In Tasmania (18 page)

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.

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, happened 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.

Meanwhile, Meredith and Amos had each sent a party to the river mouth, ‘expecting, of course, that the Civil Power would be on the spot, to decide and legalise their proceedings'. Meredith advised Arthur that he was busy alerting William Lyne and other settlers on the coast to drum up every available man in order to keep the Aborigines hemmed in.

By Friday evening, a total of 84 soldiers and farm-workers had gathered at Meredith's whaling station, leaving a skeleton force to guard various properties. Fires were lit every 100 yards or so across the isthmus, three men sentried at each, and they sat down to wait. The isthmus ‘being nearly a mile', they clearly thought the game was in the bag.

Acting in lieu of the police magistrate, Swansea's local doctor had taken upon himself the surprising step of handing out rations from the Commissariat. He gave to each man the same per diem as Arthur had allowed for the Black Line: two pounds of flour or biscuit, one and a half pounds of meat, half an ounce of tea, three ounces of sugar. ‘The tobacco and soap I have not furnished.'

On Sunday, there was a new moon. Dogs were heard howling and there was a rustle in the silver wattle. At sunrise, Meredith discovered fresh footprints on a patch of burned ground and some dogs feeding on the carcass of a whale. He also found 12 spears left behind under a rock. The number of footprints suggested that there were between twelve and 20 people, some of them children. But it was clear that a ‘slab' of Aborigines were still hiding in the rocks and caves. Two settlers told Meredith that ‘they observed the blacks on a rock not far distant, endeavouring to escape'.

By now, Meredith was concerned that he did not have sufficient men ‘to form scowering parties as well as to maintain the line'. He sent urgent messages to Spring Bay and Little Swanport, which he expected to produce another 40 people. Once these arrived, ‘more effective measures may be entered upon'.

But before Meredith's reinforcements turned up, Tongerlongetter and his people did indeed escape.

They darted through the line at 10.00 on Tuesday evening, between two huts about 80 yards apart. The night was dark – the new moon had only just risen – and the fires were becoming low due to a shortage of wood. The soldiers did not see them coming.

The first to hear the alarm was William Lyne's eldest son John. Fifty-six years later, as Member of Parliament for Glamorgan, John Lyne would introduce the bill that attempted to eradicate the Tasmanian tiger. Towards the end of his life he remembered the pitch-black night when he tried to trap a band of the last Tasmanian Aborigines. ‘It was my turn to patrol. I was at the time [urging] the men Keep a good watch as the native dogs were seen amongst the fires in front and after passing one of the soldiers on duty about 50 yards I heard him call ‘Halt'. He comes there firing off his gun to give the alarm and on my running quick I heard a rustle like as though a mob of wild cattle were passing but could see nothing for it was very dark except near the fires and the low scrub had been previously burnt making the ground of the like colour of the natives. Next morning we tracked their footmarks very plain, the ground being soft from previous rain.' Apart from their footprints, the Aborigines had left behind one bloody piece of evidence. Lyne told his niece that ‘the next day was found a large piece of the scalp of a black on a wattle stake, quite low, the poor thing had raced past and struck the tree.'

 

The wattles were restless with honey-eaters on the afternoon I crossed the isthmus. I walked out along Cook's Beach, pleased to see no-one on it. ‘All we have in April are our own footprints,' a guide had told me on my first visit. On that occasion, she pointed out an ancient hut hidden in the gums. I had not been inside it, but now I could not resist opening the door. Inside, old copies of the
Mercury
insulated the walls, and seeing that one page, dated February 1958, had an advertisement for a horror movie starring Boris Karloff, I read it.

I escaped onto the dazzling white sand. A flight of yellow-tailed black cockatoos moved very fast and high over the tops of the gums, uttering loud harsh cries. The same casuarinas. The same orange-lichened rocks. The same cerulean sea. The Aborigines had been coming here for 40,000 years and yet the only traces of their presence were a few flint tools and a midden of white shells. I watched the tide hiss up past a mud oyster on the sand and come away rolling it over and over, and tried to think of Truganini. She was a member of the Bruny Island tribe, but I had an odd notion that she might have visited this beach, ever since reading Sarah Mitchell's memoir. ‘My father and I went to see her in Hobart and he asked her if she were of the East Coast tribe and she was. She went down with a basket to gather oysters and said, “Plenty of shark there.” Father said, “What did you do with the shells?” She looked at him as if he were stupid and said, “Why throw them on the bank sometimes.”' But I could not get out of my head the advertisement on the wall of the hut. ‘Can you take it? Shock! From the dead they come to haunt and terrify you.' It was no more melodramatic than the events that occurred here on a Tuesday evening in October 1831. Or the fate that awaited Tongerlongetter and his people.