’ In March 1823, George Meredith, a good friend of Kemp, wrote in appreciative terms to his wife about a group of naked Aboriginal women encountered in a small bay on his way to Swansea. ‘We were honoured by the visit of six black ladies to breakfast next morning who caught us craw fish and Mutton Fish [abalone] in abundance in return for bread we gave them – you would be much amused to see them Swim and Dive. Although I do not think you would easily reconcile yourself to the open display they make of their charms. Poor things, they are innocent and unconscious of any impropriety or indelicacy. They were chiefly young and two or three well proportioned and comparatively well looking. So you see had I fancied a Black wife I had both opportunity and choice.’7
Plenty of sealers and bushrangers availed themselves of this opportunity – like Michael Howe, whose companion, Black Mary, Kemp had interrogated in 1817. But by the mid-1820s the situation had shifted. Aborigines were no longer prepared to surrender their women and children to Europeans without a fight. They observed with mounting alarm how these Num not only raped and beat their ‘lubras’, but infected them with ‘loathsome diseases’, often with the result that they were unable to breed. Twenty-six years after Kemp’s arrival there were not enough Aboriginal women on the island to sustain the dwindling population. Of the 70 or so natives who remained in the north-east by 1830, only six were women. None were children.
The Aborigines resented, too, the way that settlers like Kemp and Meredith seized their best hunting grounds, the grasslands and open bush that supported the densest populations of wallaby and kangaroo. Under Governor Sorell grants to new settlers soared to almost one million acres. By 1831, the European population had further doubled (to 26,640), two million acres of native woods and grassland had been ceded, and the numbers of sheep grazing on the land had increased five-fold. Around Swansea, Meredith was able to fence off large tracts of land, including not only the beach where I now lived, but Moulting Lagoon behind our house, a vital gathering place for the Oyster Bay tribe. Deprived of their women and their food supply, the Aborigines retaliated. By 1825, Meredith was warning his wife: ‘The natives, I fear, must now be dispersed wherever they make their appearance.’
The Oyster Bay people were regarded by the man who subdued them as ‘the most savage of all the aboriginal tribes’. Their chief was Tongerlongetter, derived from the Aboriginal words meaning ‘heel of the foot’ and ‘great’. He was a gigantic figure who measured six feet eleven inches and was capable of drinking a quart of tea at a sitting. He used rust from the bolts of shipwrecks to colour his ringlets, and had scars in the small of his back, tattooed with an oyster shell, that resembled dollar coins. Known in captivity as the old Governor or King William, Tongerlongetter was a robust, intelligent leader, a man of ‘great tact and judgement’ in the opinion of George Robinson, who was responsible for persuading the chief to lay down his arms.
Before allowing himself to go with Robinson to Hobart, Tongerlongetter explained why his people had behaved as they had done: ‘The chiefs assigned as a reason for their outrages upon the white inhabitants that they and their forefathers had been cruelly abused, that their country had been taken from them, their wives and daughters had been violated and taken away, and that they had experienced a multitude of wrongs from a variety of sources.’
In the fens at the back of our house, Tongerlongetter had attacked hayricks and huts with spears of lighted punk, sending panic among the settlers who believed that they were in danger ‘of being ultimately exterminated by the Black Natives’. Just two months after Meredith expressed his admiration for their women, his neighbour and former employee in Wales, Adam Amos, looked out of the window at Glen Gala to see his house surrounded by Aborigines. ‘One, a woman came to the door, I made signs for her to go away. She did and in a short time about six made their appearance amongst the bush in the river close to my hut. I fired small shot at about 50 yards distance, they ran off.’ On December 13, 1823 Adam sent his oldest son ‘to shoot them again but missed by minutes’. Next day, after the same group set fire to the grass near his farm, he again sent out his son, who was joined by two of Meredith’s men ‘who fired at them and wounded one of the mob’. A month later, Amos organised another posse. ‘I had a hunt after the natives on Friday they appeared on my plain.’ He and his sons followed 30 men for two hours to a marsh about two miles from his farm. ‘We fired they run away and left their dogs and spears which we destroy and brought some of them home and two dogs.’ But he was swatting shadows. ‘The blacks are playing old gooseberry with us,’ he wrote to a friend. ‘On one occasion I saw one, and, while in the act of levelling my gun at him, he disappeared as if by magic, and I could see no more of him.’
The greatest attacks came during periods of starvation. That winter, one of Meredith’s stockmen had been killed on the edge of a sheltered lagoon where sometimes I walked on windy afternoons. Tongerlongetter’s men had surprised Thomas Gay as he ate breakfast. He made a dash for Meredith’s farmhouse and had run 200 yards when he was speared in the back. A few days later Amos came looking for him. The dogs started running around, smelling something as they approached Gay’s hut. The bodies of two unskinned kangaroos and a dead cat lay by the door, and clothes were scattered about the earth floor. Amos found Gay’s mangled body in a shallow pool, one hand above the surface. His eyebrows had been cut off, his nails separated from their quicks, his teeth beaten out of his head, and he had nine spear wounds. ‘The ravens had taken off part of two fingers that had appeared above water.’
Gay was the second of Meredith’s servants to be killed. ‘In neither case was provocation given by the whites,’ Meredith told the Aboriginal Committee that assembled in April 1830, six months before the Black Line. ‘The present feeling of the natives in our neighbourhood towards the white population is and for a considerable time has been that of avowed and unequivocal hostility.’ He went on: ‘their present object is most determinedly the death of every victim which may unhappily fall within their power or premises without respect to either sex or age.’ The worsening relationship between settlers and Aborigines was, he said, a ‘truly momentous subject’, and he recommended ‘the earliest possible importation of bloodhounds … not to hunt and destroy the natives – but to be attached to every field party – to be held in the hand and thus to track unerringly and either ensure their capture or if indeed the alternative must be resorted to – their annihilation.’
VI
ANNIHILATION WAS EMPHATICALLY NOT GOVERNMENT POLICY, BUT in the backwoods of Swansea settlers made their own vicious law. Anne Rood, one of our neighbours, remembered speaking to Jackson Cotton who grew up at Kelvedon, an estate six miles away. ‘Jackson’s grandfather, a Quaker, had told him with horror of farmers he knew who had given Aborigines bread buttered with arsenic.’
Poisoned bread or damper was not the only deterrent. Sarah Mitchell was raised on a farm adjacent to Kelvedon. In her unpublished memoir, handwritten in 1946, she included this abbreviated paragraph: ‘Twenty yards from the house at Mayfield there was a hut called the Black Hut and store room for the men. One of the Buxton family told me they noticed flour was stolen. They set a steel trap at night. In the morning a blackman had cut off his hand and left it there …’ The next pages are missing, but the injured Aborigine was most likely Tongerlongetter, who in July 1832 revealed to George Washington Walker that he had lost his forearm when it was caught in a rat-trap set by a white colonist. In the description of the Colonial Times: ‘the trap was found about 100 yards from the hut, and the hand in it … The unfortunate creature must have undergone dreadful agony, as we hear that the sinews and tendons of the arm were drawn out by main force, and to use the expression of our informant,
resembled those of the tail of a kangaroo.’ Tongerlongetter later altered his story to say that he had been shot by white men in moonlight, but the conical stump was examined at his post-mortem in June 1837 and the doctor confirmed from the extensive lacerations that the arm had been ‘violently torn away’.
It is impossible to know how widespread was the use of such traps any more than it is possible to verify the number of little fingers cut off to be used as tobacco-stoppers. But on a farm seven miles north of Swansea I was taken to a bluestone barn known as the Cellar.
The farmer led me through a low door. White nails along the lintel were hammered into old possum claws, and inside he had hung the walls with skinned hares, their ribs pressing out through the shiny red flesh.
The door had been built this low to stop intruders from entering in a hurry. ‘They were under a few pressures,’ the farmer said. He was small, with a wide nose, and two of his teeth were framed in gold. He gestured at a narrow aperture set in the massive wall, about four feet from the ground and five inches wide. The hole was no bigger than an arrow slit. ‘But narrow enough to get in the old muzzle-loader.’
In Tasmania Page 16
