In Tasmania

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  I stared out between the bars. His two grandsons played on the grass where the first settler had blasted his shot at Tongerlongetter’s men. The farmer said: ‘The Abos got in and pinched stores through the shingle roof. The owners used to have a big man-trap. They reckon the Abos got in here because someone was taking the grain. When they came back a foot was in it. They found a hoppy-legged Abo over in Avoca and reckon it was the same fella. I’d be running too, I reckon.’

  I stepped back into the cavernous room. The wall at the rear was cut into the bank. Once, the farmer said, it was lined with barrels of cider and there was a press. The farmer remembered his father working the press.

  ‘Where was the coffin?’ I asked. I had read that the man who built the Cellar had used his coffin as the coolest place to store alcohol.

  ‘He probably bloody did put it here.’

  The Cellar was erected as a cider house for a deadly brew made of crabapples, Sturmers and Early Janers brought out from England. We went outside and the farmer showed me a bedraggled orchard where a creek rippled past. ‘There used to be beautiful eating ones. “Lady in the Snow” – red skin and white flesh, real sweet. And cooking apples. Mum would stew ’em or else the green parrots made a mess of ’em. But they now taste pretty woody.’

  It was not only the Cellar I wanted to see. I had also read that on this property were the remnants of the oldest surviving log cabin in Tasmania. We walked down to the sheep pen and there it was, a sorry sight beside three plum trees and a rusty water tank with a hole in it. All that remained of the cabin was a stack of old blue-gum spars spattered in grey lichen; a pile of sandstone rocks; and a concrete block with a metal plaque to commemorate William Lyne’s arrival on Christmas Day, 1826.

  Lyne had managed a country estate in Gloucestershire. Then the lease ran out. He was a tall, proud man with five children and a wife who hated Tasmania for all the 47 years she lived there. Before he emigrated, he had his men make him a coffin from an old oak on the property. He packed it with lead, pewter, saucepans, five swords, six guns, and five pairs of pistols. He also took with him a church organ, keeping out a flute and violin to play on the voyage. He filled other crates with a cider press, an anvil, a bellows and a copper furnace. Then he shot his lovely saddle horse and sailed to Hobart.

  On his arrival, he was told of the problems with bushrangers and Aborigines, and was recommended New South Wales. But he was a stubborn man. He walked four days to Great Oyster Bay and found 1,500 acres east of Adam Amos: a warm valley, lightly timbered, with a tidal marsh. The turf hut that he built with his wife collapsed when someone leaned on it, and so, early in 1827, they put up a log cabin, 20 feet square, made of large gums scooped out at the end.

  It would not be his cider that killed him, or a ti-tree spear, but a bone that lodged in his throat while he was eating dinner. By then he was living in a Georgian sandstone house that today the farmer used as a barn. Built by convicts, it closely resembled the stately home that Lyne had looked after in North Cerney.

  In the early years, he never left his low door without a gun. He made a small seat on his plough and strapped his six-year-old daughter Susan into it so close to the ground that she could smell the turned earth. One day a man panted up, a stockman who worked for George Meredith. His companion had been murdered by blacks. Abandoning his plough, Lyne ran to the valley that he had called Coombend after the estate in Gloucestershire, and found a dead man with a spear four and half feet long sticking from his back. Another time a movement caught his eye and he turned to see a large band of Aborigines 70 yards away. He raced inside and dressed his wife in a long man’s overcoat and handed her a gun. When he led her outside, the Aborigines scattered at the strange spectacle. But he could not always be there to protect his family. In February 1828, Susan and her ten-year-old sister Betsy were guarding a herd of calves near the tidal marsh when they failed to see a group of a dozen Aborigines who had concealed themselves behind a large rock. Betsy ran screaming to the cabin. Susan fell unconscious in the shallow lagoon, struck by an Aboriginal weapon – a spear or the heavy stick known as a waddy.

  The farmer leaned against the remains of Lyne’s old hut and hesitated. ‘When I was a kid, this was still a square block. A door here, walls this high’ – and he rebuilt them in the air.

  ‘What do you feel,’ I asked, ‘standing there?’

  He rested his hand on the spars of wood carelessly heaped up. ‘Probably like to know what went on.’ He nodded at a slope once covered in white gums, a folk memory returning. ‘Over that bank, by the large rock, one of the girls got speared in the side.’

  We walked over. The rock was large – about ten feet high, the size and shape of an obelisk.

  He went round the back. ‘See that ledge, reckon that’s where he was sitting when he speared her.’ He went on gazing at the rock, and on a sudden it was not an Aborigine he was seeing, but himself. ‘It’s a beautiful place to sit. As a kid, I used to sit there playing cowboys and Indians.’

  VII

  IN Medical Hints for Emigrants, I FOUND THIS ENTRY FOR SPEAR wounds: ‘These are more serious than mere cuts. If any vital part is injured, you can do very little except keep the patient quiet and send for the clergyman and surgeon. If a shot or spear has passed through or into one of the limbs, bind it up, and treat it as you would a cut.’

  Whether Lyne’s daughter had been struck by a waddy or a spear, she recovered. So did Edith Stanfield’s great-grandmother.

  Edith lived two miles from us, in a white weatherboard house off the road into Swansea. She told me that her great-grandmother as a little girl was speared in the back not long after arriving at Plassy, under the Western Tiers north of Ross.

  Her mother, she said, was often shown the wound. ‘My mother was allowed to put her hand on it. It was a deep scar in her back, in the fleshy part below the shoulder, and deep enough to feel through her clothes.’

  ‘She felt it through a dress?’ I thought of a young girl performing her Braille, mapping the bloody history of this island on her grandmother’s back.

  ‘No way would she have shown her flesh to her grandchildren – not like mine, who wander in when I’m having a shower.’

  VIII

  IN THE MIDDLE OF THE BEST HUNTING GROUNDS, MOUNT VERNON was a prime target. Kemp told Bonwick that in 1821 he saw about 300 Aborigines ‘poking’ after bandicoots. ‘He immediately guessed that his hour had come and thinking, he said, that he might as well die with a good heart as a bad one, he started his dogs into the mob, and on their flight, took himself heartily off.’ The attacks escalated after a sawyer was speared to death within half a mile of Kemp’s property. In 1826, 60 natives pursued Kemp’s servants and tried to plunder Kemp’s hut. In one raid, Aborigines surrounded a hut and dared the settler inside to shoot at them, threatening in good English ‘to put his wife into the bloody river’. It was hard to resist the conclusion that the Aborigines were directing towards settlers’ wives the frustration they felt over the fate of their own women and children. A few miles from Mount Vernon, Ann Geary was killed by an axe through the skull. Geary’s neighbour Esther Gough fell to her knees shortly before her own death. She begged: ‘Spare the lives of my Piccaninnies.’ One of her attackers responded: ‘No, you white bitch, we’ll kill you all.’ In October 1828, 15 Aborigines ambushed Mrs Langford in the heart of Kemp’s township. They speared her small son to death in her arms and also his 14-year-old sister. The girl and her mother survived. This last group was rumoured to include two white men. One of those who pursued them, Zacharias Chaffey, recognised a former convict servant of his father named Green, who had blackened his face and wore only a striped shirt. No longer taken by Aborigines for the spirits of their dead, these convict fugitives were welcome allies in the resistance against invaders like Kemp.

  The gradual deterioration of Kemp’s relationship with Bennelong’s people was dramatised in a three-hour play that opened in London on February 10, 1830. In Van Diemen’s Land; or Settlers and
Natives, William Moncrieff transposed Bennelong from Sydney and promoted him chief of the Broken Bay Tribe. Those who watched the play in the Surrey Theatre were given a picture of Bennelong that more accurately resembled a North American Indian than an Aborigine like Tongerlongetter. But if his taste for yams and canoes struck a false note, his fury at Kemp’s type was authentic. He called for ‘just revenge’ on the colourless strangers that had ‘usurped our plains, and would fain extirpate our race’. He pointed out: ‘These white men can speak fair and promise well. But what has the dark chief ever found from them, save this, that they have striding legs and grasping hands – have over-run our isle, and seized our all, because he wore not the same hue with them.’ And he spoke of his visit to England in 1792. ‘I went far over sea, to white man’s lands, where their King dressed me in his warrior’s dress, and gave rich gifts, then smiled on the dark chief, and bade him make his people like to them.’ But what had Bennelong found on his return with Kemp? ‘He found the white man chief – he found his lands all seized, and he, their prince, the white man’s slave.’ Before the arrival of the white man, his people had coveted nothing, taken nothing. ‘They’ve taught me something; I will profit by it – taught me to plunder and deceive.’

  His sister Kangaree echoed his distress: ‘Caffres have black faces but white hearts; but white men’s faces white, their hearts black.’

  Crude though Moncrieff’s drama was, it captured a truth about the Aborigines’ new attitude. Num were no different to other men. In fact, they were worse.

  IX

  GEORGE ROBINSON ONCE ASKED AN ABORIGINAL WOMAN WHY SHE cried after her sick husband was admitted to hospital. She replied: ‘Why black man’s wife not cry as well as white man’s?’

  As part of their response, many colonists disagreed that Aborigines and Europeans shared the same humanity. They sided with Kemp’s friend, Mrs Prinsep, who dismissed it as a romantic notion that Tasmanian Aborigines could be noble savages. ‘They are undoubtedly in the lowest possible scale of human nature both in form and intellect,’ she wrote in 1830. ‘Jaws elongated like the Ourang Outang and figures scarcely more symmetrical.’

  In 1829, Arthur alienated the Aborigines further by giving away another 208,000 acres in grants. Between February and July 1829, eleven white people were killed, and eleven more between August and December 1830. They included Mrs Emma Coffin, speared in her right breast. Her child was found weeping. He pointed to a mob of Aborigines: ‘There is the blacks that killed mama.’ In the past seven years approximately 187 Europeans had died. Even enlightened colonists like George Boyes understood the need for action. ‘It has become apparent that unless means were devised for allaying the cruel nature of these wretches, of making them prisoners … in some well adapted part of the country, or, otherwise, of exterminating the race, that the country must be abandoned.’

  To classify Aborigines as ‘Ourang Outangs’ or ‘wretches’ made it easier to sanction the drastic measure that Lieutenant Governor Arthur decided on in October 1830: to mobilise the white population into a human chain. This was the reason for Kemp’s appearance at the packed Court House.

  Once he had got off his chest the cause, as he saw it, for the atrocities, Kemp changed tack. His volte-face was in character and received with ‘much applause’. His honourable spirit of moderation had evaporated. Initially well disposed towards the native population, Kemp now judged them to be ‘like all other savages, expert in ambush and ferocious in vengeance’. A few weeks later, Bennelong’s former shipmate tabled the following resolution: ‘that the atrocious character of the Aborigines of this Island – manifested by their cruel and wanton murders of the white inhabitants, perpetrated without distinction of age or sex, and with increasing barbarity – renders the life of the Settler insecure and operates as a most serious drawback to emigration to this country; and consequently to its commerce and prosperity.’ The motion would be carried unanimously.

  For now, he saluted the Governor in his endeavour, and perhaps for the first time in his career gave a superior his unstinting support. He looked forward to the success of ‘the great object now about to be undertaken … to subdue the Aborigines and put them in a place of security which I sincerely hope may lead to their civilisation’.

  Without being at liberty himself to join in what became known as the Black Line, he proposed that he and a number of free settlers should form a town guard for as long as the military were occupied in the bush. It was, he said, ‘the duty of every man cheerfully to contribute to the common cause every assistance in his power’. He appointed himself ‘Field Marshal’ of this Home Guard.

  The duties that Kemp supervised were tiresome and unnecessary. Visitors to Hobart from early October to late November 1830 were amused by the spectacle of respectable civilians patrolling the streets in ill-fitting military clothing or parading stiffly up and down on horseback. ‘Gentlemen,’ was one old soldier’s response to Kemp’s initiative, ‘you may call yourselves marshals, generals and colonels, but the duties assigned to you are usually performed by a corporal’s guard.’

  Meanwhile, a line of 2,000 settlers, convicts and soldiers were beating the bush from Moulting Lagoon through Campbell Town to Quamby Bluff in the Western Tiers. Day after day, Colonel Arthur rode up the line in his visored blue cap, his blue frock coat and curved sabre. His purpose: to drive the Aborigines ‘like deer in the Highlands’ into the Tasman peninsula.

  Six weeks later, the Hobart Town Courier mocked this ‘Grand Army’ and asked what had been gained by the enormous expense of such a gigantic military manoeuvre. ‘The answer is, unfortunately, a simple dysyllable – nothing!’

  At a second meeting chaired by Kemp in the Court House, he was forced to lament ‘that the expedition against the Aborigines had not been attended with the success that we all fondly hoped would have been effected, but what is money compared with the protection of our lives and properties? Away with such mercenary ideas …’

  Nonetheless, his obituarist was scathing. The Black Line, wrote James Erskine Calder, recently arrived in Hobart, was an absurd passage in the history of the colony: ‘too chimerical in its conception, too absurd in its progress and too inconsiderable in its results’. It had cost £30,000 – that is to say half the annual budget – and resulted in the capture of one Aboriginal man and a 15-year-old boy. The tribal people were still there, had passed like water through the hands of their would-be captors.

  But the tradition of scoffing at the Line as altogether ineffectual is astray.

  X

  I HAD LIVED IN TASMANIA TWO YEARS BEFORE I WAS ABLE TO COME to terms with the Black Line. Powerful though the image was, Arthur’s response to the Aborigines seemed too theatrical to have been a real historical event. I felt that had it been presented as such at the Surrey Theatre the audience would have hooted it off the stage. Historians like Calder, Bonwick, Reynolds and Windschuttle evoked it graphically enough on the page: a cordon of beaters in a hunt, men blowing bugles, firing muskets, and shouting their names to keep in touch with those out of sight. There was supposed to be one man to every 100 yards in the first days, with the line stretching 120 miles from Great Oyster Bay to Lake Sorell. But I only had to spend a morning in a clumsy attempt at emulation to understand the impossibility of maintaining a formation. For three hours I scrambled up and down, into hollows, over boulders, through outcrops of rock, dipping into ravines, pushing through dense chest-high grass, blundering over rotten branches. It did not surprise me to learn that many of the beaters ended up walking in single file along the main roads. Nor that they failed to capture more than two Aborigines. It was easy, though, to picture their quarry every 80 yards or so, indistinguishable from the blackened stumps and keeping still in the dead bracken, the fallen logs. Tongerlongetter and his people must have been terrified.

  I did not properly grasp the Black Line until I discovered that a local version of it had taken place a year later, in October 1831. The episode, which has seldom been brought to light, ha
ppened within sight of my house.

  The Oyster Bay people had dwindled from about 800 to about 30 since Kemp’s arrival on the island. Bonwick put it that the Aborigines, ‘harassed by continual alarms, worn out by perpetual marches, enfeebled by want and disease, had sunk down one by one to die in the forest’. Tongerlongetter was not to know that Arthur’s extravagant measure was a one-off and the Black Line knocked the stuffing out of him. ‘It showed the Aborigines our strength and energy,’ wrote Jorgenson, and when, in November 1830, George Robinson told a group of natives in the north-east about the operation, ‘the whole of them was in tears throughout the whole of the day’. Tongerlongetter’s distress would have been no less intense. He might have escaped the Black Line, but it left him stranded, trying on the one hand to avoid capture – there was a £5 bounty on the head of every adult, £2 on every child – and on the other to adhere to his traditional migratory patterns.

  On October 13, Tongerlongetter and the remnants of his tribe appeared at a hut near Amos’s farm. In great alarm, George Meredith wrote to Arthur explaining how ‘with their usual cunning’ they had removed a batch of weapons. They plundered one of Amos’s huts, and another belonging to Meredith, this time stealing flour and two dirty shirts. Meredith believed that Tongerlongetter was heading for the tip of the Freycinet Peninsula where it dropped into Schouten Passage. Each year the Oyster Bay tribe came looking for shellfish, ochre and swans’ eggs in Moulting Lagoon, camping on a flat neck of land beyond the Hazards. Meredith had established a whaling station inland from this narrow isthmus. He planned to trap the Aborigines in ‘their customary resort’.

  Meredith sent his son Charles to the whaling station. If Charles saw any natives he was to light two fires. On the following Wednesday morning, Meredith saw the signal through his telescope and reported it to the police station in Swansea, ‘but extraordinary as it may appear to the whole colony the Police Magistrate at such a time had departed to a distant duty’. In the magistrate’s absence, a constable and four soldiers were dispatched in a leaking vessel to the Fisheries, but they rowed back the following evening, claiming that they had seen no-one.