Skip to main content <#maincontent>
We will keep fighting for all libraries - stand with us!
Internet Archive logo A line drawing of the Internet Archive
headquarters building façade.
Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass.
Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass.
Upload icon An illustration of a horizontal line over an up pointing
arrow. Upload
User icon An illustration of a person's head and chest. Sign up
| Log in
Web icon An illustration of a computer application window
Wayback Machine
Texts icon An illustration of an open book.
Books
Video icon An illustration of two cells of a film strip.
Video
Audio icon An illustration of an audio speaker.
Audio
Software icon An illustration of a 3.5" floppy disk.
Software
Images icon An illustration of two photographs.
Images
Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape
Donate
Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses.
More
Hamburger icon An icon used to represent a menu that can be toggled by
interacting with this icon.
Internet Archive Audio
Live Music Archive Librivox Free
Audio
Featured
* All Audio
* This Just In
* Grateful Dead
* Netlabels
* Old Time Radio
* 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
Top
* Audio Books & Poetry
* Computers, Technology and Science
* Music, Arts & Culture
* News & Public Affairs
* Spirituality & Religion
* Podcasts
* Radio News Archive
Images
Metropolitan Museum
Cleveland
Museum of Art
Featured
* All Images
* This Just In
* Flickr Commons
* Occupy Wall Street Flickr
* Cover Art
* USGS Maps
Top
* NASA Images
* Solar System Collection
* Ames Research Center
Software
Internet Arcade Console
Living Room
Featured
* All Software
* This Just In
* Old School Emulation
* MS-DOS Games
* Historical Software
* Classic PC Games
* Software Library
Top
* Kodi Archive and Support File
* Vintage Software
* APK
* MS-DOS
* CD-ROM Software
* CD-ROM Software Library
* Software Sites
* Tucows Software Library
* Shareware CD-ROMs
* Software Capsules Compilation
* CD-ROM Images
* ZX Spectrum
* DOOM Level CD
Books
Books to Borrow Open Library
Featured
* All Books
* All Texts
* This Just In
* Smithsonian Libraries
* FEDLINK (US)
* Genealogy
* Lincoln Collection
Top
* American Libraries
* Canadian Libraries
* Universal Library
* Project Gutenberg
* Children's Library
* Biodiversity Heritage Library
* Books by Language
* Additional Collections
Video
TV News Understanding 9/11
Featured
* All Video
* This Just In
* Prelinger Archives
* Democracy Now!
* Occupy Wall Street
* TV NSA Clip Library
Top
* Animation & Cartoons
* Arts & Music
* Computers & Technology
* Cultural & Academic Films
* Ephemeral Films
* Movies
* News & Public Affairs
* Spirituality & Religion
* Sports Videos
* Television
* Videogame Videos
* Vlogs
* Youth Media
Search the history of over 835 billion web pages
on the Internet.
Search the Wayback Machine
Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass.
Mobile Apps
* Wayback Machine (iOS)
* Wayback Machine (Android)
Browser Extensions
* Chrome
* Firefox
* Safari
* Edge
Archive-It Subscription
* Explore the Collections
* Learn More
* Build Collections
Save Page Now
Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in
the future.
Please enter a valid web address
* About
* Blog
* Projects
* Help
* Donate
* Contact
* Jobs
* Volunteer
* People
* Sign up for free
* Log in
Search metadata
Search text contents
Search TV news captions
Search radio transcripts
Search archived web sites
Advanced Search
* About
* Blog
* Projects
* Help
* Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape
* Contact
* Jobs
* Volunteer
* People
Full text of "Fabrication Of Aboriginal History Vol 1 Van Diemens Land
"
See other formats
the — -
FABRI CATIO OR
of ABORI e I N AL
HISTORY
VOLUME ONE
VAN DIEMEN'S LAND
1803-1847
KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE
The Fabrication of
Aboriginal History
VOLUME ONE
VAN DIEMEN’S LAND
1803-1847
MACLEAY PRESS
Sydney
First published 2002. Reprinted with corrections 2003. Reprinted with
corrections and revisions 2005
Macleay Press
PO Box 433
Paddington NSW 2021
Sydney, Australia
All nghts reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright recorded
above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or
introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),
without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the
publisher of this book.
Edited by George Thomas _
Cover design by Reno Design Group, Sydney
Printed in Australia by Southwood Press, Marrickville
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Windschuttle, Keith, 1942- .
The fabrication of Aboriginal history. Vol. 1, Van Diemen's
Land 1803-1847.
Bibliography.
Includes index.
ISBN 1 876492 05 8.
1. Aborigines, Tasmanian — History. 2. Historiography —
Australia. I. Title.
994,60049915
L
|
CONTENTS
Introduction: The Final Solution Down Under
1:
2.
10:
ii:
The killing fields at Risdon Cove, May 1804
The Black Legend in Van Diemen’s Land, 1804-1831
Black bushrangers and the outbreak of Aboriginal
violence, 1823-1826
The guerilla warfare thesis and the motives of the
Aborigines, 1824—1831
Historical scholarship and the invention of massacre
stories, 1815—1830
The Black Line and the intentions of the colonial
authorities, 1830—1831
Black Robinson and the origins of Aboriginal
internment, 1829-1847
Cape Grim and the credibility of The Conciliator,
1828-1834
Settler opinion and the extirpation thesis, 1830-1831
The death toll and the demise of the Aboriginal
population, 1803-1834
The historian as prophet and redeemer
Epilogue: Heritage, genealogy and black intellectual
authoritarianism
Bibliography
Index
29
61
83
131
167
199
249
295
351
398
417
437
455
INTRODUCTION
The Final Solution Down Under
T IE centenary of Federation in 2001 was ostensibly to celebrate
one hundred years of independent, democratic Australan gov-
ernment. Given the very few other societies that have recorded such
an achievement, the event should have been an occasion to focus on
national virtues. Instead, many of the centenary commemorations,
especially those addressed by the then Australian Governor-General,
focused on a great flaw that allegedly lay at the heart of the nation. In
speech after speech he gave around the country, Sir William Deane
turned the celebrations into an opportunity to lecture Australians
about their failings over one issue. One hundred years of stable and
successful government meant little compared to the treatment meted
out to the Aborigines. The nation would remain diminished, he said,
until it came to terms with this fundamental defect at its core. Deane
told one of his audiences:
The oppression and injustice to which indigenous Australians were sub-
jected in our land and under our Federation were not merely the acts of
individuals who are long since dead and for whose acts living Australians
might deny responsibility. They are properly to be seen as acts of the
nation itself of which all living Australians are members. As such, that past
oppression and injustice remain part of the very fabric of our country.
'They reach from the past to blight the present and to demand redress and
reconciliation in the future.'
! 2001 Sydney Peace Prize lecture, University of Sydney, 8 November 2001
‘
Uu FABRICATION Ol ABORIGINAL HISTORY
x 0 : ` ^ * v
In June 2001, in his last symbolic gesture as Governor-General,
Deane went to the Kimberley district of Western Australia where he
apologized to the Kija people for an infamous massacre their tribe had
suflered at Mistake Creck as recently as the 1930s.
Deane Was anything but a lone voice. A number of the cultural
expressions produced for the centenary took up the same theme and
candidly identified where the fault lay: Australia had committed
genocide against the Aborigines. The accusation was not simply of
action by default, such as inadvertently introducing diseases that killed
people who had no immunity to them. Australia was allegedly guilty
of conscious, wilful genocide resembling the kind the Nazis perpe-
trated against the Jews. In a book written for the centenary, Australia:
A Biography of a Nation, the expatriate journalist Phillip Knightley was
one of those who drew this analogy. He wrote:
It remains one of the mysteries of history that Australia was able to get
away with a racist policy that included segregation and dispossession and
bordered on slavery and genocide, practices unknown in the civilized
world in the first half of the twentieth century until Nazi Germany turned
on the Jews in the 193052
When the National Museum of Australia was opened in 2001, it
commemorated the genocide thesis in the very design of the building
itself. Architect Howard Raggatt borrowed its central construction —
shaped as a lightning bolt striking the land — from the Jewish Mu-
seum in Berlin, signifying that the Aborigines suffered the equivalent
of the Holocaust. The museum housed its ‘First Australians’ or Abo-
riginal collection within this zigzag structure. Its director described
the opening of the institution as ‘a birthday gift to Australia’, but to
symbolically accuse the nation of the most terrible crime possible was
a strange present to offer. Yet, apart from a handful of conservative
objectors, the country accepted it without demur.
The reason was that the Governor-General, the journalist and the
architect were all reflecting the consensus reached by the historians of
Aboriginal Australia over the previous thirty years. This is a consensus
that has been largely accepted by the country's intellectual and politi-
cal classes. It commands an overwhelming majority of support in the
media, the arts, the universities and the public service. While the
historians themselves might not have overtly used the Nazi compari-
son, they have created a picture of widespread mass killings on the
frontiers of the pastoral industry that not only went unpunished but
had covert government support. They created the intellectual frame-
work and gave it the imprimatur of academic respectability. They
? phillip Knightley, Australia: A Biography of a Nation,
Jonathan Cape,
London, 2000, p 107
have used terms such as ‘genocide’, ‘extermination’ and ‘extirpation’
so freely that non-historians like Deane, Knightley and Raggatt read-
ily drew the obvious connection. From the very outset, as Deane had
said in 1992 from his then High Court bench in the historic Mabo
judgement, the colonisation of Australia was ‘a conflagration of op-
pression and conflict which was, over the following century, to
spread across the continent to dispossess, degrade and devastate the
Aboriginal peoples and leave a national legacy of unutterable shame’.’
In short, the debate over Aboriginal history goes far beyond its
ostensible subject: it is about the character of the nation and,
ultimately, the calibre of the civilization Britain brought to these
shores in 1788.
This book is the first volume in a series that examines the credibil-
ity of the received interpretation. It is a study of the historiography,
the nature of the written history, of the relations between colonists
and Aborigines. It examines the major claims of the prevailing con-
sensus that ‘violence was ever present along the ragged line of early
interaction’, that ‘invasion and conquest prepared the way for settle-
ment' and that the Aborigines put up a brave but futile resistance
through a century-long campaign of guerilla warfare.* I am not giving
anything away here by saying the findings of this series are radically at
variance with the story now so widely accepted. This volume and
those that follow argue that the story the historians have constructed
does not have the empirical foundations they claim.
This series is not only a study of historians. Embedded within its
critique is an alternative version of its subject, a counter-history of
race relations in this country. It finds the claim of a ‘conflagration of
oppression and conflict misinterprets the whole process. The British
colonization of this continent was the least violent of all Europe's en-
counters with the New World. It did not meet any organized resis-
tance. Conflict was sporadic rather than systematic. Some mass kill-
ings were committed by both sides but they were rare and isolated
events where the numbers of dead were in the tens rather than the
hundreds. The notion of sustained ‘frontier warfare’ is fictional.
A great many Aborigines willingly accommodated themselves to
the transformation. They were drawn to and became part of the new
society. Many others, however, were subject to a policy that kept
them separate from the white population. The officials who initiated
this strategy claimed it was to protect them from white violence and
? Deane and Gaudron JJ, High Court of Australia, Mabo versus Queensland, in
Richard H. Bartlett (ed.) The Mabo Decision, Butterworths, Sydney, 1993, p
79
‘ Henry Reynolds, Why Weren't We Told?, Viking, Ringwood, 1999, pp
151, 166
3A Pure FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
white exploitation, However, the worst crime Australia committe,
against the Aborigines was not violence or exploitation but this Very
policy. of separating, and interning them on missions and reserves
Those who did this are still celebrated by historians today as grey
humanitarians and as the Aborigines’ friends, These volumes severely
question that assessment.
Although the series starts in Tasmania, it will eventually cover the
whole of the continental mainland. The colony of Van Diemen’s
Land, as it was originally known, comes first because it has long been
widely regarded as the worst-case scenario. Those historians now up-
held as the most reputable on this subject assure us that the 'Tasma.
nian Aborigines were subject to ‘a conscious policy of genocide'?
International writers routinely compare the actions of the British in
Tasmania with the Spaniards in Mexico, the Belgians in the Congo,
the Turks in Armenia and Pol Pot in Cambodia.’ The English
journalist James (Jan) Morris once entitled an article on Tasmania
‘The Final Solution, Down Under’.’
Tasmania was also the location of what one of its historians, Henry
Reynolds, has called ‘the biggest internal threat that Australia has ever
had’: the so-called Black War of 1824—31.* This was purportedly a
guerilla war of momentous proportions in which Aboriginal warriors
conducted a violent, protracted, but ultimately tragic war in defence
of their homeland against European invaders.
The long-term policy that Australia eventually devised to manage
Aboriginal affairs also had its origins in Tasmania. The settlement es-
tablished on Flinders Island from 1831 to 1847 became the model for
all the missions and reserves that followed in the next 130 years.
Moreover, the rationalisation that violence between the races could
only be resolved by the separation of blacks from whites was born
here too, with arguments that were to be repeated right up to the
present.
Another reason to start with Tasmania is because its records are so
good. On the mainland, the supporters of the genocide thesis often
hide the weakness of their case behind what they claim is a paucity of
historical documents. One of them has written: ‘Most of the historical
sources that might have enabled us to enumerate the number of
5 Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, (1981), Allen and Unwin,
Sydney, 2nd edn. 1996, p 255
^ See Chapter One, p 14
7 James Morris, ‘The Final Solution, Down Under’ (1972), reprinted in F.
Chalk and K. Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and
Case Studies, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1990
* Henry Reynolds, interviewed by Bruce Montgomery, "The First Patriots’,
Australian, 3 April 1995, p 10
INTRODUCTION: THE PINAL SOLUTION DOWN UNDER 5
Aboriginal people killed on the frontier have, for various reasons,
either never existed or have since been lost or destroyed." This is
detinitely untrue for Van Diemen's Land. Its Lieutenant-Governor
from 1824 to 1836, George Arthur, knew his relations with the Abo-
rigines would engender controversy and so he had all the records in
his possession. preserved in seventeen consecutive volumes, which
today are readily available on microfilm at the Archives Office of
Tasmania in Hobart. The government records are supported by com-
plete sets of almost all contemporary newspapers plus diaries, letters
and submissions from local settlers. There was even a questionnaire
survey conducted in 1830 to determine settler attitudes towards the
blacks. Hence, rather than evidence ‘never existing’ or being lost or
destroyed, the documentary record here is comprehensive and
accessible. The early colony was a very small society where, except
for a handful of gaps, there are good records of the activities of almost
the entire colonial population from 1803 to the 1840s. Moreover,
through the voluminous diaries of George Augustus Robinson, who
traversed the colony for five years accompanied by local Aborigines,
we get a unique insight into the black side of the frontier as well as
the white. Overall, there is good evidence about the intentions of the
colonial authorities, the attitudes of the settlers and the motives of the
Aborigines. Few colonial encounters anywhere in the world are as
well documented as those of Van Diemen's Land. Overall, the history
of this colony provides the best opportunity to test the claims of the
prevailing interpretation and to make some confident findings about
its accuracy.
'THE POLITICISATION OF ACADEMIC HISTORY
Most of the authors to be examined in this series were educated in, or
at least strongly influenced by, the ideas about history that emerged in
the 1960s. The most conspicuous notion from that turbulent decade
was that history was unavoidably political. It did not take long for this
concept to be applied to Aboriginal history, a field that took it up
with gusto. In 1974, in one of the earliest works, Aborigines, Race and
Racism, the Marxist author Humphrey McQueen declared:
This book is deliberately biased. It has to be biased in order to tell che
truth. For nearly two hundred years white Australians have lived a lie
about the Aborigines. To see the truth clearly the balance has to be drawn
9 Bain Attwood, ‘Attack on Reynolds Scholarship Lacks Bite’, Australian, 20
September 2000, p 35
BO Tur FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
w faveur of the Aborigines which means that this book begins by acce t
seg that white Australians are prejudiced against Aborigines, E
tn 1981, in probably the most influential book of the whole
The Oder Side of the Frontier, Henry Reynolds made a similar d
con
genre,
eclara..
Yer the book was not conceived, researched or written in a mood of de.
tachad scholarship. It is inescapably political, dealing as it must with issues
chat have aroused deep passions since 1788 and will continue to do so into
the foreseeable future."
This politicisation has not been confined to the text. Some of the
histonans discussed in this book have been prominent activists at the
national level, and, indeed, have been highly successful at it. As Rey-
nolds has recorded in a widely celebrated memoir, he and his col-
leagues have played major roles in movements for Aboriginal land
rights, acting as consultants to and advocates for the plaintiffs. The
High Court’s Mabo and Wik judgements of 1992 and 1996 were
strongly influenced by theirarguments.? — —
It has been less publicized that they have also played academic
politics with much the same succes. No one who disagrees with
them need now apply for any position teaching Australian history at
an Australian university. No graduate student seeking to write a dis-
senting thesis should waste his time applying to any of our academic
schools of history. The ruling intellectual environment that has long
controlled Aboriginal history has warned off book publishers from
recalcitrant authors and even led one press to break a contract to
publish a high profile work it had already accepted."
In the 1980s, a number of these historians were responsible for the
most disreputable campaign in Australian academic life: the attack on
Geoffrey Blainey for publicly questioning the level of Asian immigra-
tion and daring to suggest that Aboriginal society might have been
more violent before colonization than afterwards. Although Blainey's
book Triumph of the Nomads (1975) was regarded outside the academy
as a work largely sympathetic to the Aborigines, Henry Reynolds
found it had sinister political implications. He said the book had been
taken up by the mining industry and ‘other opponents of land rights’.
Blainey’s findings about Aborigines, Reynolds claimed, had ‘laid an
intellectual foundation for others to use racism as a means of swinging
»H umphrey McQueen, Aborigines,
1974, p 2
" Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aborioi ,
European Invasion of Australia, (1981), Penguin, ee ales to the
7 Reynolds, Why Weren’t We Told?, Chapters 12 and 14 l 18 »pl
See Chapter Seven, pp 199-200 : PP 185-225
Race and Racism, Penguin, Ringwood
INTRODUCTION: THE FINAL SOLUTION DOWN UNDER. 7
Australian. intellectual; iti j
right." In unam dM t oda Pe Eid à
M n | | specially compiled book of criti
cal essays, Reynolds claimed Blainey had ‘lost the respect of practi-
cally the whole profession’. It was time for a new generation of his-
torians to pull down his ‘edifice’, Reynolds asserted, so ‘a whole team
got together with the jackhammers' to criticise Blanes views.
b you ve got to expect if you engage in that sort of public
io d is that you are going to be shot at ... if you are going to gct
down there and engage in the crossfire you have got to expect to be
clobbered and people will really jump on you."
Although widely recognized as one of this country's greatest
historians, Blainey eventually resigned from his chair at the University
of Melbourne.
THE ‘COLOSSAL FICTIONS’ OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
In 1942, Paul Hasluck, a journalist, historian and politician who by
the early 1970s had himself become Governor-General, wrote Black
Australians, a history of Aboriginal policy in his home state, in which
he said:
There have been two colossal fictions in popular accounts of the treat-
ment of natives in Australia. One suggests that settlers habitually went
about shooting down blacks; the other, framed as a counterblast, is that
every settler treated natives with constant kindness. There is no evidence
to support either statement in Western Australia.'^
It is a pity that Sir William Deane was not more familiar with the
writings of his predecessor. They might have left him more sceptical
of the oral history he heard about the events at Mistake Creek in the
Kimberley, where he made his last symbolic gesture as head of state.
In his apology for a massacre the local tribe suffered, and for all those
perpetrated by whites on Aborigines, Deane said:
The facts — nobody could claim the facts were crystal clear. What is clear
is there was a considerable killing of Aboriginal women and children. It
seems it was over a mistaken belief that they were eating a stolen cow. In
fact, the cow turned up afterwards ... It's essential that we hear, listen to
14 Henry Reynolds, ‘Blainey and Aboriginal History’, in Andrew Markus
and M. C. Ricklefs (eds.) Surrender Australia? Geoffrey Blainey and Asian
Immigration, George Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1985, pp 85, 89
15 Reynolds interviewed by Helen Trinca, ‘Historians tackle the legend of
Blainey head on in new book’, Australian, 16-17 February 1985, p 5
16 Paul Hasluck, Black Australians: A Survey of Native Policy in Western
Australia 1829-1897, (1942) 2nd edition, Melbourne University Press,
Melbourne, 1970, p 179
N Yar Ea TY
1 Vii EA ATION OF ADORIGINAL HISTORY
and acknowledge the facts of wh
| | at happened in the past, the facts of the
dispossession and the f
: acts of terrible events such as what happened here at
Mistake Creek in the 1930s, which is in my lifetime. I'd like to say to the
Kija people how profoundly sorry | personally am that such events
detaced our land, this beautiful land."
However, what actually is clear is that Deane got the facts of this
case completely wrong. According to the Western Australian police
records, the incident took place in 1915, not the 1930s. It was not a
massacre of Aborigines by whites and had nothing to do with a stolen
cow. It was a killing of Aborigines by Aborigines in a dispute over a
woman who had left one Aboriginal man to live with another. The
Jilted lover and an accomplice rode into the camp of his rival and shot
dead eight people. This is not the kind of incident for which the
Governor-General of Australia should be apologizing.
Even though he had been using the same incident in speeches for
at least two years, Deane never bothered to do the most elementary
research to find out the facts. Yet eyewitness statements from the
Aborigines who survived the massacre and the evidence of police
who found the bodies and pursued the killers would all have been
available to him in the Western Australian archives and in a previ-
ously published account by a well-known author." Rather than an
example of what Deane has called our ‘diminished nation’, the tale
he told about Mistake Creek is just one more of the many myths and
legends now routinely recounted as historical fact but which, when
properly examined, reveal a different story. In a speech in November
1999 when he also used Mistake Creek to illustrate his plea for
Aboriginal reconciliation, Deane said:
It matters not whether this particular story is accurate in all its details, for
the elements undoubtedly occurred in many parts of our nation in the
211 years since European settlement.”
"Transcript, ‘A Look at Sir William Deane’s Term as Governor-General’,
7.30 Report, ABC Television, 11 June 2001
' Ion L. Idriess, Tracks of Destiny, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1961, pp
27—52. See also Keith Windschuttle, ‘Wrong on Mistake Creek’, Australian
Financial Review, 18 June 2001, p 54 and letters 20 June, 21 June, 25 June,
26 June, 29 June 2001. The most thorough account of the incident, which
provides full citations of the police investigation and the charges laid, is: Rod
Moran, ‘Mistaken Identity: The Massacre of Aborigines at Mistake Creek’,
Quadrant, May 2002, pp 14-17
?? Sir William Deane, Governor-General, Australia Day message, 26 January
1998
2 Sir William Deane, “A Few Instances of Reconciliation’, address to the
Millennium Dinner, Southern Queensland Theology Library, Toowoomba
INTRODUCTION: "THE FINAL SOLUTION DOWN UNDER 9
But, of course, 1t does matter greatly whether stories about crimes
ot this magnitude are accurate in their details, and it is most surprising
to find a former judge of the High Court thinking otherwise. If the
taetual details are not taken seriously, then people can invent any
atrocity and believe anything they like. Truth becomes a lost cause.
Similarly, the symbolism Howard Raggatt built into the structure
of the National Museum and the assertions in Phillip Knightley's
book comparing the fate of the Aborigines to the Jews of Europe, are
both false and irresponsible. It is heavily ironic that Knightley, the
author of a very good book on war reporting and propaganda, The
First Casualty, has himself succumbed to the kind of atrocity stories he
has criticized others for accepting.”! As even the narrow focus of this
first volume alone is enough to make clear, the Aborigines were not
the victims of a holocaust. To compare the intentions of Governor
Phillip or Lieutenant-Governor Arthur, or any of their successors, to
those of Adolf Hitler, is not only conceptually odious but wildly
anachronistic. There were no gas chambers in Australia or anything
remotely equivalent. The colonial authorities wanted to civilize and
modernize the Aborigines, not exterminate them. Their intentions
were not to foster violence towards the Aborigines but to prevent it.
This is the first book in a series that attempts not only to present a
more credible factual record of this subject but also to explain why
there have been so many people throughout our history who have
wanted so badly to believe the worst possible story. As this volume
shows, this desire is by no means new but goes back to those early
colonists who originally saw themselves as saviours of the Aborigines,
but whose historical track record reveals something else entirely.
The series has been written in the belief that the factual details are
matters not to be waved aside but to be critically examined. Those
historians who have advanced the ‘genocide’ and ‘frontier warfare’
theses have believed they were taking the Aboriginal side in a great
national debate. However, the real interests of Aboriginal people
themselves can never be served by those who take a cavalier attitude
to the evidence, no matter how sympathetic their intent. Indeed, the
surviving Aboriginal cultures have only been debilitated by the belief
that their people were once subject to a conscious policy of extermi-
nation, when the reality was that nothing remotely like this occurred.
If Australians of Aboriginal and European descent are to look one an-
other straight in the eye, they have to face the truth about their
5 November 1999, p 5, reprinted in Sir William Deane, Directions: A Vision
for Australia, St Pauls Publications, Sydney, 2002, p 38
21 Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and
Myth Maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, (1975), Revised edn., Prion, London,
2000
10. Tur FABRICATION Ol ABOLUGINAL HISTORY
mutual history, not rely upon mythologies designed to create an
editice ot black victimhood and white guilt.
This series is also an excursion into the methodology of history. It
examines how we can know about the past, the kinds of evidence we
ean regard as reliable, and how to detect false claims when they are
made. Many readers will find this first volume an unusual exercise, to
say the least. It pays so much attention to footnotes, citations and ar-
chival references that some will probably find it uncomfortably diffi-
cult, There was, however, no other way to proceed. The corruption
of this story has been accomplished by historians under the cloak of
academic respectability. There was no choice but to address the fabric
of their scholarship in order to unpick their work and to establish
what really happened.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The research for this first volume was done primarily in the Archives
Office of Tasmania in Hobart and the Mitchell Library in Sydney,
two institutions that remain exemplars of public service and profes-
sional practice. I am grateful for all the assistance I have had from
their staff. I would also like to acknowledge the editors of two jour-
nals, Paddy McGuinness of Quadrant in Sydney and Roger Kimball of
the New Criterion in New York, who both encouraged me to con-
tinue with this project by publishing essays in which I originally pre-
sented some of these unfashionable ideas. My wife Elizabeth intro-
duced me to Van Diemen's Land through her own historical research,
which gave me an insight into the cultural and religious values of its
settlers that assured me I was on the right track. She has also been my
most severe and hence most valued critic.
REVISIONS AND CORRECTIONS TO THIS EDITION
This edition is the second reprint of the first edition but with some
revisions and corrections. Despite the publication of an anthology
critical of this volume (Whitewash, ed. Robert Manne, Black Inc,
Melbourne, 2003), nothing in that book required a revision of any
historical substance. Chapter Ten's tally of Aboriginal killings has
been increased by one, so that the total is now 121. I responded to
Whitewash in some detail in Quadrant magazine, October 2003. A far
more extensive response is John Dawson, Washout: On the academic
response to the fabrication of Aboriginal history, Macleay Press, 2004. For
more of this debate, see my website www.sydneyline.com.
Keith Windschuttle, May 2005
CHAPTER. ONE
The killing fields at Risdon Cove
May 1804
HOBART, Australia — On a fall day in 1804, soon after the first convicts
arrived here in Tasmania, Aborigines pursued a mob of kangaroos to the
fringes of white settlement beside the Derwent River. The hunting party,
which included women and children, carried only clubs. Soldiers fired at
them with a cannon, the opening shot in a war that would result in the
near-extermination of Tasmanian Aborigines. Some of the 50 or so killed
that day were salted down and sent to Sydney as anthropological curiosi-
ties.
T is the opening paragraph of a front-page story of the Wall
Street Journal, America’s biggest-selling daily newspaper, on 21
August 2000. The story was written by two Australian journalists and
was designed to publicize the view that, beneath the surface of the
apparently benign society that was about to host the 27th Olympic
Games, lurked a dark and shameful history it had yet to come to
terms with.! It was followed by a similar story in the English-language
daily, the Bangkok Post. Written by the expatriate Australian Ben
Kiernan, professor of history and director of the Genocide Studies
Program at Yale University, this article was entitled ‘Australia’s Abo-
! Geraldine Brooks and Tony Horwitz, ‘As Olympics loom, Australians
agonize over Aborigine issues’, Wall Street Journal, 21 August 2000, p 1
12 Tur FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
H ` j ` R x 7 + .
riginal Genocides’. ? Kiernan said that thro
ughout the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries,
an British colonists had mounted untold 'pu-
nitive expeditions’ against the blacks and had committed ‘hundreds of
massacres’, The Aborigines ‘were hunted like wild beasts, having
lived for years in a state of absolute terror of white predators’. Among
the atrocities he recorded was the same 1804 incident on the Der-
went River, where he put the total number killed at forty. In Tasma-
nia today, the descendants of the Aborigines themselves tell a similar
story about this event, only they claim the death toll was much
higher:
Close to a hundred were killed that day, whole families; the exact number
will never be known. Bodies were dragged back to the settlement, butch-
ered and boiled down so that the bones could be packed in lime and sent
back to Sydney. When the Moomairremener returned to bury the dead
many could not be found.
Those authors who want to paint Western imperialism in its black-
est terms often use Tasmania as one of their most compelling cases. In
his 1998 book Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold, about the impact of
European expansion on the indigenous peoples of the world, Mark
Cocker, a journalist on the Guardian newspaper in England, chose the
British colonisation of Tasmania as one of the four worst illustrations.
The others were the Spanish conquest of Mexico, the destruction of
the Apaches by the United States, and the German subjugation of
South-West Africa! In Robert Hughes’s best-selling tirade against
Australian history, The Fatal Shore, the expatriate art critic called the
events in Tasmania the one indisputable genocide of English imperi-
alism.? Other critics in the US and UK who want to disparage the
moral track record of the West routinely drop the name Tasmania. In
the Times Literary Supplement in February 2001, for instance, an
American historian compared his own country’s treatment of the In-
dians with the worst examples of imperialism by putting it ‘on a
moral par with Belgium’s Congo or Britain's Tasmania’.°
? Bangkok Post, 10 September 2000, Perspective, p 2
? Greg Lehman, ‘Our story of Risdon Cove’, Pugganna News, 34, April
1992, p 45. The Moomairremener was the name of a band of Aborigines
who were sometimes seen in the Pitt Water district. However, no one at
Risdon Cove in 1804 knew the tribal name of the Aborigines concerned
and Lehman is merely guessing who they were.
* Mark Cocker, Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe’s Conflict with Tribal
Peoples, Jonathan Cape, London, 1998
? Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to
Australia 1787—1868, Pan Books, London, 1987, p 120
* Ronald Wright, ‘Living on haunted land’, Times Literary Supplement, 9
February 2001, p 9
ONE: THE KILLING FIELDS AT RISDON COVE 13
Within Australia, the local counterparts of these authors believe
early ‘Tasmania gives them their strongest case. The now widely
accepted version of this history claims that before the first British set-
tlement in 1803 there were about 6000 natives on the island.’ Tasma-
nia, or Van Diemen’s Land as it was called until 1855, is a territory of
26,393 square miles, or 68,358 square kilometres, a little larger than
Sri Lanka and a little smaller than Scotland. At the close of what
became known as the ‘Black War’ of the 1820s and early 1830s, this
story says those Aborigines who had not been shot dead by settlers
and troopers were rounded up and transported to Flinders Island in
Bass Strait where the remnant of about 200 people slowly perished
from disease. By 1876, with the death of the last full-blooded Abo-
rigine, the woman named Truganini, the indigenous population had
been exterminated, although mixed-blood descendants today still
identify themselves as Tasmanian Aborigines.
According to the principal historian of the ruling interpretation,
Lyndall Ryan, these tribal people were ‘victims of a conscious policy
of genocide’.” She compared the fate of the Tasmanian Aborigines
under the British to that of the Jews under Hitler, noting Clive
Turnbull’s 1948 book Black War provided ‘a reminder that extermi-
nation policies were not exclusive to Nazi Germany". The author of
the most recent general history of Tasmania, Lloyd Robson, concurs:
‘they were dispossessed and destroyed by their invaders and conquer-
ors in an impressive example of extermination'." In their script for
the documentary film The Last Tasmanian, the pre-historian Rhys
Jones and producer-director Tom Haydon describe the actions of the
British as ‘a holocaust of European savagery’. Jones says: “To the
colonists, the problem of the Tasmanians was a practical one, to rid
the country of such vermin.’ He compares the atrocities committed
7 Michael Roe, ‘Tasmania’, Oxford Companion to Australian History, Oxford
University Press, Melbourne, 1998, p 628
8 This is now her most familiar name, which in the past has been spelt
variously as Trugernanna, Truganina and Trucanini. She was also known as
Lalla Rookh and Lydgugee. She was the last to die in Tasmania itself but was
actually outlived by some other full-blooded Tasmanian Aboriginal women
on Kangaroo Island, South Australia, the last of whom died unnoticed in
1888. See Norman Tindale, ‘Tasmanian Aborigines on Kangaroo Island’,
Records of the South Australian Museum, Adelaide, 1937, 6, 1, pp 29-37
? Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, (1981), Znd edition, Allen and
Unwin, Sydney, 1996, p 255
10 Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 2
1 Lloyd Robson, A History of Tasmania, Volume 1, Oxford University Press,
Melbourne, 1983, p vil
14. Tn FAIRICATION OF ANORIGINAL HISTORY
E na anas sf Buchen and My a
recent newspaper iiile a, j iain dins AU prentan, Even 4
nea ad k ud that que staigi the validity of the prevailing
TARAY ict on the Australian mainland could still write
that “no Australian would deny the genocide committed against Tas-
mania's Aborigines’,
The international reputation of Tasmania has long been every bit as
bad as its domestic version. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish jurist who, in
the aftermath of the Second World War, invented the term ‘geno-
cide’ and successfully urged the United Nations to adopt a conven-
tion on the subject, believed Tasmania to be one definite site of
genocide. He rated its victims on a par with those of the Belgian
Congo, the Huguenots of France, the Incas of Peru and Ukrainians
under the Soviet Union." The evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond
has used Tasmania as an example of genocide comparable to that of
East Pakistan in 1971 and Cambodia in the late 1970s, each with
more than a million victims, and the Sudan and Indonesia in the
1960s and Burundi and Uganda in the 1970s, where more than one
hundred thousand people died in each case.? Another American au-
thor has compared the fate of the Tasmanians under the British to the
Armenians and Jews at the hands of the Turks and the Nazis.!
The orthodox version of this interpretation argues that the shoot-
ing of the kangaroo hunting party in 1804 set the pattern for subse-
quent race relations in Van Diemen's Land. Historians who hold this
view call the incident the ‘Risdon massacre." It took place at Risdon
Cove,'? which had been the initial British settlement in 1803 before it
was relocated further down the Derwent River to the site that be-
came Hobart Town. It was widely believed by subsequent commen-
°? The Last Tasmanian, script by Rhys Jones and Tom Haydon, produced and
directed by Tom Haydon, Artis Film Productions, Sydney, 1978; Rhys
Jones, Rocky Cape and the Problem of the Tasmanians, PhD thesis,
University of Sydney, 1971, p 9
? Deborah Cassrels, ‘History of Manne’, Courier-Mail, Brisbane, 2 June
2001, BAM Section, p4
“* Helen Fein, Genocide: A Sociological Perspective, Sage Publications, London,
1990, p 11, citing Lemkin’s unpublished work
? Jared Diamond, ‘In Black and White’, Natural History, 10, 1988, p 14
© Florence Mazian, Why Genocide? The Armenian and Jewish Experiences in
Perspective, Iowa State University Press, Ames, 1990
" Henry Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, Penguin, Ringwood, 1995, p 76
18 Some authors today use the name Risdon for the settlement, most of
which was on a hill above the Derwent River, and keep the term Risdon
Cove for the circular bay at its foot. However, in 1804 the whole locale was
called Risdon Cove: see Collins to King, 30 September 1804, Historical
Records of Australia, YII, I, p 238-9
ONE: THE KILLING FIELDS AT RISD INCOVE 15
tators that this incident was the initial cause of the later hostilities. In
one of the first histories of the Australian colonies, William Charles
Wentworth wrote in 1819 that the officer in charge that day had
committed an ‘unmerited and atrocious act of barbarity’. After his
‘murderous discharge’ of grape and canister shot, dealings between
Aborigines and settlers became defined by ‘the spirit of animosity and
revenge’. Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur, who took up his
post in 1824, attributed the outbreak of native violence during his
own period to the ‘unfortunate step' taken by the officer in command
of the garrison at Risdon Cove twenty years earlier.” In 1830, a gov-
emment committee of inquiry into Aboriginal hostilities, chaired by
the Anglican Archdeacon William Broughton took a similar line. In
this "lamentable encounter', the Aborigines were not the initial ag-
gressors and probably had peaceful intentions at the time. The num-
bers slain, the committee reported, ‘have been estimated as high as
50.7
As is clear from the story in the Wall Street Journal, this version of
events has persisted, largely intact, until the present day. In the 1990s,
those claiming to be descendants of the Tasmanian Aborigines laid
claim to a large portion of land on the island, demanding compensa-
tion for the death and dispossession of their forebears. Part of their
claim included what they termed the ‘killing fields’ at Risdon Cove.
In 1995, the conservative Premier of Tasmania, Ray Groom,
responded by transferring 3800 hectares of land at a number of
locations to Tasmanian Aborigines, including seventy hectares (173
acres) at Risdon Cove, which till then had been a heritage site
commemorating the founding of British settlement.”
In other words, the story told in the international press in 2000 has
had considerable support down the years, from the very early colonial
period to our own times. This does not, however, make it true. In
fact, the events at Risdon Cove provide a good case study of how the
conflict between Aborigines and settlers has long been exaggerated by
people far removed from the scene and by rumours and myths that
have perpetuated themselves. Let me illustrate this by examining all
the evidence we have about the events of May 1804.
? William Charles Wentworth, Statistical, Historical and Political Description of
the Colony of New South Wales ..., Whittaker, London, 1819, pp 116—7
? Arthur to Goderich, 10 January 1828, British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies,
Australia, Volume 4, Irish University Press series, Shannon, p 175
? Report of the Aborigines Committee, 19 March 1830, British Parliamentary
Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 209
? Australian, 18 October 1995, p5
16 THER TN
1E FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
THE EVIDENCE FROM RISDON COVE
On T hursday 3 May at 2 p.m. the new settlement at S
later named Hobart Town, heard a c
at Risdon Cove, the first site of the colony. The Risdon Cove se.
tlement had by then been replaced as the administrative centre bis
there were still some troops and settlers located there. The Licuten-
ant-Governor, David Collins, sent a message to Risdon Cove to en.
quire about the cause. The first report of the incident was written
Immediately after the event by the surgeon, Jacob Mountgarrett, who
lived in a hut there. Mountgarrett sent a short note to the colonial
chaplain, Rev Robert Knopwood, at Sullivan’s Cove. Knopwood
copied the full text of the note into his diary:
Dear Sir,
I beg to referr you to Mr. Moore for the particulars of an attack the na-
tives made on the camp today, and I have every reason to think it was
premeditated, as their number farr exceeded any that we have ever heard
of. As you express a wish to be acquainted with some of the natives, if
you will dine with me tomorrow you will oblige me by christening a fine
native boy who I have. Unfortunately, poor boy, his father and mother
were both killd. He is about two years old. I have likewise the body of a
man that was killed. If Mr. Bowden [the colonial surgeon] wishes to see
him desected [dissected] I will be happy to see him with you tomorrow. I
would have wrote to him, but Mr. Moore waits.
Your friend
J. Mountgarret, Hobert, six o'clock
The number of natives I think was not less than 5 or 6 hundred — J.M. >
ullivan's Coye
annon shot six miles up the river
The same evening, the temporary commander of the Risdon Cove
troops that day, Lieutenant William Moore of the 102nd Regiment
of the New South Wales Corps, called on Knopwood:
At 8, Lt. Moore came to my marquee and stayd sometime; he informed
me of the natives being very numerous, and that they had wounded one
of the settlers, Burke, and was going to burn his house down and ill treat
his wife etc. etc. ?*
The only other document written at the time was by Lieutenant
Moore. On 7 May he sent a report to Lieutenant-Governor Collins.
This is the full text:
?* The Diary of the Reverend Robert Knopwood 1803-1838, ed. Mary Nicholls,
Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Hobart, 1977, entry for
Thursday 3 May 1804, p 51
?! Knopwood, Diary, 3 May 1804, p 51
ONE: THE KILLING FIELDS AT Rs DON COVE 17
Agreeable to your desire I have the honour of acquainting you with the
Circumstances that led to the attack on the Natives, which you will per
ceive was the consequence of their own hostile Appearance.
It would appear from the numbers of them and the Spears etc. with
which they were armed, that their design was to attack us, however it
was not all they had thoroughly convinced me of their Intentions by
using violence to a Settler's wife and my own Servant who was returning
into camp with some Kangaroos, One of which they took from him,
that they were fired upon on their coming into Camp, and Surrounding
it. I went towards them with five soldiers, their appearance and numbers
| thought very far from friendly; during this time I was informed that a
party of them was beating Birt, the Settler, at his farm. I then dispatched
Two Soldiers to his assistance, with orders not to fire if they could avoid
it; however they found it necessary, and one was killed on the Spot, and
another was found Dead in the Valley.
But at this time a great party was in Camp, and on a proposal from Mr
Mountgarrett to fire one of the Carronades to intimidate them they dis-
persed.
Mr Mountgarrett with Some Soldiers and Prisoners followed them Some
distance up the Valley, and had reason to suppose more were wounded,
as one was seen to be taken away bleeding; during the Time they were
in Camp a number of old men were perceived at the foot of the Hill
near the Valley employed in preparing spears.
I have now Sir, as near as I can recollect given you the leading particulars
and hope there has nothing been done but what you approve of.”
There are a number of points to be made about these documents.
For a start, while Moore's report is obviously that of a man trying to
justify his actions, it is also clear he was simply doing his duty by res-
cuing a settler and protecting his camp. His words are not those of
someone who thought he could kill natives on any pretext or with
impunity. His casualty list of two Aborigines killed and some
wounded derived from three separate confrontations: when the Abo-
rigines first came into the camp, at the farm of Birt, and then when
the ‘great party’ came into the camp. However, Moore’s account is
not all that different from that of Mountgarrett, except that the latter
recorded three killed. Mountgarrett had no ostensible reason to
downplay the conflict. He was not part of the military. He had been
replaced as colonial surgeon when Matthew Bowden arrived that
February and, at the time, was a free settler.” Given the matter-of-
fact invitation to his fellow surgeon to come over and see the body
* Moore to Collins, 7 May 1804, Historical Records of Australia, Series III, Vol
I, pp 242-3
? Isabella J. Mead, ‘Jacob Mountgarrett’, Australian Dictionary of Biography,
Vol 2, 1788-1850, I-Z, p 264
IS. Tut FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL History
and perhaps dissect it, he w
What had happened.
The carronade fired ‘to intimidate
often used for ceremonial purposes to fire a salute to welcome -
farewell important visitors and naval vessels, or on public celebration.
such as the Queen’s birthday or victory over the French, *
pose was the most likely reason the carronade w
Cove, since it was not a weapon normally used by English field artil-
lery.? Despite William Wentworth’s assertion in 1819 that it fired
grape and canister shot, none of the origin
what it discharged. It might have fired ammunition but it was more
likely to have been loaded with one of the blanks regularly used for
ceremony. The sound of a blank being fired would have dispersed the
natives just as well.
There is one part of Moore’s report that rings very true. This is his
statement that when the Aborigines saw his servant with some kan-
garoos, they took one from him. As Chapter Two will demonstrate,
all the subsequent incidents of violent conflict with Aborigines up to
1808 occurred when settlers took native game, especially kangaroos.
As these later incidents revealed, the Aborigines clearly regarded na-
tive game as their sole prerogative. So it is highly plausible that this
action incensed them in May 1804 just as it did in the following
years. Hence, Moore's report is not only consistent with that of
Mountgarrett but also with later incidents of conflict. This is another
reason to regard it as credible. On the other hand, Mountgarrett’s
claim that the Aborigines must have planned an attack, because of the
numbers they had assembled, seems dubious. If the natives were on a
large-scale kangaroo hunt, then this would explain the size of their
assembly, the fact that women and children were among them, and
their resentment about the British taking their game. ——
Rev Knopwood did not take up Mountgarrett's invitation to come
up to Risdon Cove the following day. Neither he nor surgeon Bow-
den could get a boat. He did not cross the river until seven days later.
During that visit he christened the orphaned native boy, as Mount-
garett had requested, and then took a walk to see where the natives
as not acting 45 SOmconc trying to hid.
them’ was a small ship's canne,
’ This pur-
as still kept at Risdon
al documents tell exactly
*” Knopwood, Diary, records many ceremonial volleys, such as the regular
artillery firings in honour of the Queen and Lieutenant-Governor on 18 or
19 January 1805, 1806, 1807 and 1808. In October 1814, to celebrate the
taking of Paris, a royal salute of twenty-one guns was fired from the battery
at Government House and guns were fired from all quarters of Hobart
Town: Lloyd Robson, A History of Tasmania, Vol 1, Oxford U
Press, Melbourne, 1983, p 78.
78 Donald Featherstone, We
Blandford Press, Poole, 197
niversity
apons and Equipment of
the Victorian Soldier,
8, Chapter 8 "Artillery"
o ——P- —— MM
ONES Fri KILLING FIELDS AT RISDON COVI 19
had attacked the camp and settlers,” Knopwood was a terse but keen
observer who liked to note down in his diary morbid events such as
murders, hangings and burials. However, he recorded nothing of this
kind on his visit to Risdon Cove. If there had really been a large
number of Aborigines killed at the time, they would have been bur-
ied or cremated on the spot and Knopwood would almost certainly
have inspected the site on his walk. He would also have spoken to
somebody about a mass grave or mass cremation, which would have
been a remarkable occurrence in the colony at the time. In this case,
the complete absence from his diary of any such detail is telling.
On 15 May, when he wrote his next despatch to Governor King in
Sydney, Lieutenant-Governor Collins sent him a copy of Moore’s
report. Collins himself accepted that three Aborigines had been killed
in the affray. He also told King he had ordered the orphaned native
boy to be returned to his own people, rather than sent to England as
Mountgarrett had proposed. If they never saw the child again, the
Aborigines would ‘imagine we had destroyed it?
It was not until 1830 that the death toll that is now routinely cited
by historians was first proposed. This occurred at Archdeacon
Broughton's committee of inquiry into Aboriginal violence. The
committee took a wide range of verbal and written evidence. One
witness was identified as Mr Kelly, who said he had arrived in the
colony in 1804. He said ‘forty or fifty’ natives were killed in the inci-
dent. However, he admitted that he had not been at Risdon Cove
himself at the time. He also said three Aborigines were killed when
they attacked the colonists at Hobart Town near the hospital.’
Another witness, a former convict named Edward White, told the
committee that in May 1804 he was out ‘hoeing new ground near a
creek’ that formed the boundary of the Risdon Cove settlement. On
the morning in question, he had actually seen three hundred Aborigi-
nes coming down the valley from the east, in a circular formation,
with kangaroos hemmed in between them. They were a hunting
party of men, women and children, who were astonished to see him:
‘they looked at me with all their eyes’. He thought that before they
came to Risdon Cove they did not know there was a white man in
the country. Even though he told the committee he did not know
how many Aborigines were killed, he nonetheless said ‘there were a
great many of the Natives slaughtered and wounded’. White added
2 Knopwood, Diary, 11 and 12 May, pp 512
39 Collins to King, 15 May 1804, Historical Records of Australia, IIL, I, p 238
31 Minutes of evidence taken before the Committee for the Affairs of the
Aborigines, Mr Kelly, 10 March 1830, British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies,
Australia, 4, p 223
W Mu FAMUCATION OF ADORIGINAI History
that ‘some of their bones wet
Dr Mountgarrete’, X
There were other ve
re sent in two casks to Port Jackson by
rsions about what happened at Risdon Coye
that were told during the colonial period. In 1820, the naval office;
Charles Jettreys published a guide for prospective settlers to Van
Diemen's Land in which he included an account of the early history
of the colony. He wrote that in 1804, when the natives approached
the soldiers’ camp, they were singing. Each of these ‘innocent and
Well-disposed creatures’ held a green bough, ‘a well-known emblem
of peace in all Savage countries’. However, ‘their tokens of friendship
Were returned by a heavy firing of musquetry from the military
detachments which was drawn up for the purpose’.*’ His image of the
green boughs was so vivid that later settlers, such as the surgeon James
Scott, repeated it to the Aborigines Committee in 1830.**
In James Bonwick’s nineteenth-century history of the Black War,
The Last of the Tasmanians, he said one of his informants, ‘a settler of
1804’, told him that when Lieutenant Moore ordered his troops to
fire on the natives, he was drunk. Moore ‘saw double that morning
from an over-dose of rations rum’. The reputation Moore and his
102nd Regiment had for hard drinking led some people, Bonwick
wrote, to think the shooting occurred during ‘a half-drunken spree,
and that the firing arose from a brutal desire to see the Niggers run’
This last story has made its way into much of the twentieth-century
literature on early Tasmania. In his widely-acclaimed history of Tas-
mania, Lloyd Robson repeats Bonwick’s account without questioning
it, as does the pre-historian Rhys Jones, in both his PhD thesis and his
documentary film The Last Tasmanian. Journalists invariably quote
the story for its dramatic effect. Among them have been the
Melbourne journalist Clive Turnbull, in his book Black War, the
Guardian journalist Mark Cocker, in his book on Western imperial
brutality, the Sydney Morning Herald journalist Bruce Elder, in his
popular history of the massacres of Aborigines, and the Australian ex-
? Minutes of evidence, Edward White, 16 March 1830, British Parliamentary
Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 225
? Lieutenant Charles Jeffreys R.N., Van Diemen’s Land. Geographical and
Descriptive Delineations of the Island of Van Diemen’s Land, J. M. Richardson,
Cornhill, London, 1820, pp 114-5
34 Scott to Aborigines Committee, 10 March 1830, AOT CSO 1/323/7578,
316
5 James Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians: Or the Black War of Van
Diemen's Land, Sampson Low, Son and Marston, London, 1870, p35
** Robson, A History of Tasmania, Vol I, p 46; Rhys Jones, Roc
the Problem of the Tasmanians, PhD thesis, University of Syd
8; The Last Tasmanian, script by Rhys Jones and Tom Haydo
ky Cape and
ney, 1971, p
n
Oni; THE KILLING FIELDS AT RISDON COVE 21
patriate historian Ben Kiernan, writing in the Bangkok Post in 2000."
The descendants of the Aborigines also tell the same story, although
they claim that it was not just Lieutenant Moore but most of the
whites at the settlement who ‘appeared to be drunk’.
However, none of the later accounts of what happened at Risdon
Cove deserve to replace the original versions given by Mountgarrett,
Moore, Knopwood and Collins. The evidence to the 1830 commit-
tee might seem to us at this distance to be contiguous enough, but it
was given twenty-six years after the event. Much of it was shown at
the time to be unreliable. Even though the committee's report digni-
fied the evidence of the witness Kelly by reporting the numbers killed
*have been estimated as high as 50', it should have been more cir-
cumspect in repeating this figure. This witness was Captain James
Kelly, the sealer and harbour pilot, who would have been only
twelve years old in May 1804.” Kelly admitted he was not at Risdon
Cove at the time and could not have seen what occurred. Moreover,
the committee knew Kelly was not a reliable witness and was prone
to recounting rumours. His story about the killing of Aborigines near
the hospital at Hobart Town was a matter on which other witnesses
were questioned. Kelly swore they were fired on with grape shot and
three natives were killed. However, Rev Knopwood said this par-
ticular story originated some years after the settlement was formed
when excavations on Hospital Hill uncovered some skeletons and
some grape shot. "The shot were the remains of stores brought from
Port Philip, Knopwood said, ‘and the bones those of persons who
arrived from India, died, and were buried there.’ Two other wit-
nesses, Robert Evans and William Stocker, both rejected Kelly's story
about the Hobart Hospital killings."
3 Clive Turnbull, Blace War: The Extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines,
(1948), Sun Books, Melbourne, 1974, p 34; Cocker, Rivers of Blood, Rivers of
Gold, p 125; Bruce Elder, Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatment of
Aboriginal Australians since 1788, New Holland Publishers, Sydney, 1998
edn., p 32; Ben Kiernan, ‘Australia’s Aboriginal genocides’, Bangkok Post, 10
September 2000, Perspective p 2
38 Lehman, ‘Our Story of Risdon Cove’, p 44
39 E. R. Pretyman, ‘James Kelly’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol 2, I—
Z, pp 36-7. Although the witness was only identified in the minutes as ‘Mr
Kelly’, Brian Plomley agrees he was James Kelly: N. J. B. Plomley, The
Tasmanian Tribes and Cicatrices as Tribal Indicators among the Tasmanian
Aborigines, Occasional Paper 5, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery,
Launceston, 1992, p 13
40 Minutes of evidence, Rev Robert Knopwood, W. T. Stocker, 11 March
1830, Robert Evans, 16 March 1830, British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies,
Australia, 4, p 53
5
Vut FABRICATION OI ABORIGINAL HISTORY
Edward White had more credibility since
Cove side of the Derwent at the time and he first saw the Abor;
coming towards the settlement. However, his claim that *
many’ natives were killed and wounded has to be read in the conteys
of his other evidence. He was a convict assigned to work for the free
settler Richard Clark, whose five-acre farm was about a quarter of ,
mile from the soldier’s camp. If, as White said, he was near the creek.
ìt is quite plausible that he would have seen the Aborigines come ;
from the valley to the east. However, he was not in a position to see
what subsequently happened, since most of the settlement lay on 4
hill well above the creek and, from it, was out of sight." White,
testimony as an eyewitness — albeit one recalling what he saw
twenty-six years earlier — related to the action at the hut of the other
free settler, William Birt, which was next to Clark’s property. White
said the Aborigines came close to Clark's house but did not go near
Birt (whose name was mistakenly transcribed as Burke in the minutes
of the 1830 committee”): ‘the Natives were never within half a
quarter of a mile of Burke’s house ... they were not on Burke s side
of the creek; never heard that any of them went to Burke’s house’.
This comment shows White’s awareness of events was not good
because, as shown by Lieutenant Bowen’s September Mea Ss
map of the settlement reproduced here, the huts of Birt an zd
were both on the same side of the creek as the soldiers’ camp. e
Aborigines definitely crossed the creek to enter the camp. a part of
the settlement was on the other side of the creek. So if W e Was
unaware the Aborigines crossed the creek, he was spé s 2 2
that happened. Since he was down at the creek, Hn of the ne
sight, this was understandable. This was where he remaine A e
whole time. After he saw the Aborigines, he reported their arriv E
some nearby soldiers and ‘then went back to my work'. diei he
contradicted all the other evidence about the course of events, which
agreed that Birt and his wife were either assaulted or threatened. For
this reason, the 1830 committee discounted White's evidence. ‘It
appears unquestionable,’ the final report noted, ‘that a person named
Burke, whose habitation was considerably advanced beyond the rest,
was driven from it by the Natives, whose number was estimated at
upwards of 500, and much violence was threatened by them towards
he was on the p isde;
ries
a Beat
n
*! Bowen to King, 18 October 1803, Historical Records of Australia, III, I, p
199; plus my personal inspections of the site in 2001 and 2002.
? Both William Aaron Birt and William Richard Clark are mentioned in
several documents about the Risdon Cove settlement in Historical Records of
Australia, III, I. See index to that volume. There was a soldier named Burke
but no settler named Burke or Bourke at Risdon Cove in 1804.
ONE: THE KILLING FIbLDS AT RISDON Covi
ve
"Ye li m : », y 3
Sy KIN Mil iy À 4 Ñ
^ Moe *
E a
_—
7
uL
à k D»
Fa > í LA
Lieutenant John Bowen's 1803 sketch map of the 173-acre settlement at Risdon
Cove. In May 1804, the Aborigines came towards the settlement from the ‘fine
valley' to the east (top of map). Source: Archives Office of Tasmania CO
201/26
25
24. Tut FABRICATION Ol ABORIGINAL HISTORY
this man and his wife and dwelling.”
According to Licutenant Moore’s original report,
only two soldier:
Were sent to assist Birt and his wife.
Two soldiers were not equipped
— armed as they were with only cighteenth century, single shoe
muskets — to shoot ‘a great many’ natives. The two deaths attributed
to them by Moore were the most they probably could have managed.
They would have been able to get off only two shots before the
natives ran away, out of range. In other words, White’s claim about 4
large number of Aboriginal casualties appears, like that of Kelly, to
derive more from the common gossip of 1830 than from any direct
observation of what actually happened in 1804.
White’s claim about the two casks of bones sent by ship to Sydney
by Mountgarrett is in the same category. As a convict working as an
assigned servant on a farm, he was not in a position to have any direct
knowledge of what Mountgarrett, a surgeon and member of the small
colonial elite, had done in a matter of this kind. No one else at the
time mentioned anything about bones being sent to Sydney. There
was no word from Mountgarrett himself to suggest he did this, nor
any record in his surviving correspondence of his having done so.
So, again, the story is no more than a rumour told twenty six years
after the event, for which there was no contemporary corroboration.
The story about the fate of the bones told by the modern descen-
dants of the Aborigines is even less plausible. There yano mention
in any of the early colonial evidence of bones being packed in lime .
In fact, the settlement did not have any quantity of lime at its dis-
posal. When lime was needed for mortar, the convicts were sent out
to collect oyster shells and burn them.“ l
The claims in Charles Jeffreys's book are just as unbelievable. He
was not at Risdon Cove in 1804. He did not arrive in the colony
until 1814 so everything he wrote about it was hearsay.“ His claim
that each native carried a green bough was contradicted by all the
eyewitnesses, including Edward White. They agreed the Aborigines
carried either spears or waddies, that is, the clubs they used on kan-
garoo hunts. Jeffreys's assertion that the natives were fired on by a
military detachment ‘drawn up for the purpose’ derives from literary
? Report of the Aborigines Committee, 19 March 1830, British
Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 209
^ Archives Office of Tasmania (hereafter AOT), correspondence file under
Mountgarrett; Mitchell Library (hereafter ML), MS cat. under J.
Mountgarret
^ Collins to Hobart, 31 July 1804, Historical Record;
“© E. Flinn, ‘Charles Jeffreys’, Australian Dictionary
1850, I-Z, p 15
Parliamentary
of Australia, III, I, p 247
of Biography, Vol 2, 1788—
PF
Oni Vr KILUNG FIELDS AT RISDON COVE 25
licence rather than contemporary evidence. The Aborigines had not
been anticipated before they appeared and there were no troops
drawn up, waiting for them to arrive,
James Bonwick's allegation that Lieutenant Moore was drunk and
wanted to ‘see the Niggers run’ is the least credible of all. No one
mentioned this story at the time or even in evidence to the 1830
committee. It first surfaced in Bonwick's book in 1870, that is, sixty
six years after the event. Bonwick said his informant was ‘a settler of
1804, whom he does not name. However, there were only four
possible witnesses to the event who fitted the description of ‘settler’
and, by the time Bonwick arrived in Hobart from England in 1841,
none of them remained in the colony to inform him. According to
the records of the first settlement, Risdon Cove in 1803 and 1804
was populated by soldiers, convicts and four other people. The last
were the only ones who could be defined as settlers. They were: the
surgeon Jacob Mountgarrett, the storekeeper Thomas Wilson, plus
the two free settlers, William Birt and Richard (William) Clark."
Mountgarrett died in 1828, Wilson returned to Sydney in November
1803 and Birt returned to Sydney in July 1804. Clark was later
appointed a superintendent of convicts at Hobart but after his
discharge from this position in 1807 he dropped out of the historical
record. ? He does not appear in Brian Plomley’s listing of 550 officers,
settlers and convicts in Van Diemen’s Land in 1831. In other words,
when Bonwick arrived in 1841, there was no ‘settler of 1804’ still in
the colony who could have observed Lieutenant Moore's condition
or heard him speak on 3 May. The story that he was drunk and the
words he purportedly used are plainly Bonwick's inventions. Bruce
Elder's more recent description of Lieutenant Moore's condition —
‘hung over, depressed and antagonistic, he saw the approaching group
47 Return of first settlers, stock and provisions, 31 August 1803, Historical
Records of Australia, III, 1, pp 196-7
48 Mead, Jacob Mountgarrett’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol 2, I-Z,
1788-1850, p 264; Historical Records of Australia, II, I, pp 206, 249, 251
*? Historical Records of Australia, III, I, pp 248, 252, 262, 269, 283, 342, 558.
Clark was recorded as both Richard Clark and William Clark. There was a
William Clark recorded as overseer of blacksmiths in 1820 but he was a free
settler who arrived in 1818: Historical Records of Australia UI, III, p 600,
Knopwood, Diary, p 683 n 31a. A third William Clark, a retired captain of
the 6th Regiment of Foot, arrived in the colony in 1824 from the Cape of
Good Hope: Historical Records of Australia, III, V, p 651
5° Brian Plomley, “List of officials, settlers, convicts and others, with
biographical notes', Appendix 8, Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and
Papers of George Augustus Robinson 1929-1834, Tasmanian Historical
Research Association, Hobart, 1966, pp 1021—47
*
* MP uus e
26 Ta FABRICATION OF AIORIGINAI HISTORY
through bloodshot eyes’!
— is even more inventive than Bonwici
imin: ENS ` 1 Ti K
orginal fiction, Despite its repetition by Lloyd Robson M
Cocke oa Tha : ’ ark
Cocker, Clive Turnbull, Rhys Jones, Greg Lehman and Ben Kietna
this fabricated tale should never have been accepted as legitimat,
historical evidence. It reveals more about the motives of those ,
recycle it than it does about Lieutenant Moore.
Overall, the we
tation about the
who
ight of the evidence does not support the interpre-
Risdon Cove conflict now current in history books
and the news media. It was not a slaughter of 'up to fifty’ innocent
men, women and children. It was a defensive action by the colonists
in which three Aborigines were shot dead and at least one, though
possibly more, wounded. The first suggestions that more than this
were killed were not made until decades later by people who were
not there at the time and, in most cases, were not even in the colony,
Moreover, it was an incident in which neither party could be easily
blamed. The Aborigines were on a kangaroo hunt and were incensed
to see some of their game expropriated by these strange new white
people. The colonists mistook the natives’ purposes and believed they
were under attack. The troops had no intention beforehand to kill
any of them. The commander in charge was concerned to justify his
actions by the threat to his own people. He did not believe he could
shoot Aborigines without good justification. The reaction by the
colonial authorities, both at the time and for decades afterwards,
ranged from regret to repugnance. Indeed, the fact that the colonists
were so ready to blame their own side was telling. No one took the
event lightly and no one urged that shooting Aborigines was an
acceptable thing to do. To call the incident a *massacre' is to beat it
up beyond credibility. To fabricate a death toll of 'close to a
hundred', as descendants of the Tasmanian Aborigines have done, is
to abandon any semblance of veracity in order to milk the event for
maximum political gain.
THE ORTHODOX INTERPRETATION OF TASMANIAN HISTOR Y
The following chapters are a critical examination of the prevailing
historical orthodoxy about racial conflict in Van Diemen's Land.
What I call the ‘orthodox’ interpretation of these events is actually
very old. The fate of the Tasmanian Aborigines has attracted a num-
ber of authors over the past 170 years. Those who have used the issue
to condemn the British colonists have included Henry Melville in
The History of Van Diemen's Land (1835), James Bonwick in The Last
of the Tasmanians (1870), Clive Turnbull in Black War (1948), and
David Davies in The Last of the Tasmanians (1975).
?' Elder, Blood on the Wattle, p 32
ONE THE KILLING FIELDS AT RIDON COVE 27
Although some of these works are discussed in the chapters that
llow, my main target is the orthodoxy that has been produced by
academic historians over the last thirty ycars. It is the academics who
have taken up the old story and given it a new scholarly authority
who have been the most influential. As noted earlier, the principal
author of this period has been Lyndall Ryan, whose book The Abo-
riginal Tasmanians was published in 1981, with a second, revised edi-
tion in 1996. The first volume of Lloyd Robson’s A History of Tasma-
nia, published in 1983, dealt extensively with race relations from
within much the same genre. Henry Reynolds published a widely
discussed book about Tasmanian Aborigines, Fate of a Free People, in
1995. He followed it in 2001 with a book about genocide against the
Aborigines, An Indelible Stain?, in which two of the ten chapters were
devoted to Tasmania.
The most scholarly and reliable of the orthodox historians is Brian
Plomley, the editor of the journals of George Augustus Robinson,
which he published as Friendly Mission (1966) and Weep in Silence
(1987). Plomley, who continued to publish monographs on the
Tasmanian Aborigines until his death in 1994, is sometimes dismissed
today by academics like Lyndall Ryan as insufficiently sympathetic to
current Aboriginal political objectives? However, Plomley saw
himself working within the same tradition as Melville, Bonwick and
Turnbull? and, as subsequent chapters will show, several of his
arguments are identical to those of Ryan. One of Plomley's protégés
is Sharon Morgan, whose 1992 book, Land Settlement in Early
Tasmania, is the most overtly moralistic work of the orthodox
school, in that it expresses unreserved disdain for the British coloniz-
ers and unqualified praise for the indigenous inhabitants. Cassandra
Pybus's 1991 history, Community of Thieves, which intertwines the
story of her own Tasmanian colonial family with that of Robinson’s
‘Friendly Mission’, runs a close second to Morgan. The pre-historian
and archaeologist Rhys Jones is also a member of the school, not only
for his writings about Aboriginal society in the pre-contact period,
but especially for the 1978 documentary film, The Last Tasmanian,
whose script Jones co-wrote with the producer-director Tom Hay-
don. This film draws its evidence from the written histories and fash-
ions its drama almost exclusively from the claims of the orthodox
school. There are several other authors sharing all or part of the same
52 Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, 2nd edition, pp xxiv-xxv. See also my
Epilogue, pp 420, 433
55 Plomley, Friendly Mission, p 37 n 33
5+ Morgan was employed by Plomley to write this book on a commission
from the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston. See her
Acknowledgments, p x
28 THE FABRICATION Ol ABORIGINAL HISTORY
interpretation who have published in journal articles, anthologies atid
academic theses, A number of them are discussed throughout tha
following chapters as well,
What these works have in common is
an intellectual mindset. cy
framework that has largely determined the questions they have asked
the research they have done and how they have interpreted their evi
dence. To argue this is not to say they agree on every point — far
from it, as shown in the chapters that follow. Nor is it to allege
conspiracy, even though many of the academics now in the field ac-
knowledge they are friends.” There is nothing unusual about the
existence of an outlook of this kind. It means people bring to their
historical research the same set of assumptions about what they expect
to find, and go looking for evidence that fits these assumptions, His-
toriography has long been full of examples of authors working within
such interpretive frameworks or schools, often very productively.
While the existence of a particular interpretation is not uncom-
mon, what makes the Tasmanian orthodoxy more unusual than most
is that it has overt political objectives. Rather than adopt the tradi-
tional stance of the academic historian and profess at least a modicum
of detachment from their subject, Reynolds, Ryan, Pybus and several
others quite openly state that their objectives are to serve the pis
of the descendants of the Tasmanian Aborigines. In particular, t ey
seek to justify ‘land rights’ and the transfer of large tracts of ons to
the descendants. This is not only a highly politicized approach E
history but is also unusual in the success it has won, even in politica
circles that once resisted it. As noted above, the conservative Premier
of Tasmania, Ray Groom, made the first gestures in this direction
with a series of land grants in 1995. The Labor governments of Jim
Bacon and Paul Lennon made much more extensive land grants in
2001 and 2005. The orthodoxy has had this success because people
have accepted its account of Tasmanian history as largely true. "Tas-
mania committed acts of great evil against its first settlers,’ the Hobart
Mercury wrote in 1992. ‘It has an obligation to the descendants of
those Aborigines to offer them more than platitudes.” B
The chapters that follow examine whether such an explicitly politi-
cal and unambiguously moral interpretation of Tasmanian history
really does follow from the evidence.
A
55 [n the second edition of Aboriginal Tasmanians, Lyndall Ryan thanks He
Reynolds for lending her his Hobart house (p xvi). In Fate of a Free People,
Reynolds acknowledges the invaluable ideas and information he has received
from both Ryan and Pybus (p ix). In Community of Thieves, Pybus got
Reynolds to write the Foreword and she offers special thanks to ‘my friend?
Lyndall Ryan (pp xi, xiv).
5° Mercury, Hobart, 2 September 1992, ps
CHAPTER TWO
The Black Legend in Van Diemen's Land
1804—1831
TS colonization of Van Diemen’s Land took place early in the
rise of what is now known among historians as the ‘second’
British Empire. The first empire had begun in the Americas in the
late sixteenth century. The second empire began in the late eight-
eenth century when the British wrested control of India. The des-
patch of the First Fleet to Botany Bay was part of the decision made
in the wake of the British defeat in the American War of Independ-
ence to turn imperial attention towards Asia. Nonetheless, the two
hundred years of American experience was not shed quickly. When
they first arrived on Australian shores, the American legacy continued
to dominate the thoughts of the colonial administrators. To under-
stand the mentality of those in authority in Van Diemen’s Land we
need to look at the intellectual milieu they inhabited. Today this is
not easy because so many historians take a simplistic, ideological atti-
tude towards European imperialism and fail to recognize distinctions
that the historical actors of the day took for granted.'
! The recently published five volumes of the Oxford History of the British
Empire have gone a long way towards dispelling many of the myths on
which most current thinking has been based: The Oxford History of the British
Empire, editor-in-chief Wm. Roger Louis, Oxford University Press, Oxford
and New York, Vols I-II, 1998, Vols II-V, 1999. The concept of the first
and second British Empires derives from this series. For an examination and
review, see Keith Windschuttle, ‘Rewriting the history of the British
Empire’, New Criterion, May 2000
W Tw FABRICATION Ot AUORIGINAL History
Some historians o
f imperialism still like
British version rese
bled the Spanish,
Empire with the brutal reputatic
they argue, were rationalized b
of the New World to the Chri
form of persuasion: conc
Seventeenth centurie
deed. Its initial inten
to show how Closely the
thereby tainting the
n of the conquistadores, 1
y the objective to conver
stian faith
titish
joth empire,
t the heather,
and both employed the Same
Juest. It is true that in the sixteenth and e
s Britain did imitate Spain in both word
tions in Virginia were to co
Mexico and Peru. In his Pamphlet Jor the Virginia Enterprise, Richard
Hakluyt in 1585 defined the objectives of the new colony as ‘to plant
Christian religion, to traffic, to conquer'.? The royal charters of the
Virginia Company in 1606 authorized the invasion of any legitimate
ruler's territory and the seizure of its property. The Governor of the
Roanoke colony of Virginia in 1608, John Smith, admired both the
‘unparalleled virtues’ and the ‘mountains of wealth of the Spanish
imperialist adventure.
However, as the seventeenth century unfolded, the two powers
moved far apart in both imperialist theory and practice. While Spain
retained its original rationale and objectives, the British colonies in
America became sites of economic development, commercial enter-
prise, trade and investment. The economic historians P. J. Cain and
A. G. Hopkins have argued that the foundations of the later British
Empire were laid in the financial revolution that followed the Glori-
ous Revolution of 1688. This led to the emergence of a class af gen-
tlemanly capitalists’ or ‘merchant bankers and merchant princes’ cen-
tred on the financial houses of the City of London. Gentlemanly
capitalism, Cain and Hopkins argue, had close ties to the government
and the military and helped to promote the expansionist forces ar
British investment, commerce and migration throughout the world.
In contrast, Spanish America remained largely a site of imperial
expropriation. Until the final demise of the Spanish empire in the
Americas in the 1830s, the extraction. of precious metals had
remained the crown's principal economic concern. Despite reforms in
the 1770s and 1780s designed to implement diversification and allow
limited free trade, Spain continued to look to the importation of gold
athy
and
py the conquest of
? Richard Hakluyt, The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard
Hakluyts, ed. E. G. R. Taylor, Vol I, Hakluyt Society, London, 1935, p 332
? First Charter of Virginia, 10 April 1606, in Documents of American History,
ed. Henry Steele Commager, 8th edn, Appleton-Century- Crofts, New
York, 1968, pp 8-10; Smith quoted in Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Settling
with the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580.
1640, Rowman and Littlefield, Totowa, 1980, p 166
^ P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imp
erialism: Innovation and Expansion
1688-1914, Longman, London, 1993
ail)
PWO: THE BLACK LEGEND IN VAN Dir MEN'S LAND 31
and silver from its South American mines
i : as its ultimate and only fully
reliable source of wealth,
i ""Dhe radical divergence of the economies of
the two colonial empires derived from, and in turn fed into, their
equally different legal and religious foundations. i
The legal status of the American colonies had never been a source
of anxiety to the Spanish crown. Their occupation had been sanc-
tioned by the famous papal bull of 1493, Inter Caetera, which divided
the New World between Spain and Portugal. Miereover: in Mexico
and Peru, they had taken control of territories previously occupied by
legitimate rulers. Hence, the Spanish settlers in America called them-
selves conquerors, conquistadores. In his comparative study of the
ideology of the three main European empires, Anthony Pagden
argues the Spanish crown was as much concerned with its potential
rights over the American Indians themselves as it was with their prop-
erty. The grants made by the crown to settlers in Spanish America
were known as encomiendas, feudal titles to labour.ó This was in
marked contrast to the British concern with commercial rights in
property, especially land. British culture legitimated the ownership of
things, not people. Another contrast, Pagden says, was that the British
regarded conquest as both indefensible in theory and unsustainable in
practice. Since 1066, British political culture had been committed to
the ‘continuity theory’ of constitutional law in which the legal and
political institutions of the conquered were deemed to survive a con-
quest. So, even after colonization, indigenous peoples would have
retained all their laws and customs until they voluntarily surrendered
them.’ ‘Conquest,’ John Locke wrote on the eve of the revolution of
1688, ‘is as far from setting up any government, as demolishing an
House is from building a new one in the place.’
These arguments were not merely abstract salves for the con-
sciences of British colonists. They had profound practical implica-
tions, especially in determining their attitude to indigenous peoples.
In America it meant they initially chose to settle on vacant land with
the consent and, usually, the co-operation, of the local native popula-
tion. The seal of the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1629 depicted an
5 David Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots and
the Liberal State, 1492—1867, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991;
David Brading, Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763—1810,
Cambridge University Press, London, 1971
* Anthony Pagden, Lords of all the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain
and France, 1500-1800, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1995, p 91
7 Pagden, Lords of all the World, p 77
8 John Locke, ‘Of Conquest’, Second Treatise of Government, paragraph 175 in
Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett, Mentor, New York, 1965, p
431
32 THE FADIRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
Indian saying: 'Come over and Help Us’.” When Willi:
organized his colony of Pennsylvania in 1681 he drew zi EN
concessions and conditions aimed primarily at securin
tions he already had with the local Indians.”
regarded their settlements as peaceful exercises, mutually beneficial ,,
both colonist and native. Rather than a mission to coerce the eda.
into accepting their religion, the early British objectives towards the
indigenous people were primarily to trade useful products mom
demonstrate by example the benefits of the civil and polite customs of
Europe.
UP à charter ,,
g the good rel,
Hence the Britit
This is not to say that the British were indifferent to spreading their
religion. As Chapters Six and Nine will discuss in more detail, by the
time the first Australian colonies were established in the late eight-
eenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Evangelical revival within
the Church of England was being felt politically both at home, in
movements to uplift the poor, and abroad, in the campaign to end
the slave trade and to bring the gospel to the peoples of the Pacific.
All of this, however, was a stark contrast in British minds to what
they believed were the designs of Spain.
Ever since the Spanish Armada of 1588, English Protestants had
been nourished on a steady diet of anti-Spanish stories designed to
show that the adherents of the Roman Catholic Church were capable
of any cruelty. What became known as the ‘Black Legend’ began
with stories about Catholic atrocities perpetrated on the Dutch Prot-
estants during their revolt against the Spanish crown. The legend
became firmly entrenched when stories emerged about the treatment
of the natives in the Spanish colonies of the Americas. The most dra-
matic testimony came from a book by the Spanish priest Bartolomé
de Las Casas. Written in 1542, Las Casas’s A Short Account of the
Destruction of the Indies became a frequent point of referral for the offi-
cials of the British Empire until the late nineteenth century.
Before he entered the Dominican order, Las Casas had been the
prosperous master of Indians on Hispaniola and Cuba. He underwent
a religious conversion and subsequently dedicated his life to the abo-
lition of the basic organisation of Spanish colonial rule, the
encomienda, an institution he regarded as worse than slavery. His
famous book was written to persuade the Spanish monarchy of the
exploitation and atrocities being committed in its name in the Car-
ibbean and on the Spanish Main. It was a collection of horror stories
of natives being killed, maimed, raped and tortured, of bloodthirsty
? Pagden, Lords of all the World, p 88
10 Concessions to the Province of Pennsyl
vania, 11 July 1681
American History, ed. Commager, pp 35-6 y p Plaihenis of
Pwo: THE BLACK LEGEND IN VAN DIEMEN'S LAND 33
massacres of whole tribes, and of a total death toll of twelve to fifteen
million. people." The method Las Casas adopted in his account of
each of the Spanish settlements was to contrast the peace and happi-
ness of the idyllic Indian society before conquest with the unspeak-
able atrocities they suffered after the Spanish arrived. ‘The indigenous
peoples of the region,’ he wrote, ‘are naturally so gentle, so peace-
loving, so humble and so docile.’ He said: ‘It would constitute a
criminal neglect of my duty to remain silent about the enormous loss
of life as well as the infinite number of human souls dispatched to
Hell in the course of such “conquests” .!?
Las Casas's book became widely known in England after 1583 and
confirmed everything the Black Legend predicted about Spanish rule
in the Americas. Spain had wilfully destroyed the blameless American
Indian society, which before 1492 had been an arcadian paradise. In
their lust for gold, the Catholic Spaniards had taken more lives in
America than they had subjects in Europe. Among Protestant opinion
in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, Spanish colonialism
gained a reputation for sadistic cruelty matched only by the Turks,
with whom they were commonly identified as enemies of enlight-
ened values. Increasingly, the British came to regard themselves not
only as the Indians’ friends but also their saviours from Spanish tyr-
anny. The English had once assisted the liberation of Spain's Protes-
tant subjects in the Netherlands, they rationalized, so now they might
save their even more oppressed subjects in America from a similar
fate.?
Ironically, however, the British also adopted part of the Spanish
mindset itself in the form of Las Casas’s own opinions. The ideas that
inspired the Spanish priest’s critique — that all men ‘are our brothers,
and Christ gave his life for them’, and that ‘all the races of humankind
are one’ — originated in Spanish Catholicism. They came out of the
upheaval within Spanish Dominican philosophy in the early sixteenth
century as a direct result of the encounter with the New World."*
They were the precursor to largely identical sentiments adopted by
the British Evangelical revival in the late eighteenth century. Hence,
in both their overt anti-Catholicism and their reproduction of a
Catholic critique, the British used the treatment of the American
Indians to fuel the ongoing propaganda war against Spain at home
!! Bartolomé de Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, ed.
Anthony Pagden, Penguin Books, London 1992, p 12
12 Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, p 6
'3 Pagden, Lords of all the World, p 87
^ John M. Headley, “The Universalizing Principle and Process: On the
West’s Intrinsic Commitment to a Global Context’, Journal of World History,
13/2 (2002):291-321
M4 Tae FABRICATION Ol AWORIGINAL HISTORY
and to provide a moral sanction to their imperial adventures abr,
They also generated. the widespread belief within Engl
brand of colonialism was mutually beneficial to both set
and that the burgeoning British Empire was cre
social order in the New World.
rad
and that the.
tler and Native
ating a more virtue,
LAS CASAS IN VAN DIEMEN’S LAND
The colonies in Australia were established because of their strategic
location in the Asia-Pacific region but initially functioned as penal
settlements. They were repositories of criminals from Britain, most of
whom had committed what were regarded at the time as serious felo-
nies. Transportation was an alternative to capital punishment. Con-
victs were sentenced for periods of seven or fourteen years transpor-
tation. The punishment was primarily that of exile. Once in the col-
ony, prisoners were required to work out the unexpired term of their
sentences. They were not otherwise punished by being confined or
shackled unless they committed further offences in the colony itself,
in which case they received secondary punishment ranging from flog-
ging to imprisonment or execution. In other words, most convicts
lived in the colony with a status similar to that of indentured labour-
ers, working either on government projects such as roads and build-
ings, or as assigned servants to farmers. .
Because most convicts were criminals who were at large in the
community, the governors of the penal colonies acknowledged the
potential for conflict between their lower orders and the natives. In
the first three decades of the colonization of Van Diemen’s Land, the
governors made a number of statements blaming both convicts and
ex-convicts, especially those employed as stockmen and sealers on the
outskirts of white settlement, for the deterioration in relations with
the Aborigines. In April 1830, Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur
held them largely responsible for the violence then sweeping the
island:
That the lawless convicts who have, from time to time, absconded,
together with the distant stock-keepers in the interior, and the sealers
employed in remote parts of the coast, have, from the earliest period,
acted with great inhumanity towards the black Natives, particularly in
seizing their women, there can be no doubt, and these outrages have, it is
evident, first excited, what they were naturally calculated to Produce in
the minds of savages, the strongest feelings of hatred and revenge. !5
There were also free settlers who took a s
imilar view. In Van Die-
men's Land, as Henry Reynolds has docu
mented in Fate of a Free
55 Arthur to Murray,
15 April 1830, British Parliamentary Pa ers, Coloni
Australia, 4, p 187 Ty F'apers, Colonies,
Pwo Pri BLACK LEGEND IN VAN DIbMEN'S LAND 35
People. a number of the colonists in the 1820s and 1820s were dis-
curbed about the. demise of the Aborigines and sympathized with
their plight. They included the landowner Richard Dry, the police
constable Gilbert Robertson, the newspaper editor Henry Melville,
the ‘conciliator’ George Augustus Robinson, the colonist R. M.
Ayrton, the historian John West, plus the Newspaper correspondents
‘Zeno’, 'A Border Settler’ and ‘J. E."^ They blamed those on their
own side for the conflict. They took the principles of the virtuous
social order on which they felt English colonization should have been
based, and found it wanting. To make their case in the strongest
possible rhetorical terms, some of these men invoked the Spanish
comparison. They likened the fate of the Tasmanians to the Indians
of the New World and compared the actions of the British to those
of the Spaniards.
Some of these people had fairly obvious reasons for taking this line.
Henry Melville was a political opponent of Lieutenant-Governor
Arthur. His principal Hobart newspapers, the Colonial Times and the
Tasmanian, were for years nagging critics of many aspects of Arthur’s
regime. In 1835 his criticism got Melville convicted of contempt of
court and sentenced to prison. While in jail he wrote The History of
Van Diemen’s Land from 1824-1835, intended largely as a critique of
Arthur’s administration. The history was published in both Hobart
and London later that year with the aim of having Arthur recalled and
his governorship terminated. To damn Arthur’s policy towards Abo-
rigines in terms he knew would be most telling, Melville made the
Spanish comparison: "These poor bewildered creatures had been
treated worse than were any of the American tribes by the Spaniards."
Others, like George Augustus Robinson who became superinten-
dent of Aborigines in the 1830s, had different reasons for invoking
the same assessment. Part of his motivation was, like Las Casas,
inspired by religion, but much of it was, as Chapter Seven discusses in
detail, his desire for secular influence and wealth. To achieve these
ambitions, his principal biographer has argued, he became ‘a liar and a
cheat, a man of little honour’,'* whose reports about the conditions of
the Aborigines under his control turned out to be largely fraudulent.
In November 1830, after learning of the shooting of two of the
'é Henry Reynolds, Fare of a Free People, Penguin, Ringwood, 1995, pp 30—
1, 82-5
7 Henry Melville, A History of Van Diemen’s Land from the Year 1824 to
1835, inclusive, During the Administration of Lieutenant- Governor George Arthur,
ed. George Mackaness, Horwitz-Grahame, Sydney, 1965, p 30. His
emphasis.
18 Vivienne Rae-Ellis, Black Robinson: Protector of Aborigines, Melbourne
University Press, Melbourne, 1988, p 82
36 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
brothers of an Aboriginal woman in his expeditionary p
; ings - arty, ho,
son lamented in his diary:
The cruelties exercised upon them beggars all description
ferings have been far greater than those of the Indians
Spanish,"
; and their yg
at the hands of «
In December 1831, Robinson heard that one of his former Cony
servants, Alexander McKay, now a rival of his in the business of Cor,
ciliating the natives, had gone in pursuit of natives who had killed ,
white stockman. McKay had shot and killed four of them, ln
response, Robinson wrote a long denunciation of the governmeny’,
decision to employ his competitor.
A precedent is now established and as the government has patronized this
outrage by sending this man out again, we may of course expect to hex
of similar massacres by other white ruffians who have only wanted per-
mission to imbrue their hands in the blood of the aborigines... it is ;
refinement of cruelty not to be met with in the present day and is parallel
only with those cruelties practiced upon the South American indians by
the blood-thirsty Spaniards.”
Some settlers made the Spanish comparison without mentioning
Spain specifically but by making the same comparison as Las Casas
between pre-colonial innocence and peace, and post-colonial horror.
The Launceston Advertisers correspondent ‘J. E.’ wrote in 1831:
The Aborigines were originally the rightful owners and possessors of the
island — they were inoffensive, innocent and happy. The British Colo-
nists have taken their country from them by force; they have persecuted
them, wantonly sacrificed them, and taught them to hate the whites.*
Even though ‘J. E.’ did not give his name, it is not hard to work
out who he was. Given his interest in the natives and the fluency of
his prose, it was most likely the surveyor J. E. (James Erskine) Calder,
who arrived in the colony in 1829 aged twenty-one and in later life
wrote the book The Native Tribes of Tasmania (1875).
Another of Tasmania’s nineteenth-century historians also empha-
sized the similarity between the two European colonial powers. In his
? Robinson, diary, 15 November 1830 in Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian
Joumals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, ed. N. J. B. Plomley,
Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Hobart, 1966, p 276
?' Robinson, diary, 26 December 1831, Friendly Mission, p 566. In fact,
during this pursuit there were only two Aborigines killed by the ex-convict
Alexander McKay, plus one other later: see Plomley, Friendly Mission, p 686
n 18
*! Launceston Advertiser, 26 September 1831, cited by
Reynolds, Fate of a Free
People, p 84
PWO THE BLACK LEGEND IN VAN DIEMEN'S LAND 37
1870 work, The Last of the ‘Tasmanians, James Bonwick quoted a Dr
Broca Who asserted that the English: Shave committed upon the Tas-
manian race, and that in the nineteenth century, execrable atrocities a
hundred times less excusable than the hitherto unrivalled crimes of
which the Spaniards were guilty in the sixteenth century in the
Antilles. Bonwick recounted the story of a convict bushranger in
Van Diemen's Land who confessed on the scaffold ‘that he had actu-
ally been in the habit of shooting the black Natives to feed his dogs’.
Bonwick quotes the “Rev Dr Lang’ as his source for this story but
otherwise provides no details which might verify the confession: no
name of the convict, no date except 'a few years ago’, and no place of
the execution. Bonwick also compared the fate of the Tasmanian
natives to Las Casas's account of the Caribs under the Spaniards:
It is a small satisfaction to be told that other nations have been as bad as
ourselves: that a million of Caribs in Hispaniola were reduced by the
Spaniards to sixty thousand in fifteen years; that, according to Las Casas,
fifteen millions of Indians perished at their hands; or that, as Cotton
Mather reports of the English American colonies: ‘Among the early set-
tlers, it was considered a religious act to kill Indians.’ Some Spaniards
made a vow to God to burn or hang every morning, for a certain time,
thirteen Indians; one was to be in compliment to the Saviour, and the
others to the twelve Apostles.”
The four authors quoted here, Melville, Robinson, Calder and
Bonwick, cannot be dismissed as unrepresentative or eccentric fig-
ures. They were the four most influential nineteenth-century voices
in framing opinion about the fate of the Tasmanian Aborigines. To
compare England with Spain and to tell atrocity stories of this kind is
a highly effective rhetorical strategy. The images are memorable and,
without the benefit of counter argument, readers usually find passages
of this kind persuasive. The legacy of this comparison is one of the
main reasons why, in the annals of imperial brutality, Tasmania is to-
day compared to the Belgian Congo and German South-West Africa.
The readiness of nineteenth-century observers to resort to this tac-
tic, however, poses a problem for later historians. For even Las Casas’s
most sympathetic editors today acknowledge that, while the Spanish
colonies were undoubtedly sites of homicide and exploitation, very
little of what the priest had to say had any empirical basis. To use the
comparisons drawn by the four above authors as evidence of the
moral status of the British in Van Diemen’s Land is to pile myth upon
myth. This can be readily demonstrated with some examples from Las
Casas’s book. One of his constant themes was how the Spaniards
? James Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians: Or the Black War of Van
Diemen’s Land, Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, London, 1870, pp 66, 68
28 Tur FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
allegedly seized children and killed them before their mothers’ ,
. A t "yes
On Hispaniola: i
They forced their Way into native settlements, slaughtering everyone the
tound there, including small children, old men, pregnant women pi
even women who had just given birth. They hacked them to pieces,
ing open their bellies with their swords as though they were
sheep herded into a pen. They even laid
and
slic
SO Many
wagers on whether they could
manage to slice a man in two at a stroke, or cut an individual's head from
his body, or disembowel him with a single blow of their axes. They
grabbed suckling infants by the feet and, ripping them from their mothers’
breasts, dashed them headlong against the rocks. Others, laughing and
joking all the while, threw them over their shoulders into a river, shout-
ing “Wriggle, you little perisher’. They slaughtered anyone and everyone
in their path, on occasion running through a mother and her baby with a
single thrust of their swords.”
Another theme was the feeding of people, either dead or alive, to
dogs. Every chapter of Las Casas’s book has examples of atrocities
about dogs. The following three sentences give examples on three
consecutive pages:
He cut the hands off some; others, women as well as men, he threw to
wild dogs who tore them to pieces ...
The death toll was huge, and countless others, men and women, had their
hands and noses hacked off while yet others were thrown to wild dogs
who tore them to pieces and devoured them ...
Some forty or fifty perished in the flames and yet others were thrown to
wild dogs who tore them to pieces and devoured them.”
Two of his most unforgettable anecdotes are also about dogs. On
the Yucatan Peninsula:
A Spaniard who was out hunting deer or rabbits realized that his dogs
were hungry and, not finding anything they could hunt, took a little boy
from his mother, cut his arms and legs into chunks with his knife and dis-
tributed them among his dogs. Once they had eaten up these steaks, he
threw the rest of the carcass on the ground for them to fight over.?5
And in New Granada:
It has already been stated that in the New World the Spaniards have a
number of wild and ferocious dogs which they have trained especially to
kill the people and tear them to bits. It is not difficult to discover who are
the real Christians and who are not when one learns that, to feed these
dogs, they ensure that wherever they travel they always have a ready sup-
? Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, p 15
4 Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, pp 120-2
?5 Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, p 74
Pwo: THe BLACK LEGEND IN VAN DIEMEN'S LAND 39
ply of natives, chained and herded like so many calves on the hoof. These
they kill and butcher as the need arises. Indeed, they run a kind of human
abattoir or flesh market, where a dog-owner can casually ask, not for a
quarter of pork or mutton, but for ‘a quarter of one of those likely lads
over there for my dog! ^
In works on early American history, these stories are still widely
recycled by academics of the political left. In 1985, the postmodern
literary critic Tzvetan Todorov dedicated his book about the Spanish
conquest of Mexico to an unknown Mayan woman, whom the
conquistadors had torn apart by dogs.” However, you do not need an
especially sceptical turn of mind to find such stories dubious. They
were written to shock the sixteenth-century Spanish court into
changing the legal status of natives in the Americas and to give the
Church a greater role in colonial rule. Anyone who contemplates
their feasibility with an open mind, especially the technicalities of im-
plementing some of these exploits, will find many of them inherently
implausible. Most likely, the Spanish monarchs found the same
because they remained unmoved in their policies, which stayed in
place for another two hundred years.
Despite their popularity among radical academics, many of the sto-
ries of Las Casas are today recognized by less politicized scholars as
fancifully inflated and largely rhetorical accounts of places he never
visited and events he never saw. His death toll is several times higher
than the most plausible estimates of the total native population of the
region. In particular, some of his stories were inspired more by
Roman histories and Biblical narratives than by events in the Indies.
One of Las Casas’s major influences was the account by the Roman-
Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus, of the destruction of Jerusalem by
Titus Vespasianus in 70 AD and his description of mass killings of
Jews, of starvation, infanticide, cannibalism and of people being eaten
by dogs. Another of the major sources of his inspiration was the Old
Testament. For instance, Psalm 137, ‘By the rivers of Babylon’ con-
tains the Israelite curse on their captors: 'O Daughter of Babylon,
doomed to destruction, happy is he who repays you for what you
have done to us — he who seizes your infants and dashes them
against the rocks’; Isaiah 13: ‘Their infants will be dashed to pieces
26 Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, p 125
27 Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other,
HarperCollins, New York, 1985
28 Las Casas’s other major work, History of the Indies, cites Flavius Josephus at
length in its prologue, Anthony Pagden, ‘Introduction’, A Short Account of
the Destruction of the Indies, pp xiii—xiv, xxxi-xxxii; Flavius Josephus, The
Wars of the Jews, (75-79 AD) J. M. Dent and Sons, London, 1915, Books V
and VI, especially pp 411, 416-9, 428
40 "Tur FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
before their eyes; their houses will be looted and their wives ray
ished’; 1 Kings 14: "Dogs will eat those belonging to Jeroboam whe
die in the city, and the birds of the air will feed on those who die in
the country’; 2 Kings 8: ‘You will set fire to their fortifi
their young men with the sword, dash their little
ground, and rip open their pregnant women’.
It was only to be expected that a Catholic priest, writing at the end
of the Middle Ages, would have a head full of Old Testament
imagery. The Bible was his principal source of literature and deter-
mined the foundations of his thought. But when observers in the
Australian colonies in the nineteenth century told stories about loca]
incidents that bear uncanny resemblances to those Las Casas claims for
the Spanish colonies in the seventeenth century, which themselves
had similarities to Biblical atrocities willed or suffered by the Israelites,
this should be a signal for historians to question their sources closely.
Instead, as this and subsequent chapters will demonstrate, the
members of the orthodox school of Tasmanian history have seen such
claims primarily as fodder for their own arguments. They have re-
peated numerous tales about violence done towards the Aborigines
without questioning their veracity. These stories have been handed
down to our own time where they form what now passes for the
historical record. There are many claims made by modern historians
about what happened to the Aborigines of Tasmania that have the
same degree of credibility as Las Casas's tales about what happened to
the Indians of the Americas. Indeed, some have been directly inspired
by the very myths invented by Las Casas himself.
ed places, kil
children to the
RHYS JONES AND THE YAHOOS
This may be illustrated with examples from the work of two authors.
They could have come from the wilder anecdotes of Journalists like
Clive Turnbull and Mark Cocker, who have made the demise of the
Tasmanian Aborigines into a highly dramatic, tabloid newspaper
story. Instead this chapter provides a sample of the work of two of the
most widely respected and frequently cited academic scholars in the
field, the pre-historian and archaeologist Professor Rhys Jones, who,
until his untimely recent death, was a member of the Research
School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National Uni-
versity, and Dr Lloyd Robson, who spent most of his academic career
in the Department of History at the University of Melbourne.
Even though he later fell out with them for not paying sufficient
attention to modern Aboriginal politics? Rhys Jones's work in the
1970s provided some of the foundations of the orthodox school. His
?? see my Epilogue, p 432
MENU —— n r e r ~ M a HE
Two: THE BLACK LEGEND IN VAN DIEMEN'S LAND 41
1971 PhD thesis at the University of Sydney, ‘Rocky Cape and the
Problem of the Tasmanians’, was the source of a number of his jour-
nal articles on which later historians relied. In particular, Lyndall
Ryan was indebted to him for her account of the Aboriginal popula-
tion and tribal distribution in the early chapters of her 1981 book The
Aboriginal ‘Tasmanians, The first chapter of Jones's thesis is entitled
‘Houyhnhnms and Yahoos’. The title is taken from the most misan-
thropic tale in Jonathan Swifts cighteenth-century satire Gulliver’s
Travels, Gulliver was cast ashore in a land ruled by the Houyhnhnms,
noble and generous creatures who looked and acted like horses but
who had a language and culture like human beings. Their good
nature was contrasted to that of the other inhabitants of the island, the
Yahoos, naked creatures in human form, hideously hairy and smelly.
The brutal and greedy manners of the Yahoos threatened the orderly
civilization created by the horses. Jones likens the Tasmanian Abo-
rigines to the Houyhnhnms and the British settlers to their antago-
nists. The section of his chapter on the establishment of the British
colony in Van Diemen’s Land is called “The arrival of the Yahoos’.
After recounting the events at Risdon Cove in 1804, in which he
regurgitates James Bonwick’s fabricated tale that ‘a drunken Lieuten-
ant Moore opened fire on a large group of Aborigines’ in order ‘to
see the niggers run’, Jones summarizes the atrocities the British com-
mitted against the natives.
One's gorge rises at this sorry tale — of psychopathic sadism, of punitive
parties and concentration camps, of Sunday afternoon man hunts, of sex-
ual mutilation, of cutting flesh off living bodies and feeding it to dogs, of
burying a baby up to its neck in sand and kicking its head off in front of
its mother, of tying the severed head of a husband around the neck of the
raped spouse.”
Jones recorded these atrocities without saying where or when they
happened or in what documentary sources he found evidence for
them. Despite its complete lack of verification, this passage has since
been repeated verbatim by two books on modern Aboriginal politics,
Generations of Resistance, by Lorna Lippmann, and ‘It’s Coming Yet ...’
An Aboriginal Treaty within Australia between Australians, by Stewart
Harris?! Both books cite the passage as credible evidence of what the
30 Rhys Jones, Rocky Cape and the Problem of the Tasmanians, PhD thesis,
University of Sydney, 1971, p 9
31 Lorna Lippmann, Generations of Resistance: The Aboriginal Struggle for Justice,
Longman Cheshire, Melbourne 1981, p 21; Stewart Harris, ‘It’s Coming
Yet...’ An Aboriginal Treaty within Australia between Australians, Aboriginal
Treaty Committee, Canberra, 1979, p 35
32. Tur FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL History
British did in Tasmania and why
compensation, reparations, land rights and a treaty,
Jones repeated a similar list of atrocities in the 197%
film. The Last Tasmanian, whose script he co-wrote
director Tom Haydon. This time, however,
source for his allegations.
all Australian Ab:
TI NES dese hos
document,
with produca,
he Indicated 4 historic,
The atrocities committed by se
alers and convicts and re
committee included rape,
flogging of women,
roasting alive, emasculation of men, cuttin
dogs, dashing out the brains of children, kic
of its mother. Most common was the
and children.*?
ported to the 18%)
burning with brands
g flesh off and feeding it to
king offa baby's head in front
abduction and enslaving of women
The source Jones indicates here is the 1830 Committee for the
Affairs of the Aborigines, a government inquiry in Hobart into the
causes and remedy of the native hostilities of the time. However,
anyone who checks out the documents before this committee wil]
find very few of Jones’s claims gain any support there. The minutes of
evidence of the witnesses who appeared, plus the final report itself,
were published in the British Parliamentary Papers in 1831.” In addi-
tion, the Archives Office of Tasmania holds three hundred pages of
settlers’ letters on the topic, which were collected and put before the
committee." Nowhere in all this documentation is there any mention
of burning with brands, emasculation of men, cutting flesh off
Aborigines and feeding it to dogs, or kicking a baby’s head off in
front of its mother. Indeed, this last atrocity is one that only the
unusually gullible could take seriously. It is not pleasant to contem-
plate but it is obviously the case that kicking a baby’s head would
probably crush it and break the neck, but would not decapitate it. Yet
Jones finds this image so compelling that, despite the complete lack of
evidence, he uses it in both his thesis and his film script. (In 1981, the
same story was retold by another author, only this time there were
several babies involved and the event took place in north-east Victo-
ria.) Similarly, there was no evidence given to the 1830 Hobart
?? The Last Tasmanian, script by Rhys Jones and Tom Haydon, produced and
directed by Tom Haydon, Artis Film Productions, Sydney, 1978
? Minutes of evidence taken before the Committee for the Affairs of the
Aborigines, 23 February—17 March 1830, British Parliamen
Colonies, Australia, 4, pp 219-27
34 Suggestions relative to the capture of the natives,
pp 62-286; Answers by settlers and others to certai
them by the Aboriginal committee, AOT CSO 1/
Chapter Nine analyzes the answers provided in th
55 Jan Roberts, Massacres to Mining: The Colonizati,
Dove Communications, Blackburn, 1981, p 19,
tary Papers,
AOT CSO 1/323/7578
n questions submitted to
323/7578, pp 287-383.
e latter series.
on of Aboriginal Australia,
Roberts heard the Story, she
\ 4 $660$060000<0.0 TT
Pwo. THE BLACK LEGEND IN VAN I YIEMEN'S LAND 43
committee that any convict or settler had cut the flesh off live natives
w teed his dogs. Even though James Bonwick’s 1870 history put the
words of a similar tale into the mouth of an unnamed convict at an
unspecified execution, this does not warrant academic historians
repeating it without some corroboration. The claim that this kind of
thing happened in Van Diemen’s Land is based on no credible evi-
dence and is just as unbelievable as Las Casas’s absurd tale about a
human flesh market for dogs in New Granada.
Of the above atrocities claimed by Jones, only three were men-
tioned to the 1830 committee. One witness reported one case of an
Aboriginal woman who had been thrown onto a fire and had burnt
to death. Another witness spoke of a massacre of Aborigines near
Campbell Town in 1828 in which, after the men had been shot, the
perpetrators dragged the women and children from crevices in the
rocks, ‘dashing out their brains’. A third witness, James Hobbs, said
4 convict named James Carrett, known as Carrotts, had ‘told him he
had once cut off a Native man's head at Oyster Bay, and made his
wife hang it round her neck, and carry it as a plaything; from Car-
rotts’ manner he credited the story’.*” i
The third of these atrocities was the only one the committee found
credible enough to include in its final report. It was a story that the
witness, James Hobbs, said he had been told, not something he had
seen himself, but it clearly shocked the committee members.
Although even the most judicious of the modern historians of first
race contacts in Tasmania, Marie Fels, finds this story of a woman
wearing the skull ‘horrifying’ and says 'it may have been more
shocking in that culture than ours," the ethnographic evidence
shows the natives would not have regarded it in these terms. Several
contemporary observers noted that Tasmanian Aborigines often wore
not only amulets of ashes and bones but also whole jawbones, thigh
bones and skulls of dead relatives around their necks or on their bod-
ies both as mementos of the deceased and as highly valued charms
against illness and pain. Carrotts’s story may well have originated in
claims, from a local Aboriginal man who said his mother witnessed the
atrocity. She footnotes the story as: ‘Account given anonymously to author’.
36 Minutes of evidence, British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, pp
220, 226
37 Minutes of evidence, British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, pp
221-2
38 Marie Fels, ‘Culture Contact in the County of Buckinghamshire, Van
Diemen's Land 1803-11’, Tasmanian Historical Research Association Papers and
Proceedings, 29, 2, June 1982, p 60
3 H, Ling Roth, The Aborigines of Tasmania, F. King and Sons, Halifax,
1899, p 64; Robinson, diary, 27 February 1832, 7 April 1834, Friendly
44 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
a similar sighting, We have no way of verifying whether he
woman's husband or not, but the story of her Wearing
her neck would not, in Aboriginal culture,
sion as it would in colonial society.
Whatever the case, Hobbs had a predilection for CXagperatin;,
atrocities done to the Aborigines and was not a reliable witness, He
gave other evidence in 1830 that can definitely be shown to be un
true, He claimed that in 1815 the 48th Regiment massacred twenty-
two Aborigines at Oyster Bay. As Chapter Five demonstrates, how-
ever, this incident not only did not happen, but could not have hap-
pened in the way Hobbs claimed. Similarly, the story about the mas-
sacre at Campbell Town in 1828 in which Aboriginal women and
children had their brains dashed out is, as Chapter Five also shows in
some detail, every bit as fictional as the other claims made here,
killed the
a skull around
generate the same repu]
l
LLOYD ROBSON AND THE SEALERS’ ATROCITIES
Lloyd Robson’s highly acclaimed and award-winning book, A History
of Tasmania, Volume One, published by Oxford University Press in
1983, contains passages with a similar degree of credibility. Later,
Chapter Five examines in detail some of the more notorious massa-
cres Robson claimed were perpetrated on the Aborigines, but let us
here focus on just one passage. Robson writes:
Great and barbarous cruelties were practised. Sealers were said to have
burnt women alive. Some cut the flesh off the check of an Aboriginal boy
and made him eat it, and tied up an Aboriginal woman to a tree and then
cut off her ears and the flesh off her thigh and made her eat it because she
had run away.”
Anyone who stops to contemplate these stories with an open s
will soon come up against the dilemma that faced ced : e
Merchant of Venice: how can you cut a sizeable portion of flesh from a
living body without killing its owner? Robson, however, presents
these anecdotes with a straight face, as if they were common practice
at the time. He does not provide a footnote for them, but they come
Mission, pp 591, 874. When the Big River tribe were brought into Hobart
by George Augustus Robinson in January 1832, the Hobart Town Courier
reported: ‘The women were frightfully ornamented with human bones hung
round them in various fantastic forms, even to the rows of teeth and skulls.
(14 January 1832, p 2). On Flinders Island in 1837, the Aboriginal woman,
Queen Adelaide, wore the skull of her favourite child around her neck.
Another woman, Pauline, wore the jawbone of a relative's brother around
her stomach to relieve severe pain: Rae-Ellis, Black Robinson, pp 129-30
* Lloyd Robson, A History of Tasmania, Oxford University Press,
Melbourne, 1983, Vol I, p 231
Two: THE BLACK LEGEND IN VAN DIEMEN'S LAND 45
from the diaries of George Augustus Robinson. They were from a
series of stories retold by Robinson, who said he heard them from
"m of the Dass Strait seal hunters, James Munro. 'The information is
in Robinson's diary entry of 28 May 1831." After the above passage,
Robson goes on to recount more atrocity stories from the diary, but
then, on the following page, adds his one and only note of caution:
‘Perhaps not all the stories told to Robinson were accurate.”
This way of presenting information is, of course, far more circum-
spect than Rhys Jones's practice of simply making it up. Robson
knew that, if it ever came to a dispute, he could plead that he was
doing no more than repeating stories that were there, on the
historical record, and that he did warn readers to be wary of the tales.
However, Robson failed to give his readers any of the background
about how or why these stories came to be in Robinson’s diary. Yet
both the diary itself, and the lengthy annotations provided by its
editor, show that Robinson had powerful reasons of his own to
invent stories of this kind.
At the time, Robinson was engaged in a struggle with the Bass
Strait sealers for control of their women. There were about thirty
sealers on the islands of the strait, mainly in the Furneaux group.
Some of them had been there since the 1790s and all were accompa-
nied by at least one Aboriginal woman, while some kept two or
three. Robinson wanted to remove these women to Gun Carriage
Island to rectify the severe shortage of females at his newly-established
Aboriginal settlement. In the preceding months he had already seized
fourteen Aboriginal women from the English sealers on the grounds
that they had been abducted and were kept by force. He wanted the
rest of their women as well.
However, the sealers responded by delegating James Munro to go
to Hobart to plead with the Lieutenant-Governor to put a stop to
Robinson’s activities. They complained that Robinson had removed
women who were their long-standing common law wives and the
mothers of their children. Munro's own wife was one of those taken.
He was left by himself on Preservation Island with their three chil-
dren. There were similar complaints from the other sealers. The
women, they argued, wanted to remain with their husbands and chil-
dren, rather than be taken to Robinson’s settlement to become the
mistresses of a new group of Aboriginal strangers. Arthur saw their
point and took their side. He sent, via Munro, an order for Robinson
“ Robinson, diary, 28 May 1831, Friendly Mission, p 357
* Robson, History of Tasmania, Vol I, p 232
* Robinson, diary, 11 October 1830, 9 November 1830, Friendly Mission,
pp 246, 269
46 Tur FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL Hisrony
to return à number of women to the
letter to Robinson on 24 May."
decided that
sealers, Munro deliverea ,
The letter also said Art x
n traded with the
d with them, he intended to
of the Aborigines,
» Since the sealers ofte
and were well acquainte
to become ‘conciliators’
indignant about anyone c
the monopoly,"
rthur haa
Northerp trib,
authorize ther,
Robinson, ,
lse acting in this role, in whicl
So Munro's visit not only me:
return the sealers’ women and thus reduce
settlement, it also threatened his lucr
of Aborigines.
however
1 he so far haa
gnal
aptor
Four days later, Robinson began recording in his diary stories that
he claimed Munro had told him about atrocities committed by the
sealers, including the tales eventually reproduced in Lloyd Robson’;
book. One does not need an especially cynical turn of mind to see
Robinson’s motives. He was accumulating evidence to present to
Arthur to show that the sealers were such depraved beasts that they
were not fit either to keep their women or to act as government
agents in conciliating the Aborigines. By claiming Munro as his chief
informant, he was specifically trying to undermine the man who had
gained the Lieutenant-Governor's confidence.
Now, all this was well known to Robson when he wrote the
above passage. The editor of R obinson's diary, Brian Plomley, pro-
vides lengthy annotations to the entries from which Robson quotes,
recording no fewer than thirteen letters and reports that circulated
between Bass Strait and Government House between 16 April and 8
June 1831, in which both parties to this dispute denounced each
other's morals and motives.“ Yet Robson pretends he is oblivious to
this background and the objectives involved. He presents the stories
of sealers forcing Aboriginal women and children to eat their own
flesh as if they were simply part of a series of plausible tales from the
time. Of course, the idea that Munro would have volunteered such
self-incriminating information to Robinson at a time when both were
locked in a contest for control of the same women stretches all cre-
dulity. It would be deceitful for any historian to omit this context.
But Robson does not give his readers any reason to be sceptical of
these claims and not the slightest hint of the political agenda behind
their notation. Robson’s omissions are every bit as dishonest as Rhys
Jones’s inventions.
“ Robinson, diary, 24 May 1831, Friendly Mission, p 355
^5 A full account of Robinson’s role as ‘conciliator’ or captor of Aborigines is
in Chapter Seven.
* Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp 457-60 n 166
119000909 ollas o ——-———
Pwo: THE BLACK LEGEND IN VAN DiEMEN' S LAND 47
The point that stands out most about the catalogue. of violence
cited in this chapter is that it derives more from Las Casas than from
Van Diemen’s Land. The stories are replicas of atrocities the
l pricst
ally credited to the Spaniards.
origin a } lhis is a telling example of how
the myths of imperial cruelty have resounded down the
centuries.
Whether or not Rhys Jones or George Aug
ustus Robinson had ever
read Las Casas, it is clear that, either directly or indirectly, they had
absorbed his rhetoric and the detail of his tales. The stories sound
dramatic, they fit the purpose at hand, so they get used. In the chap-
ters that follow, there are many other examples of the same phe-
nomenon — people who are so desperate to paint British colonists in
Australia as the most reprehensible kind of Yahoos that they take the
rhetoric to its furthest extremity, which means invoking the atrocity
stories originally invented by Las Casas to condemn the Spaniards in
the Americas.
Apart from the generation of myths, Las Casas did have a real
influence on early nineteenth-century Australia, but not in the way
the orthodox school imagines. The Black Legend formed part of the
mental framework of the British authorities in Van Diemen’s Land
and gave them a counter model for their own behaviour. The repu-
tation of the Spaniards in Mexico and Peru marked a level to which
the British knew they must not descend. This was especially true of
Lieutenant-Governor Arthur, who was appointed to govern Van
Diemen’s Land in 1824. He had previously been at Belize, a British
outpost surrounded by Spanish colonies on the Yucatan Peninsula of
the Central American mainland. As commandant of the settlement,
Arthur had imbibed the anti-Spanish spirit of the era. In 1820 he
limited the power of local settlers to punish their slaves. In 1821 he
was responsible for a proclamation that went beyond his formal
orders, setting free the American Indian slaves of Belize." So, at the
time of the greatest conflict between settlers and Aborigines in Tas-
mania, during the period the orthodox school calls the ‘Black War’ of
1824-1831, colonial authority was held by a man well aware of the
reputation of Spanish rule in the Americas and determined to use it as
an example of how not to govern indigenous people. Arthur’s back-
ground and his intentions towards the Aborigines are examined in
detail in Chapter Six.
Among all the macabre details given by Jones and Robson above,
there are only two claims that have any credible support in the wider
historical evidence. These are the charges about the abduction of
native women and children. These aspects of the Black Legend of
* A. G. L. Shaw, Sir George Arthur, Bart 1784—1854, Melbourne University
Press, Melbourne 1980, pp 50-3
AS Qr FAURICATION Ol AUVORIGINAL HISTORY
Van Diemen's Land are discussed, together with the
i , l . . í . reasons for T
first contlicts with the natives, in the following sections "
NATIVE GAME AND THE NATURE OF FIRST CONFLICT
The fist British settlements in both the north and south of v.
1 ` . qs . j 4T)
Diemen's Land had problems maintaining their supplies. Within thre,
weeks of their establishment, they suffered an acute shortage of
salt
meat provisions. Supply ships failed to arrive from Sydney or "i
Cape of Good Hope. To provide a supply of fresh meat, the com-
mandants of both settlements sent parties of convicts with dogs into
the bush to hunt kangaroos. Without this source of food, the colon
would not have survived. Reverend Robert Knopwood, the first
chaplain of Van Diemen's Land, recorded in his diary on 23 October
1805, the day the supply ship Governor Hunter arrived to relieve the
settlement at Hobart Town:
I may say truly that the colony was in a very dreadful distress and visible
in every countenance. Had it not have been for the good success in killing
kangarros, the colony would have been destitute of everything. We had
only three weeks flower in the colony and 5 weeks pork.?
From 1804 to 1808 kangaroo was the major source of fresh meat
for the colonists. Lyndall Ryan says this brought Aborigines and
Europeans into direct competition for the same food resource, ^?
Competition over game took place not only between Aborigines and
those hunters approved by the colonial authorities. Kangaroo hunting
became a lucrative business for the civil and military officers, since the
government's commissariat paid them such high prices that hunting
became more profitable than agriculture. This encouraged a number
of convicts to abscond from their service. They survived mainly as
kangaroo hunters who traded illicit kangaroo meat with accomplices
in the settled areas. By 1808, Ryan records, there were twenty men
of this kind, called bushrangers at the time, roaming between Hobart
and Launceston. Some of them abducted Aboriginal women and
some made uneasy liaisons with Aboriginal bands.
This combination of legal and illegal kangaroo hunters became,
Ryan records, ‘a visible source of annoyance to the Aborigines. At
first, the Aborigines avoided the hunters but they eventually retaliated
and tried to take the kangaroos from them. Violent conflict burst into
the open. She writes:
^ Mary Nicholls (ed.), The Diary of the Reverend Robert Knopwood 1803—
1838, Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Hobart, 1977, diary entry
23 October 1805, p 94
® Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 77
9 Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 78
lwo: THE BLACK LEGEND IN VAN DIEMEN'S LAND 49
The first European was killed by the Aborigines in 1807, By 1808 conflict
between Aborigines and Europeans over kangaroos had so intensified that
twenty Buropeans and a hundred Aborigines probably lost their lives.”
Phe authority Ryan quotes for these twenty white and one hun-
dred black deaths is the Reverend Robert Knopwood, whose daily
diary from 1803 to 1838 is one of the most commonly used sources
about the early years of the Hobart settlement. However, neither the
ayes Ryan cites, nor any of Knopwood’s other entries between 1804
and 1808, confirm a level of homicide on anything like the scale she
claims. To support her death toll above, Ryan cites pages 128, 140
and 146 of the diary.” On page 128 Knopwood wrote two entries
about conflict between Aborigines and colonists. On 28 February
1807, he reported the natives attacked a colonial hunting party and
fatally speared one hunter, George Brewer, and took a kangaroo from
him. On 2 March 1807, he explained the background details of this
incident. Two of Knopwood's convict servants, while out hunting,
were attacked by sixty blacks. Two of the natives, who tried to spear
the hunters, were shot dead. These entries are the only ones cited by
Ryan that related to Aboriginal deaths. The diary entries on pages
140 and 146 (31 July-9 August 1807 and 11—25 September 1807)
contain no mention at all of anyone, black or white, being killed or
injured, except the chaplain's dog Spott who was killed by a native
spear. In fact, over the entire period from 1804 to 1808, apart from
the incident at Risdon Cove, Knopwood's diary recorded a total of
only five incidents where confrontations between Aborigines and set-
ders caused death or injury on either side. They are described in his
entries on 16 June 1806, 27 November 1806, 14 February 1807, 28
February 1807, 2 March 1807 and 19 April 1807. Instead of Ryan’s
figure of one hundred blacks killed, the Aboriginal casualty list from
this diary is only four dead. Instead of twenty, the British lost two
convict kangaroo hunters killed and one wounded, plus, of course,
poor Spott.
The only accurate statement in Ryan’s account of violence in this
period is the reason she gives for it. All the recorded conflicts at this
time, bar one, were with kangaroo hunters. In these incidents, the
Aborigines attempted to take game the hunters had killed. Signifi-
cantly, if the whites surrendered the game, no blood was spilled. In
November 1806, for instance, two of Knopwood’s men out hunting
near Frederick Henry Bay had their haul of nine kangaroos seized by
the natives. Even though their boat was taken as well, the two did
5! Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 77
52 Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 82, n 15
SO `
i Vur Panna ATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
not resist and there was no violence on either side? On the
hand, whenever hunters refused to give up their catch, a fi "ht us
oped. In all the incidents listed above where death Or tan : l : ras
it Was because hunters took this stand, UNT Geneted,
Throughout 1806 and 1807, Knopwood's diary often records
comments such as: ‘the natives are very troublesome to the men dm
a-kangarroing? But as Marie Fels has pointed out in a detailed
analysis of conflict in the early colony, kangaroo hunting was about
the only cause of the limited violence that did occur. ‘At this stage n
appears to be not so much the presence of the invaders that Aborsi-
nes object to, but the specific practice of taking food which they
considered to be theirs.”55 Moreover, Fels puts the morality of thence
casualties that did occur into a balanced perspective. “These killings
are not murders,’ she writes, ‘whether of Aboriginal by European or
vice versa: they arose out of ownership disputes about property —
food to which each culture felt itself legally entitled. Malice, the
essence of murder, was absent. "^?
There was only one recorded clash at this time that was not with
kangaroo hunters. This occurred in March 1805 between Aborigines
and a party of eight sealers camped on an island in Oyster Bay. The
natives set fire to their house, took their provisions and destroyed
their sealskins." The motive for this assault, however, would appear
to be indignation similar to that caused by the taking of kangaroos,
since seals were also game for coastal Aborigines.
Fels has also analyzed the evidence about the violence done at the
time by convict bushrangers. Until her study, several historians had
attributed numerous Aboriginal deaths to the activities of these out-
laws. They had taken their lead from Governor George Arthur, who
in 1828 had blamed much of the later hostility of the blacks on
atrocities committed by runaway convicts. Arthur wrote:
T
we are undoubtedly the first aggressors, and the desperate characters
amongst the prisoner population, who have from time to time absconded
into the woods, have no doubt committed the greatest outrages upon the
Natives, and these ignorant beings, incapable of discrimination, are now
filled with enmity and revenge against the whole body of white inhabi-
tants.”
5 Knopwood, Diary, 27 November 1806, p 120
5t Knopwood, Diary, 18 February 1807, p 127
55 Fels, ‘Culture Contact’, p 56
56 Fels, ‘Culture Contact’, pp 56, 67
5 Knopwood, Diary, 5 March 1805, p 78
58 Arthur to Huskisson, 17 April 1828, British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies
Australia 4, Irish University Press series, p 177
pu wwe Tm RE
Two: THE BLACK LEGEND IN VAN DIEMEN'S LAND 51
Fels examined every report about bushranging between 1804 and
ist t. The first convicts to escape into the bush did so in 1805. Fif-
teen. of them remained at large for various periods of three to five
months, They lived in the bush just outside the Hobart settlement.
rhe use by historians of the term ‘bushrangers’ conjures up images of
armed and mounted criminals like Ben Hall and Ned Kelly. But the
early ‘Tasmanian variety were simply convict absconders roaming, on
foot — ‘poor creatures ... half-dead with cold and hunger', as one
colonist described them?" — who eventually begged to return. While
at large, they had the opportunity to annoy the Aborigines, Fels
notes, but ‘whether they could have caused much physical harm is
doubtful, as they possessed no firearms’. They hunted kangaroos
with dogs. In 1806 there were another seventeen convicts who were
at large for periods of up to five months. But, again, they were mostly
unarmed and on foot, so they could not have done much harm to the
natives either.
The first reports of genuine conflict between bushrangers and
Aborigines did not come until 1808. Richard Lemon and John
Brown were two convicts who escaped from Port Dalrymple in June
1806 and murdered three soldiers and another convict. In February
1808, Lemon was killed by troopers near Hobart and Brown recap-
tured.*! A newspaper report later claimed that, while on the run, the
pair killed two male and three female Aborigines and wounded four
others.” There were two other convicts who also probably killed
Aborigines. William Russell and his companion George Getley were
bushrangers from 1808 until 1810. Little is known of what they did
but the Aborigines eventually killed both of them. Lieutenant-Gov-
ernor Collins thought they would have been slain in acts of revenge.
Russell was probably punished, Collins speculated, “by the hands of
those very people who have suffered so much from him; he being
well known to have exercized his barbarous disposition in murdering
or torturing any who unfortunately came within his reach’. It is
59 Fels, ‘Culture Contact’, p 54
60 Fels, ‘Culture Contact’, p 52
61 Historical Records of Australia, III, T, pp 563, 685-6
62 Fels, ‘Culture Contact’, p 61. Fels saw only a press cutting of the story but
could not identify the newspaper or its date. The Sydney Gazette, which
reported Brown’s trial for murder in Sydney, gave a different account. He
was reported to have committed ‘many acts of barbarity against the straggling
natives’ but only to have killed one of them: Sydney Gazette, 5 June 1808
63 Lieutenant-Governor David Collins, General Order 29 January 1810,
cited by John West, The History of Tasmania, (1852), ed. A. G. L. Shaw,
Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1971, p 264, quoting from the now missing
Derwent Star and Van Diemen’s Land Intelligencer, 29 January 1810
52 THE FABRICATION OF Anc MIGINAL HISTORY
probable that, while at large, he had Aboriginal victims. O
verall, thes
four convicts may rightly be suspected of killing more Aborigines ;,
ANC jg
other, unrecorded conflicts, but the summary of the evidence pre
vided here is the most w
e can say with any confidence,
'J hus, up to
d native dead at the hands of bus]
Angers a.
1808, the total recorde
five.
Fels also canvassed the possibility chat white stockmen in the inte
rior might have assaulted Aborigines in this period. As noted earlier.
Lieutenant-Governor Arthur had himself confidently asserted, ‘That
the distant convict stock-keepers in the interior
... have, from the
earliest. period,
acted with great inhumanity towards the black
Natives, “4 However, Fels points out that between 1803 and 1811 the
entire livestock population of Hobart was clustered around the banks
of the Derwent — a meagre total of 489 cattle and 1091 sheep in the
whole settlement. The most distant individual stockholder was just
eight miles up the river. Beyond that, the only livestock was at the
government stockyard established in 1808 at New Norfolk, twenty
miles away. Thus, since there were no sheep or cattle in ‘the interior i
there would have been no white stockmen there either. Arthur s gen-
eralisation about distant stock-keepers acting with inhumanity ‘from
the earliest period’ cannot be true. Hence, not only We ec ae
Ryan’s own cited evidence fail to support her claim that dn undre
Aborigines were killed by colonists in early conflicts over uen
hunting, but there is also no other evidence that supports a tota
his high.
ene iu ne: demonstrates how even the Lieuten-
ant-Governor of the colony was not himself an infallible a
knowledge about events that preceded his own term of ss e a
to rely on old reports, hearsay and speculation about what ess
on the frontier of settlement. As Arthur s comments sis sa
strate, he sometimes accepted propositions that could not have been
true. The most revealing aspect of Arthur’s comments, however,
were not that they were wrong but that the British colonists were so
ready to blame their own side for the origins of Aboriginal hostility.
These were not the sentiments one would expect to accompany an
intention to commit genocide against an indigenous people.
KIDNAPPING OF CHILDREN AND ABDUCTION OF WOMEN
According to Ryan, the first fifteen years of white settlement wrought
a terrible devastation on the Aborigines. In this brief period, the
indigenous population was reduced by more than half. ‘By 1818; she
writes, ‘the Aboriginal population of Van Diemen’s Land had fallen
6 Arthur to Murray, 15 April 1830, British Parliamentary Papers, 4, p 187
| e
d mmm -e-+ AE
Two: THE BLACK LEGEND IN VAN DIEMEN'S LAND 55
tom an estimated four thousand to somewhere below two
68
thousand, k
In accounting for this loss of two thousand people, Ryan excludes
thom contention the cause that many readers would expect, disease.
Unlike the mainland, where Aborigines were recorded dying from
European diseases after even minimal contact with whites, there were
no epidemics in Van Diemen’s Land, she says." Moreover, in this
early period few Tasmanian Aborigines succumbed to alcohol. On
the mainland, alcohol addiction cut a swathe through Aboriginal soci-
ety but not in Van Diemen’s Land, where alcohol remained in scarce
supply until the 1820s. ‘The first inebriated Aborigines were not
recorded until 1823,’ Ryan records. ‘Aborigines did not plunder
alcohol from stock-keepers’ huts; indeed it was noted as late as 1823
that they openly rejected the one form of alcohol that was readily
available — rum.'*
Instead of disease and alcoholism, Ryan advances three alternative
explanations for the deaths of the two thousand Aborigines between
1804 and 1818. First, there was widespread kidnapping of Aboriginal
children to provide a labour force for the settlers. Second, the Abo-
riginal tribes were depleted of women as colonists abducted them or
the natives exchanged them for provisions. Third, the Aborigines
were shot by stockmen in the settled districts and by sealers and
bushrangers beyond the frontiers of settlement.
Tasmanian economic development in the settled districts went
through three stages during the period of conflict with the Aborigi-
nes, Ryan argues. The first stage, from 1804 to 1807, was dominated
by kangaroo hunting, as discussed above. The second stage, from
1807 until around 1819, was the agricultural, or ‘peasant proprietor’,
phase of British occupation. The third stage, which took off between
1817 and 1824, was the pastoral phase, which, Ryan argues, pro-
duced the most severe dislocation of the Aborigines.
The second, or peasant proprietor phase, from 1807-19 had a pro-
found effect upon the Aborigines but nonetheless produced a degree
of exchange and reciprocal arrangements between the two cultures,
she argues. The bulk of the new British arrivals in 1807 were from
the colony at Norfolk Island. This had originally been established at
the same time as Sydney Cove in 1788. It proved too expensive to
maintain and was eventually closed down, with 700 of its inhabitants
shipped to Van Diemen's Land. Most were ex-convicts who had
turned to farming. They were settled mainly at New Norfolk in the
6 Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 79
6 Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, pp 175-6
9 Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 176
54 Tur FABRICATION Or ABORIGINAI HISTORY
south and Norfolk Plains in the north, where they were
of from forty to fifty acres. According to Ryan
generated à big demand for Aboriginal labour,
recalcitrant adult males, the settlers prefe
given farm,
» these small farmer,
| lowever, rat]
: Yer than
rred their children:
The agriculturalists who suffered an acute shortage of labour were more
attracted to the Aboriginal children as a labour force,
mutual arrangements operated whereby Aboriginal children were ‘lent’ pe
their parents. However, by 1810 Collins was warning the settlers that the
kidnapping, rather than borrowing, of Aboriginal children would provoke
retaliation by their parents.
For a time some
There is no evidence, however, that Collins ever gave such 4
warning. He did make a general order in 1810 about the treatment of
Aborigines and two versions of it were published. Neither, however,
mentioned the kidnapping of children. The order warned settlers
against the ‘abominable cruelties’ that had been done to the Aborigi-
nes by ‘white people’, but was mainly concerned about acts of this
kind done by the bushrangers Russell and Getley. Collins said that
anyone assaulting or murdering a native would be proceeded against
as if they had done the same to a ‘civilized person’. There is no men-
tion by Collins of the kidnapping of children in any of the references
Ryan cites.”°
Nonetheless, two of the Lieutenant-Governors who succeeded
Collins certainly believed kidnapping had become widespread. Lieu-
tenant-Governor Davey said he had found strong evidence of the
5 Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 78
© Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians (1870) pp 39-40, says he found a
copy of the order in the colony's Muster Book of 1810. According to Fels, p
69, this book has been missing since 1915. West, History of Tasmania, (1852)
p 264, quotes another version of the order published in the Denvent Star, 29
January 1810, which is also now missing (see next footnote). Plomley, l
Friendly Mission, p 26, quotes the Bonwick version, but does not provide his
source. It is possible that both the Bonwick and West versions are extracts
rather than the full text of the original. l
” None of Ryan’s references on page 82, footnote 19, discuss the
kidnapping of children, except perhaps the Derwent Star of 29 January 181 0,
which I have not seen. That edition of the newspaper has been missing since
the nineteenth century, so it is hard to understand how R yan could have
sighted it in the 1970s. As explained on the facsimile copy of Derwent Star, 3
April 1810, in Mitchell Library, no edition of that newspaper published on
any other date has survived. The edition Ryan claims as her primary source
is the same one that John West quoted from in 1852. See West, History of
Tasmania, p 264 and p 623 n 11. West’s published version, however, does
not mention kidnapping.
Two: THE BLACK LEGEND IN VAN DIEMEN’S LAND 55
sractice when he investigated the reasons for Aboriginal hostilities in
the Coal River district in 1813:
He has learnt that the resentment of these poor uncultivated beings has
been justly excited by a most barbarous and inhuman mode of proceeding
acted upon towards them, viz. the robbery of their children! Had not the
Lieutenant-Governor the most positive and distinct proofs of such barba-
rous crimes having being committed, he could not have believed that a
British subject would so ignominiously have stained the honour of his
country and of himself; but the facts are too clear. "'
Lieutenant-Governor Sorell expressed similar sentiments in 1819
when he described *occasional outrages of miscreants whose scene of
crime is so remote as to render detection difficult; and who some-
times wantonly fire at and kill the men, and at others pursue the
women, for the purpose of compelling them to abandon their chil-
dren'.? Most settlers, Ryan comments, rejected these entreaties.
"They believed they were saving the children from starvation and
barbarism as well as using them as a cheap labour force'. By 1817, she
says, there were at least fifty Aboriginal children in settlers’ homes. m
Unfortunately, neither Davey's nor Sorell’s statements provide
details of how often kidnapping occurred or of how many children
were taken this way. In Sorell’s proclamation, he mentions only one
incident in which two native children were taken in by a settler. In
the surviving records about all of these cases, the children concerned
were very young. At Risdon Cove in 1804, the Aboriginal boy
whose parents were killed, and who was subsequently baptized by
Reverend Knopwood, was only three years old." At New Norfolk in
1819, two boys were found in the bush, apparently abandoned after
their parents had run off at the approach of stockmen. The younger
was a baby who was given to a wet nurse. The age of the elder was
not recorded but he would have been of early school age. He was
christened George Van Diemen and, under the care of Sorell, was
taught to read and say his prayers. Instead of being put to work in the
fields, he was sent to England in 1821 for five years of further educa-
?! quoted in Report of the Aborigines Committee, 1830, British Parliamentary
Papers, 4, p 208
72 quoted in Report of the Aborigines Committee. 1830, British Parliamentary
Papers, 4, p 209. The full text of the proclamation is in Plomley, Friendly
Mission, pp 42-3
73 Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 78
74 Collins to King, 30 September 1804, Historical Records of Australia, III, I, p
238
56 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
tion.’ In these cases, the children were obvious]
greatly prized for the agricultural labour force.
Ryan says that in March 1819 Sorell decided to put an end t
practice. ‘Sorell ordered,’ she writes, ‘that all Aboriginal children hi
ing with settlers must be sent to the charge of the chaplain oe
Knopwood, in Hobart and placed in the Orphan School." E
however, could not be true. There was no orphan school in Hoba
in 1819 or at any time during Sorell's administration. The fine
orphanage in the colony, the King’s Orphan School, was Opened in
1828 by Lieutenant-Governor Arthur. Rev. Knopwood was never
involved in running it.” The original document of the proclamation
Ryan cites as her evidence merely ordered that magistrates and con-
stables were to ‘take an account’ of any cases of native children living
with settlers and to report the details to the Colonial Secretary in
Hobart.'?
The only firm figure for native children living among the whites at
the time was provided by a general return of baptisms, marriages and
deaths within Hobart Town compiled by Rev. Knopwood and pub-
lished in 1820. He recorded that he had baptized a total of twenty-six
native children between 1809 and 1819.” At the time, baptism or
christening was not only a religious ritual. It was the early nineteenth-
century equivalent of registering a birth, of officially recording the
entry of a child into the community. However, there might have
been native children within the white settlement who Knopwood did
not baptize because their custodians did not want their presence
widely known. If so, it is possible there could have been twice the
recorded figure of twenty-six children, that is, a tally of about fifty
acquired between 1809 and 1819.
y too young to be
This,
75 Sorell to Kermode, 15 September 1821, quoted in Plomley, Friendly
Mission, p 475
76 Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 79
” For history of the Hobart orphanage see Joan C. Brown, Poverty is not a
Crime: The Development of Social Services in Tasmania 1803—1900, Tasmanian
Historical Research Association, Hobart, 1972, pp 8, 15, 22-4; That
Knopwood never had charge of Aboriginal orphans or the orphan school
can be seen from his diary entries for 1819, 1820, 1828, as well as from Rex
and Thea Rentis, ‘Some notes on the ancestry and life of the Rev. Robert
Knopwood’, Papers and Proceedings Tasmanian Historical Research Association,
12, 1964-5
? Government and General Orders of Lieutenant-Governor, signed H. E.
Robinson, Secretary, 13 March 1819. Full text is in Plomley, Friendly
Mission, pp 42—3
” Robert Knopwood, A return of baptisms, marriages and deaths within the
District of Hobart Town, 12 March 1804 to 31 December 1819, Historical
Records of Australia, ITI, III, p 510
Two: THE BLACK LEGEND IN VAN DIEMEN'S LAND 57
Either way, the numbers involved still provide little support for
Ryan's main argument. Even if there were fifty Aboriginal children
living on settlers’ farms, and even if all of them had been kidnapped,
they would not have made a great impact on the agricultural labour
force needed by the 700 ‘peasant proprietors’ from Norfolk Island. In
particular, such a figure would not go very far towards explaining the
demise of the indigenous population by two thousand.
Another of the ‘significant’ factors in the collapse of Aboriginal
numbers, according to Ryan, was the loss of women. Up to 1828,
she claims, ‘most conflict between Aborigines and stock-keepers took
place over women and kangaroos’. In the first twenty-five years of
settlement, there was a shortage of European women, with three
males to every female in the colony. In some cases, the Aborigines
exchanged their women with whites for provisions. In others, rival
tribes abducted women from others for exchange with the whites.
Ryan writes:
Aboriginal society faced its first major upheaval with Europeans over the
‘gift’ of women to the stock-keepers in return for European provisions as
a means to incorporate the stock-keepers into the obligations of Aborigi-
nal society. While some tribes were anxious to develop strong ties of obli-
gation with the Europeans, others found themselves with only a small
number of women, having lost many to neighbouring bands who appro-
priated them for exchange with the Europeans. The loss of women led to
an immediate decline in the birth rate.?
Unfortunately, this point in Ryan’s discussion is not enlightened by
any statistics about the women involved. However, in an appendix at
the back of the book she does include a table that calculates the num-
ber of Aborigines ‘accounted for in the literature’ between 1800 and
1835.°! There she records seventy-four Aborigines who were ‘with
sealers’ on the islands of Bass Strait. Almost all of these were women,
since the sealers were not interested in male labourers. Ryan lists their
tribal origins but gives no indication of where her information came
from. However, when Brian Plomley compiled his own list in 1966
he could find only forty-nine of these women. He named each one of
them and gave the names of the sealers with whom they lived plus a
brief account of the information known about each individual.*
Since Ryan provides no evidence or references to support her figure
and since Plomley, a far more reliable scholar, has actually done the
research to uncover their backgrounds, his is the only credible tally
we have.
3? Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 176
8! Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, Appendix I, p 313 in 2nd edition
8 Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp 1017-20
58 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL History
Over the same period 1800—1 835, Ryan claims, f
rigines were ‘with settlers’. On her own calculations, |
were about fifty children working as labourers for settlers
would account for virtually all this latter group. The remaini
umns in her table are figures of Aborigines allegedly either Captured
or shot. Hence, over this entire thirty-five-year period, the only
women Ryan can find to explain the depletion of Aboriginal num.
bers were the seventy-four she claims had been acquired by the seal-
ers. Given that we are trying to extract from her work an explanation
for the demise of two thousand Aborigines over the much shorter
period from 1803 to 1818, even if her figures were accurate, the
would not establish her case. The loss of women, and the loss of their
potential offspring for fifteen years, must have had some impact öh
the tribes of the coastal north and east of the island, but it could
hardly have been as significant as Ryan claims for the entire indige-
us population.
"So if there were two thousand fewer Aborigines in 181 8, and they
didn’t die of disease or alcohol, the overwhelmingly majority of them
— about 94 per cent using Ryan’s figures — must have been killed
by the settlers. The problem for this hypothesis is that there is no
recorded evidence of conflict on anything like this scale in this
period. In fact, in Brian Plomley’s 1992 survey of all archival and
published reports of clashes between ARM and SES he
recorded only ten Aborigines killed between 1804 and 1818. My
own calculation in Chapter Ten, Table 10, is that the public records
show there were eighteen natives killed in this period. ;
At one point in her narrative, Ryan suggests briefly that =
rangers and military deserters might have been involved in dep! Re
Aboriginal numbers.™ Killings by them would not have figure in the
public records, so is it plausible that the decline of the Abonginal
population was caused by unrecorded deaths at their hands in the
are
"ie dli as the early convict absconders in the period 1805-8 there
was a renewal of bushranger activity in the middle of the decade of
the 1810s. Some bushrangers cohabited with Aboriginal women and
some, Ryan claims, had contact with inland tribes. In 1815, the dep-
redations of the bushrangers against white settlers became so serious
that Lieutenant-Governor Davey declared martial law against them.
For this, he was severely chastised by his superior, Governor Mac-
fty-eipht Abo.
Jowever, there
50 the
Ng co].
9 N. J. B. Plomley, The Aboriginal/Settler Clash in Van Diemen’s Land, Queen
Victoria Museum and Gallery, Launceston, 1992, pp 54-7. His reference for
this incident is the Hobart Town Gazette, 7 September 1816
*! Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, pp 77-8
Two: THE BLACK LEGEND IN VAN DIEMEN'S LAND 59
quarie of New South Wales, for 'adopting so illegal and unwarrant-
able a measure without my previous concurrence'.? Davey’s measure
was nonetheless probably justificd. From 1814 to October 1818,
when the most notorious of the bushranger leaders, Michael Howe,
was finally killed by police, there was a great deal of collusion
between them and a number of convict and ex-convict stockmen and
settlers around Hobart. At one stage in April 1815, the bushrangers
took over the town of New Norfolk, robbing houses at will. Some
parts of Hobart Town were not safe, even in daylight. The ability of
the authorities to maintain public order was in jeopardy.^^
However, little of this affected relations between blacks and whites.
The bushrangers' attacks were entirely directed at white society,
which possessed the goods and arms they wanted. The only thing
they wanted from the Aborigines was women. For three years,
Michael Howe had a black mistress, a women named Mary, who he
eventually abandoned and who subsequently became the most effec-
tive guide to the troops who tracked him down. In one attack at
Christmas 1816, a second black woman accompanied Howe's gang."
But there appears to have been little other contact between the
bushrangers and the Aborigines. The conventional historical record is
devoid of evidence that these gangs had any noticeable impact on the
size of the indigenous population. Even if they had committed out-
rages that went unrecorded, it is beyond credibility that this small
number of criminals, who had no plausible reason to do so, would
have embarked, at considerable risk to themselves, on a pointless
campaign of mass murder that would have eliminated half the Abo-
riginal population of the island.
There is little, then, to substantiate the claim that British colonisa-
tion caused the number of Aborigines in Van Diemen’s Land to
decline by anything like two thousand between 1804 and 1818. The
evidence that Ryan produces does not support such a figure, the
explanations she provides of how such a decline might have occurred
lack credibility, and surveys by other historians suggest that this was a
period when there was very little conflict, and indeed only limited
contact, between whites and blacks on the island.
No matter how implausible Ryan’s account may be, however, she
has raised a real problem that requires answers. As noted in Chapter
One, most historians and anthropologists today accept a pre-contact
indigenous population of about 6000. Yet by the mid-1820s, when
Macquarie to Davey, 18 September 1815, Historical Records of Australia, UI,
II, p 125
3$ Robson, A History of Tasmania, 1, pp 82-101
87 Robson, A History of Tasmania, I, p 89
60 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
the colonists began to try to calculate their numbers, they could not
reach a tally of more than 320 among the known tribes." So an
explanation of how this decline occurred is sorely needed. It is possi-
ble that large numbers of Aborigines, unobserved by the colonists,
could have ‘died in the interior from imported diseases. If so, several
thousand of them must have perished in less than two decades with-
out any of the British settlers noticing. On an island as small as rud
mania, this stretches credulity. If these figures are Liber pande id
the most likely explanation is that the currently wey popu egar
estimates are far too high and pre-contact Aborigina num uu E:
about 6000, or anything like this, are untenable. The weyd :
estimates of the pre-colonial population and a pini Sune E
ous explanations for the demise of the Aborigines are ES
ther in Chapter Ten.
. 5 is esti d (or rather guessed)
88 figure of 320 in both 1825 and 1826 is estimate
in Ha M ea Summary of Tasmania’, 1866, cited by H. Rd,
The Aborigines of Tasmania, F. King and Sons, Halifax, 1899, p 164
CHAPTER. THREE
Black bushrangers and the outbreak of
Aboriginal violence, 1823-1827
That winter [1824], when settlers and stock-keepers refused provisions,
the Big River people killed three stockmen and a settler, wounded two
others, and burnt two stockhuts. The resistance of the Big River people
had begun. They believed they were defending their land against inva-
sion, and their methods of attack were acts of patriotism.
— Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians '
VEN though they sing her praises in general, few of her peers
El the orthodox historians of Van Diemen's Land share Lyn-
dall R yan's view of the degree of violence in the first two decades of
colonisation. Instead, most emphasize that, up to 1824, relations
between Aborigines and settlers were comparatively free of conflict.
Until that year, Henry Reynolds has argued, 'the common view
among colonists was that the Tasmanians were a mild and peaceful
people'. He cites a surgeon who settled at Jericho in 1822 who said
the local Aborigines ‘at that time came amongst the settlers familiarly
! Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, 2nd edn., Allen and Unwin,
Sydney, 1996, p 115
62 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
and fearlessly’.? Most acts of violence in the first two decades were the
result of conflicts between individuals, and anything beyond this was
either sporadic or temporary. Reynolds cites the editor of the Hoban
Town Gazette who remarked in 1824 that the local blacks were ‘the
most peaceable creatures in the universe"? Similarly, Brian Plomley
argues that, in the first twenty years of the colony, ‘there was no con-
certed resistance on the part of the Aborigines’. The number of their
assaults on settlers averaged no more than 1.75 per year.’ Plomley says
the little violence that did occur was motivated not by any general
grievance but by particular causes. ‘For the first twenty years of Euro-
pean settlement, attacks by the Aborigines upon the settlers were in
retaliation for wrongs inflicted upon them,’ Plomley argues. ‘It is
clear that attacks occurred at irregular intervals and that their fre-
quency was low until 1824.’ That year everything changed. Plomley
says from then on ‘the attacks were purposeful, being motivated by a
need to drive the settlers from their territories in order to live their
natural lives, as well as by the starvation which was the outcome of
that territorial occupation.” l
These authors agree that what made the difference was pastoralism.
After kangaroo hunting, and peasant proprietorship, pastoralism rep-
resented stage three of Ryan’s model of development of the colony.
Between 1817 and 1824, she argues, pastoralism emerged to domi-
nate both the social structure and economic activity. In this period,
Ryan reports that the white population grew from 2000 to 12,643
and the sheep population from 54,600 to over 200,000. While most
people in the early colony had been convicts, ex-convicts or those
sent to guard them, pastoralism ushered in a new social class, the
gentry. Ryan says they comprised retired army and naval officers from
the Napoleonic wars, sons of the English, Irish and Scottish landed
gentry, as well as sons of colonial officials. They all arrived with capi-
tal to invest in the pastoral industry. They were attracted by the fact
that land, in the form of grants of from 400 to 800 hectares, and
labour, in the form of convict servants, were given them free. Ryan
says they came to make their fortune growing wool to supply the
? Henry Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, Penguin, Ringwood, 1995, p 29. He
gives the original source for this quotation as AOT CSO 1/322, p 327. This
is the wrong location. It is at AOT CSO 1/323/7578, p 327
? Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 30. Reynolds cites the Hobart Town
Gazette, 10 July 1824, as his source, but the quotation was in the edition of
16 July 1824, p 2
* Brian Plomley, The Tasmanian Aborigines, Plomley Foundation, Launceston
1993, p 85
? N. J. B. Plomley, The Aboriginal/Settler Clash in Van Diemen's Land, Queen
Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston, 1992, pp 22, 23
THREE: BLACK BUSHILANGERS AND THE OUTBREAK OF VIOLENCE 63
keen demand from the textile mills of northern England. The plains
of the Tasmanian midlands had the perfect climate for the production
of fine wool. Pastoral properties quickly spread up the rivers of these
plains, producing a ribbon of settlement between the two formerly
separated. centres of Hobart and Launceston. The economic basis of
society changed dramatically, she claims, and there was a profound
impact on relations between colonists and Aborigines. Pastoralism
ended any chance of reciprocal relations or some form of accommo-
dation between blacks and whites. ‘Pastoralism ushered in the most
severe dislocation to Aboriginal Tasmanian society, Ryan writes,
‘and the greatest level of conflict."
The surge in development was marked by a change in political
authority. In 1824, George Arthur, the former commandant of British
Honduras, arrived in Hobart Town to succeed William Sorell as
Lieutenant-Governor. In November 1825, Van Diemen's Land was
made a separate colony, freeing Arthur from subordination to the
Governor of New South Wales.
The orthodox thesis holds that the expansion of pastoralism had
two closely related consequences for the native people. First, it led to
the destruction of the game upon which the Aborigines fed. This
pushed them to the brink of starvation. Historians who argue this case
have some powerful supporters. Arthur himself used this explanation
for the growth of hostilities. He wrote in 1828:
They already complain that the white people have taken possession of
their country, encroached upon their hunting grounds, and destroyed
their natural food, the kangaroo; and they doubtless would be exasperated
to the last degree to be banished altogether from their favourite haunts.’
In 1830, one of the pastoralists of the Launceston district, Richard
Dry, offered a similar explanation. Henry Reynolds quotes Dry
observing:
the Rapid increase of Settlers who now occupy the Best portions of the
Land, extensive plains and fine tracts, where formerly Emu and Kangaroo
fed in such numbers, that procuring subsistence was a pastime to a Black
Native, and not as it is now, attended with Toil & uncertainty."
The loss of native game and the prospect of starvation, according to
Brian Plomley, produced a burning resentment among Aborigines
that led to the outbreak of the Black War. Plomley writes:
€ Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 83
7 Arthur to Goderich, 10 January 1828, British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies,
Australia, 4, p 176
$ Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 30, quoting from AOT CSO
1/323/7578, pp 288-93
64 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
There is evidence that the Aborigines generall
were going to starve only about 1824, and it
with the settlers moved from retaliation for sp
nation to drive the settlers from their territo
marked the beginning of the Black War."
y came to realise th
was then that their
ecific wrong
ries, in otl
at they
Clashes
S to a determi-
Yer words, 1824
The second consequence of pastoralism, according to this thesis
was the dispossession of Aborigines from the land. The pastoralists
physically excluded them from land that had traditionally been theirs
They did this by building permanent structures for their homesteads
but, especially, by constructing miles of fencing that imposed fixed
barriers to Aboriginal passage. Reynolds again quotes Richard Dry:
‘From this land they are excluded and daily witness our encroach-
ment in the extensive Fences erected by the Settlers.’ ' This led the
Aborigines to regard the whole white population as their enemy. It
was the fact that the pastoralists came to dominate the landscape
physically, Reynolds writes, that provoked the Aborigines into hos-
tility.
There is no doubt that fierce competition over the use of, and access to
land, underlay the escalating conflict... Abundant convict labour allowed
the settlers to rapidly build stone houses and farm buildings, to lay out
miles of fencing and to plant extensive hedgerows. They put roots down
quickly and deeply. "
This escalating conflict, Reynolds claims, provoked the Aborigines
into guerilla warfare. Some colonists recognized at the time, he says,
that this was what they were engaged in. Reynolds cites the Hobart
journalist Henry Melville using the phrase ‘the “Guerilla” war with
the Aborigines’ in his history of Van Diemen’s Land in 1835." The
term itself derived from the Peninsula War against Napoleon (1808—
14) in which small bands of Spanish partisans made surprise attacks on
the French army and quickly retreated. Melville put the term in italics
and inverted commas to emphasize its newness.
Reynolds argues that in the early years of the conflict in Van Die-
men’s Land, tactics of this kind produced a deep fear and hatred
? Plomley, Aboriginal /Settler Clash, p 6
'? Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 30, citing AOT CSO 1/323/7578, p
289. Dry’s comments were made in an unpublished submission to the 1830
committee of inquiry into the Aborigines. See also footnote 77 of this
chapter and discussion of Dry’s views in Chapter Nine.
11 Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 31
? Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 66. Reynolds says Melville's usage was
the first time the term was used in Australia. However, the Colonial Times in
1830 used the term ‘Guerilla parties’ to describe the roving parties of Gilbert
Robertson: Clive Turnbull, Black War: The Extermination of the Tasmanian
Aborigines, (1948), Sun Books, Melbourne, p 103
Vini bep: BLACK BUSHILANGEIS AND THE OUTBREAK OF VIOLENCE 05
among many colonists, However, as hostilities continued, others
began. to understand the Aborigines and came to respect even to
admire, the strategy of their adversaries. Reynolds writes: '
Comments on black brutality and treachery were balanced by others
referring to their skill in warfare. The editor of the Colonial Times
observed that the war bands displayed ‘superior tact and clearness of head'.
In fact, their attacks evinced ‘a cunning and superiority of tactic which
would not disgrace some of the greatest military characters’.'*
The guerilla warfare thesis is now the consensus among the ortho-
dox historians of Van Diemen’s Land. As well as Reynolds, Lyndall
Ryan describes the Aboriginal response from 1824 onwards as 'guer-
illa activity. Rhys Jones and Tom Haydon say the Aborigines
waged ‘classic guerilla warfare’. Brian Plomley takes the same line:
"The Aborigines attempted to gain their ends by waging guerilla war-
fare against the settlers: tactically it was highly successful, defeated
only by the declining number of the Aborigines and the rapidly
increasing number of the settlers.’ '^
THE CAREER IN CRIME OF MUSQUITO, 1823-1824
The winter of 1824, according to the passage from Ryan at the start
of this chapter, marked the beginning of the resistance of the Big
River tribe. They were defending their land against invasion, and
their guerilla assaults, she argues, were acts of patriotism. There are,
however, a number of problems with this thesis. The first one is that
this particular outbreak of hostilities had a far more mundane expla-
nation.
In the winter of 1824, there was certainly a major eruption of vio-
lence by Aborigines. In fact, there were seven separate assaults on set-
tlers in June, July and August. In these incidents, six whites were
killed, one wounded and one hut was burnt. All attacks except one
were in the southern midlands and Big River districts: at Jericho,
Abyssinia, Big River, Clyde River, Lake Sorell and York Plains near
Oatlands. Only one, however, was the work of the Big River tribe
who frequented these districts. Six of the seven attacks were made by
a small group of Aborigines from the Oyster Bay tribe led by a man
named Musquito.
13 Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 68, citing Colonial Times, 1 June 1831
and 16 July 1830
14 Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 115
15 The Last Tasmanian, script by Rhys Jones and Tom Haydon, produced and
directed by Tom Haydon, Artis Film Productions, Sydney, 1978
16 Plomley, Aboriginal / Settler Clash, p 23
66 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL History
W
» Mako], ; supar wo
Mich Howes yn ae
Murwh
i Binh Ja
; JA relier
BOR Le Tite lai
Mirtemwer, iy USA Edina
"m finectett blo
i. "d MR A XN
cae nae S
ith GU,
7 H Unhmeon *
222^ +
oep An [2/77
z White Ma.
OS Brushy Hains
wi
er North B. Rone
Central midlands of Van Diemen’s Land, from Ross in the north to Hobart Town.
The broad divisions represent police districts. Detail from map by J. Arrowsmith,
London, 1832 (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales)
- ias he
Musquito was not defending his tribal territory or trying to reclaim
his hunting grounds. He was an Aborigine from Sydney who had
lived among the whites in Hobart for ten years. He had been sent
down by the government in 1813 to help track bushrangers. He later
worked as a stock-keeper and in February 1818 accompanied his em-
ployer, Edward Lord, to Mauritius to buy cattle.” He was employed
as a black tracker in the search for the bushranger Michael Howe, and
17 Hobart Town Gazette, 14 February 1818 and 21 February 1818, records
two natives, Musquito and James Brown, both servants of Edward Lord,
were leaving the colony with him. Ryan incorrectly dates the voyage in
1816, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 79
THREE: BLACK BUSHRANGERS AND THE OUTBREAK OF VIOLENCE 67
sisted in his capture in October 1818." Because of this and earlier
sistance to the authorities, the anini and ex-convicts of the col-
yu regarded him as a turncoat.’ Shunned by the society of the
lower orders in Hobart, Musquito asked to return to Sydney.”
However, his passage was never approved and, feeling betrayed, he
eventually took to the bush. He fell in with one of the groups of
detribalized Aborigines, or ‘tame mobs’, who since at least 1813—14
had been frequenting Hobart, Richmond and the southern midlands,
begging provisions from the residents." Native life obviously attracted
him because of the female companionship it provided him. He was
soon seen at settlers’ homesteads with three black mistresses.22 The
anie mob Musquito joined, a band of the Oyster Bay tribe, had been
living on the edge of white settlement in the Pitt Water district. He
3 Lloyd Robson, A History of Tasmania, Vol I, Oxford University Press,
Melbourne, 1983, p 101
* Evidence of Gilbert Robertson to the Aborigines Committee, 1830,
British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 220
20 Sorell to Macquarie, 13 October 1817, Historical Records of Australia, VIT, II,
p 284 " ]
?! Descriptions of these visits are in The Diary of the Reverend Robert Knopwood
1801-1838, ed. Mary Nicholls, Tasmanian Historical Research Association,
Hobart, 1977, pp 217, 232. They are also discussed by Henry Melville, A
History of Van Diemen’s Land from the Year 1824 to 1835, inclusive, During the
Administration of Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur, ed. George Mackaness,
Horwitz-Grahame, Sydney, 1965, p 32. Knopwood told the Aborigines
Committee of 1830 that in the years 1813 and 1814 a number of natives
‘were constantly fed from his door’ and Robert Evans also gave evidence
that 18 or 20 natives frequented his house at Muddy Plains near Jericho for
six years until they were discouraged by Musquito: British Parliamentary
Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, pp 225, 226
2 Deposition by Thomas McMinn, AOT CSO 1/323/7578, p 197
3 As well as the evidence cited above by Gilbert Robertson, who knew him
well, accounts of Musquito’s background and exploits are in Melville, History
of Van Diemen’s Land, pp 32-9; J. E. Calder, Some Account of the Wars,
Extirpation, Habits, &c., of the Native Tribes of Tasmania, Henn and Co,
Hobart, 1875, pp 46-55, John West, The History of Tasmania, (1852) ed. A.
G. L. Shaw, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1971, pp 267-9; Clive
Turnbull, Black War, (1948) Sun Books, Melbourne, 1974, pp 61-2; Ryan,
Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 79. The Marxist historian Humphrey McQueen sees
Musquito as a heroic warrior who led an Aboriginal resistance. McQueen’s
familiarity with the subject can be seen from his claim that, within ‘a few
months of his arrival’ in Van Diemen’s Land from Sydney, Musquito had
organized his gang into ‘a formidable fighting force’: Humphrey McQueen,
Aborigines, Race and Racism, Penguin, Ringwood, 1974, p 21. Musquito had
actually been employed in Van Diemen’s Land for ten years before he
became an outlaw.
68 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
recruited one of this group, Black Jack, as his chief. a
Musquito also enticed another detribalized Aborigine 7i in ADAM
Viri, e A Bine, Tom Dire
better known as Black l'om, who had grown UP since childho, { :
the Hobart. household of the merchant and landowner i l ia
Birch,* to leave his service and join the group. NA
On 15 November 1823, Musquito and his gang attacked a settler.
hut on the east coast at Grindstone Bay, south of Little Swan Pe n
They killed two stock-keepers and wounded a third, Both Mus ie
and Black Jack were positively identified by the survivor, John Pr
ford. After this, Musquito's gang went on a fifteen-month Pow
spree of robbery, assault, arson and murder. In the Grindstone
incident, the witness said Musquito was accompanied by about dur
five other Aborigines, including women and children, but after a
the few descriptions that mention numbers say his group contained
trom fifteen to twenty. In March 1824 they killed a stockman at Blue
Hill, near Oatlands, and burnt down his hut.2° They then wounded
another stockman at Old Beach on the northern outskirts of Hobart.”
In June, a small mob led by Black Tom, described in the press report
as ‘the notorious companion of Musquito’, killed the settler Matthew
Osborne, wounded his wife and robbed their Property at Jericho in
the midlands. In this murder, Black Tom was assisted by a white con-
vict, whom Mrs Osborne identified. Soon afterwards, the same band
?* Hobart Town Gazette, 16 July 1824, p 2. Black Tom’s formal name was
Thomas Birch and he was also known as Birch’s Tom. In his diaries George
Augustus Robinson called him Kickerterpoller. See: Colonial Times 15
December 1826 p 3; Report on outrages etc by Aborigines at Oatlands,
Anstey to Arthur, AOT CSO 1/316/7578 p 762; and N. J. B. Plomley
(ed.), Jorgen Jorgenson and the Aborigines of Van Diemen's Land, Blubber Head
Pres, Hobart, 1991, pp 75, 95, 96 and 146n. Melville, History of Van
Diemen's Land, p 75, says he was brought up by Mrs E. Hodgson. This is
correct. She was the widow of Thomas Birch.
? A lengthy account by the survivor is in Melville, History of Van Diemen's
Land, pp 38-9.
26 Hobart Town Gazette, 26 March 1824, p 2
?' Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 87, says this assault occurred at Salt Pan
Plains near Tunbridge and that the stockman was killed. However, the
reference she herself cites, the Hobart Town Gazette, 2 April 1824 P 2, says
the stockman, James Taylor, was wounded at the Old Beach property of
John Cassidy.
28 Hobart Town Gazette, 16 July 1824, p 2, has a detailed report of the
incident. The convict was identified as an assigned servant to a settler named
*Beagent'. This was probably Eli Begent, a former convict and associate of
bushrangers himself, who was granted 50 acres in 1823: Sharon Morgan,
Land Settlement in Early Tasmania: Creating an Antipodean England, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1992, p 131. Begent himself later told George
THREE: BLACK BUSHIRANGERS AND THE OUTIMEA GhVibLEMCR G)
killed a man named Bamber at Michael Howe's Marsh, west of Oat-
lands." Musquito and his gang then made four further assaults in the
Abyssinia district in which they killed three convict servants and
assaulted the convicts employed by two other settlers. Abyssinia was
the high country between the River Clyde and the River Jordan,
with Bothwell to its north and New Norfolk to its south. The assaults
in this district in the winter of 1824 are those Lyndall Ryan attributes
to the Big River tribe. However, the information about them was
provided in a letter to the Lieutenant-Governor by Charles Row-
croft, a Justice of the Peace at Norwood near Bothwell on the River
Clyde, who identified Musquito as leader of the culprits. On 16 June,
Rowcrott wrote:
I beg leave to represent to your Honor that, the party of natives headed
by Musquito a black native of Sydney, continue to infest the District of
Murray, & the parts adjacent. In addition to the murder of two men, con-
victs assigned to Mr Parkes at Abyssinnia, within seven miles of my house;
to the murder of one convict servant in the employ of Mr Tuffett at the
Big River; to the maltreatment of two convicts assigned to Mr Wood: &
in addition to their ill treatment of Captn Wood’s servants at one of the
Great Lakes about 18 miles to the north of the Clyde; where they also
burned his stock hut; I was informed yesterday that the same party had
murdered a Settler of the name of Osborne or Osman at his farm, a short
distance from the high road to Launceston in the Jericho district, and that
the life of his widow, who at the same time has been speared by them,
was despaired of.”
The gang then moved to the south-east coast where in early
August they wounded another stockman at Pitt Water. The Hobart
Town Gazette reported: “The man it seems was enticed from his house
by Musquito cooying tll he brought him within his reach, when he
drove the spear into his back, while returning to get him some
bread."' It is probable that the same gang attacked and killed a con-
vict servant of George Meredith at Swan Port in late July, but the
report of this incident did not positively identify the attackers.? Some
time before August, they also murdered Patrick McCarthy, a stock-
keeper at Sorell Plains."
Augustus Robinson that he had been a bushranger with Michael Howe:
Robinson, diary, 19 September 1831, Friendly Mission, p 428
? Statement by Robert Jones sworn on 15 March 1830, reproduced in
Plomley (ed.) Jorgen Jorgenson and the Aborigines, pp 94—5
? Rowcroft to Arthur, 16 June 1824, AOT CSO 1/316/7578, pp 8-9
`! Hobart Town Gazette, 6 August 1824, p2
° Hobart Town Gazette, 24 July 1824, p 2
? This was the man Black Jack was found guilty of murdering; see Melville,
History of Van Diemen's Land, p39
70 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL History
There was only one killing by the Aborigines that may be
attributed to the Big River tribe in the winter of 1824. In ear],
August, two stock-keepers employed by James Hobbs on his eati.
run at the Eastern Marshes, near Oatlands, arrived at Hobart with the
news that one of their fellow servants, James Doyle, had been speared
to death. A tribe the stock-keepers estimated at ‘no less than two
hundred' were responsible. According to the Hobart Town Gazette
this incident had begun with the unexpected appearance of the tribe
on the property. The stock-keepers were alarmed. To deter the tribe
from approaching the house they fired at them. However, ‘Owing to
the fire-arms being improperly discharged all at once, and not having
time to charge again, the Natives one and all suddenly advanced,
thereby compelling the men instantly to retreat, leaving their fallen
companion on the ground.’ The size of this group, which was much
bigger than Musquito's gang, indicates it was probably the Big River
tribe, thought to be the largest in the colony at the time. The story
also shows that the Aborigines were not the initiators of this violence,
so their assault on the men does not lend any obvious support to the
guerilla warfare thesis.
In fact, this account portrays a credible explanation for the escala.
tion of hostilities in the southern midlands at the time. The series of
murders committed by Musquito’s gang had left convict servants in
the affected districts alarmed by the appearance of any blacks. The
stockmen sought to defend themselves from what they imagined to
be the hostile intent of tribal Aborigines. So when these blacks
appeared on their run, the stockmen fired at them first, thereby caus-
ing an understandably violent response. As part of this process of set-
tling of scores, the same tribe made two more attacks, both non-fatal,
on Hobbs’s men at the Eastern Marshes property between August and
October.” But there were no reports that this tribe harassed any other
settlers that year. In other words, rather than guerilla warfare in
defence of their country, the Big River tribe were simply engaged in
retaliation for an unprovoked attack by convict stock-keepers upon
themselves.
Instead of warrior patriots, their record makes it clear that
Musquito, Black Jack and Black Tom were simply outlaws. They
were bushrangers who happened to be black. They were no more
plausip],
?* Hobart Town Gazette, 6 August 1824, p 2
? Hobart Town Gazette, 29 October 1824, p2
Pra: BLACK BUSHILANGEIGS AND THE OUTBREAK OF VIOLENCE 71
Van Diemen's Land from 1824 to 1826 experienced a renewed bout
ot bushranging. The most notorious of Musquito's white counterparts
was Matthew Brady, one of nine convicts who escaped from Mac-
quarie Harbour on 9 June 1824 and who committed murder, armed
robbery and other crimes against both settlers and the military for the
next two years. In response, the new Licutenant-Governor, George
Arthur, set up a number of military posts throughout the settled dis-
tricts and established his own field headquarters at Jericho at the head
of the 40th Regiment. He offered rewards for any accomplices who
informed on the bushrangers or for settlers who assisted in their cap-
ture."
Musquito was one of those with a price on his head. As a result,
the settler Gotfried Hanskey and a Tasmanian Aboriginal youth
named Teague tracked Musquito to Grindstone Bay on the east coast
where they found him camped on his own with two women. Teague
shot and wounded him. He was taken to Hobart on 12 August
1824.” Black Jack was arrested about the same time. Both were tried
and found guilty of murder, Musquito for the two killings at Grind-
stone Bay in 1823, Black Jack for killing the stock-keeper Patrick
McCarthy at Sorell Plains. Both were executed on 24 February
1825."
While these two were awaiting the hangman, a group from the
Oyster Bay tribe decided to ‘come in’ to the white settlement. This
was a completely unexpected development. ‘We announce with the
most cordial satisfaction,’ wrote the Hobart Town Gazette on 5
November 1824, ‘from some cause unknown, no fewer than sixty-
four Aborigines came into town on Wednesday, of their own accord,
and in a pacific manner well calculated to conciliate even those who
had been most prejudiced against them.” This was by far the largest
number of Aborigines to come as a body into any township on the
island. Lieutenant-Governor Arthur saw the visit as an opportunity to
display the goodwill and generosity of his government. He offered
the natives the Hobart market house as temporary accommodation,
had three large fires kindled for them, provided them with food and
clothing from the convict stores, and posted four constables 'to guard
their repose from interruption'. The day after their arrival, Arthur
issued a general order:
% Robson, History of Tasmania, Vol I, pp 141—4
37 Hobart Town Gazette. 20 August 1824 p 2; Knopwood, Diary, 12-15
August 1824; Melville, History of Van Diemen’s Land, p 37 n
38 Hobart Town Gazette, 25 February 1825, p 2; Melville, History of Van
Diemen’s Land, pp 37-9
39 Hobart Town Gazette, 5 November 1824, p 2
72
f<
THE FABRICATION OF Alc RIGINAL HISTORY
A body of the Natives having
Governor begs to request tha
towards them
come into Hobart Tow
t the utmost kindness i
, until some arrangement can be made I
for providing for their accommodation, and removing them to some
proper establishment, It is in particular very earnestly desired that no
its or other intoxicating liquor may be given them."
n, the Licutenan,
nay be manifested
oy the BOvernmey,
Spir
The Aborigines were subsequently moved across the river to Kan.
garoo Point (Bellerive) where huts were erected for them and the
were regularly supplied with fresh food and clothing. Arthur gave
them ‘the strongest assurances of protection’. For the next two years,
this community was supplied by the government, leaving the native;
‘in the habit of departing and returning as often as their own con-
venience dictated’.*' At this stage, Arthur did not believe he was fac.
ing any kind of general hostilities. He hoped that Kangaroo Point
might be the first stage in a process that would establish à native
institution, as Governor Macquarie had done at Parramatta in 1815,
and would eventually lead to the civilization of the Aborigines.
Over the next two years, Arthur made benevolent gestures to other
gatherings of Aborigines, such as the body of 160 who met at Birch’s
Bay in the D'Entrecasteaux Channel in April 1825, to whom he sent
a supply of rugs, blankets and bread." His hopes, however, were to
be disappointed. Instead of his hospitality and goodwill generating
peace between natives and colonists, Arthur eventually came to
believe that the growth of contact between the two races was the
very cause of the conflict he was trying to avoid.
After the execution of Musquito and Black Jack, the year 1825 was
comparatively less violent, even though assaults by Aborigines did
continue. In March, a group of eighty Aborigines killed two stöċk-
keepers employed by Jonathan Kinsey on the upper Macquarie
River." In April, James Hobbs's property near the Poem Marshes
again came under attack and one stockman was killed.? In the same
district that year, the Oatlands police magistrate, Thomas Anstey,
reported another stockman went missing, presumed killed, after an
40 Government and general order, 4 November 1824, British Parliamentary
Papers, 4, p 191 l
^! Report of the Aborigines Committee of 1830, and Arthur to Murray, 20
November 1830, British Parliamentary Papers, 4, pp 211, 232
42 Hobart Town Gazette, 5 November 1824, p 2
^ Hobart Town Gazette, 15 April 1825, p 2
^* Hobart Town Gazette, 25 March 1825, p 2, 1 April 1825, p2
^5 Report on outrages etc by Aborigines at Oatlands, AOT CSO
1/316/7578 p 774
Vit: MACK BUSEICANGEIUS AND THE OUTBILEAK OF VIOLENCE 73
attack by Aborigines." In September, a sawyer was speared le
near Green Ponds.” Anstey reported a further adh io d iv pend
bat did not specify what month, Aborigines Ex ehi ales "s
settler Robert Jones, of Four Square Gallows in the Osland jist i á
Black Tom was identified as leader of this mob who cni rur gd
hut "daring Jones to fire at them, threatening to put his wife into the
bloody river’. Nonetheless, the five deaths recorded here were c
only credibly reported killings of whites by blacks that year." This
compared to eight white deaths the year before. Veste: * 1825
the assaults that did occur were concentrated largely in the one
region, the southern midlands. The rest of the colony breathed easier
thinking the worst of the robbery and assaults were over. E
BLACK TOM AND THE OUTBREAK OF VIOLENCE IN 1826
In 1826, however, there was a substantial increase in violence by
Aborigines. In the first six months of the year there were nine sepa-
rate attacks on the colonists, leaving two settlers and three stockmen
dead and four other whites wounded. One of these attacks took place
in April at Oyster Bay in which a stock-keeper, Thomas Colley, was
killed.? In May, Jack and Dick, two Aborigines being provisioned by
the government at Kangaroo Point, were tried for this murder. They
were found guilty and sentenced to death. On 13 September they
were executed. 5! Those still camped at Kangaroo Point promptly left
and never returned.
In the spring and summer of 1826, Aboriginal violence accelerated.
From September to December they made fifteen separate assaults in
which nineteen settlers and stockmen were killed and five
wounded.” In most cases there is enough evidence to show that it
46 Report on outrages etc by Aborigines at Oatlands, AOT CSO
1/316/7578 p 779
47 Colonial Times, 29 September 1825, p 2
48 Report on outrages etc by Aboriginal tribes at Oatlands, AOT CSO
1/316/7578 p 762. Plomley, Aboriginal /Settler Clash, p 61, mistakenly dates
this incident in November 1826.
9 There was a report in the Colonial Times on 29 September 1826 that two
other men were killed about a year earlier, that is, in September 1825. But
neither the names of the men nor the location were given.
50 Colonial Times, 14 April 1826; 2 June 1826; Plomley, Friendly Mission, p
445, n 106
5! Colonial Times, 15 September 1826; Melville, History of Van Diemen’s Land,
p 56-8, has a critical report of their trial and execution.
3? Plomley, Aboriginal /Settler Clash, pp 61-2. The Hobart Town Gazette, 2
December 1826, p 2, reports two more killings of stockmen that Plomley’s
survey missed. The Report of the Aborigines Committee of 1830, British
74 Tur FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL History
Was Black Tom who was responsible.
Thomas Birch's household, Black Tom had been born into the
Oyster Bay tribe, He remembered his tribal infancy when he saw the
first. sailing ships arrive at Maria Island.” After the execution of
Musquito and Black Jack, he made contact with his old tribe and led
some of them on a series of robberies and murder of settlers and
stockmen throughout the southern midlands region. Of the twenty-
three attacks on settlers in all of Van Diemen's Land in 1826, fourteen
were either in the southern midlands or the adjacent settlements on
the Coal River, north of Pitt Water.
During 1826, Black Tom led between ten and thirty Aborigines,
including women and children. In April that year, he was part of an
attack at Dromedary Mountain in which the settler J. Browning was
killed, his assigned servant wounded, and his hut plundered.** He was
also present at the assault and robbery of three stockmen and their
Overseer at Jerusalem in June.? In November and December he was
seen in five separate incidents: at Millers Bluff on the Macquarie
River where the son of a settler was killed," at Penny Royal Creek
(Liffey River) below the Western Tiers, where a stock-keeper was
killed and his hut plundered;? at Cross Marsh near Green Ponds
where a sawyer was harassed and robbed, at Macquarie Plains south
of Abyssinia where two stockmen were murdered,” and at Brown
Mountain, north of Pitt Water, where a stockman was harassed.
After this last incident on 8 December, Black Tom was tracked by
the chief district constable at Sorell, Alexander Laing, and a troop of
the 40th Regiment. He was found camped with four other
Before he became part of
Parliamentary Papers, 4, p 211, records another two killings and one
wounding. u
5 Robinson, diary 19 November 1831, Friendly Mission, pp 524, 580 n 50.
Brian Plomley says these were probably the French vessels of the Baudin-
Péron expedition which visited Maria Island and Oyster Bay in February
1802. Tom would have been about two years old at the time.
54 Report on murders etc by Aborigines at New Norfolk, AOT CSO
1/316/7578 pp 792-3 l
5 Report on outrages etc by Aborigines at Richmond, AOT CSO
1/316/7578 p 832
5 Hobart Town Gazette, 6 January 1827 p 2
57 Colonial Times, 17 November 1826 p 3; a report in the Hobart Town
Gazette, 18 November 1826, also records a string of robberies, assaults and
murders by Black Tom, but most of these are the same as those reported in
footnotes 55—60.
58 Colonial Times, 1 December 1826 p 3
5 Hobart Town Gazette, 2 December 1826 p 2
60 Colonial Times, 15 December 1826, p 3
pue: Hi ACK BUSHILANGEIUS AND THE OUTBREAK OF VIOLENCE 75
Aargainal men, four women and a child. He was captured at
aight the following day."
As well as these assaults and robberies, there were another four in
which Black Tom was probably involved. Although he was not per-
gonally identified, the reports say that at least one of the natives ‘could
penne good English’. A black who spoke very good English was
unlikely to have been a tribal Aborigine. In one incident at the Shan-
non Raver in early November, the man cursed the whites in terms
known to be used by Black Tom: ‘fire, you white buggers’. The
Shannon River was normally inhabited by the Big River tribe, but
Tom later told George Augustus Robinson that he and his Oyster
Bay mob often ranged this far west, and even beyond to Lake Echo,
sometimes to rob settlers, at other times to fight wars with the Big
River tribe.” The other three incidents were at Tea Tree Brush near
Bagdad in June, at Pitt Water in September, and Macquarie Plains in
November, all within the vicinity of Tom's other assaults.^ Overall,
then, in 1826 Black Tom was positively identified with seven attacks
on settlers and probably responsible for another four.
In other words, Black Tom’s career in 1826 does have the potential
to be portrayed by a sympathetic historian as that of a leader of a
campaign by the Oyster Bay Aborigines to harass and expel the
invaders. Even though none of the proponents of the guerilla warfare
thesis have gone into his background in the detail provided here,
Black Tom seems just the person they need. He became much more
integrated with tribal Aborigines than the other black bushrangers,
Musquito and Black Jack. In fact, an Aborigine like Black Tom, who
returned to his people after a Western upbringing with an insider’s
view of the process of colonisation, would be just the sort of person
the guerilla warfare thesis would expect to lead an indigenous upris-
ing. In fact, at the height of Tom’s activities, this was the very opin-
ion expressed by the Colonial Times newspaper:
From black Tom and others, who, like him, have been reared among
Europeans, and who have ultimately absconded into the bush, the savages
have acquired a certain degree of the manners of the whites. Aboriginal
natives, who are reared from their earliest years among us, if even they
8 Colonial Times, 15 December 1826, p 3
Colonial Times, 10 November 1826 p 2. In one assault where he was
positively identified, Tom had said, ‘you white bugger, give me some more
bread, and fry some mutton for us’: Colonial Times, 15 December 1826, p 2
® Robinson, diary, 25 October 1830, 29 November 1831, 8 December
1831, Friendly Mission, pp 257, 534, 545
Colonial Times, 16 June 1826 p 3; Colonial Times, 29 September 1826 p 3;
Colonial Times, 10 November 1826 p 2; Wells to Arthur, 26 November
1826, AOT CSO 1/316/7578, p 13
76 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL History
should be kept until they arrive at maturity, always evince a disposit;
rejoin their black brethren, and when they do so, they carry nm a
those seeds of civilization which have been sown in their own Sun 2.
which they disseminate among their tribes, thereby rendering them; 5.
formidable by thus enlightening them — not that we arc enemies bis
civilization of the blacks — far from it, but as by nature they are prörè Ke
enmity against the Europeans; any increase of knowledge is only vitio,
up a flame within their bosoms, and by their becoming acquainted wae
our manners, they are less to be intimidated by us, as it is now clear that
fear alone has kept them so harmless as they have been. Now they are in
possession of cutlasses, pistols, muskets, bayonets, &c. which they have
learnt the use of by those who have been brought up (under the hope of
ameliorating their condition) in civilized society.”
Black Tom certainly had enough disdain for white authority to be
a rebel leader. After his capture, he was not sentenced to death for
any of the murders in which he was clearly implicated. Perhaps the
increase in assaults on settlers that occurred after the execution of the
Aborigines from Kangaroo Point made the colonial authorities wary
of repeating the exercise. He was convicted of inciting murder and
sentenced to be transported to the penal station at Macquarie Har-
bour for life. However, his white foster mother, Mrs Edmund
Hodgson, appealed to the Lieutenant-Governor and had him released
into her care, much to the chagrin of the local settlers.^ However, in
April and June 1827 he was again identified robbing and assaulting
workers on outlying stations in the southern midlands districts. He
was finally recaptured in November 1827. °”
Unfortunately for the guerilla warfare thesis, after his second cap-
ture Black Tom showed little inclination to act as the leader of the
Tasmanian national liberation front. Instead of confining him to
prison, the government discharged him by proclamation in July 1828
on condition that he work as a tracker and guide.? In this position,
& Colonial Times, 10 November 1826, p 3
% Plomley, Jorgen Jorgenson and the Aborigines, p 75; O'Connor to Arthur, 11
December 1827, AOT CSO 1/323/7578, pp 70-1
© Colonial Times, 20 April 1827, p 3; Colonial Times 29 June 1827, p 3;
` Hobart Town Courier, 17 November 1827, p 1; Plomley, Aboriginal/Settler
Clash, p 65. In his memoirs, the roving party leader, Jorgen Jorgenson,
wrote that in this last round of outlaw activities, Tom was with the Big
River tribe. However, Tom later discussed his actions several times with
George Augustus Robinson and always identified his tribe as the Oyster Bay
mob, who were traditional enemies of those at Big River: Plomley, Jorgen
Jorgenson and the Aborigines, p 75; Robinson, diary, 25 October 1830, 29
November 1831, 8 December 1831, Friendly Mission, pp 257, 534, 545
* George Hobler, diary, 29 July 1828, in The Diaries of ‘Pioneer’ George
Hobler, unpublished, ML, p 94
Viu: BLACK BUSEICANGEIUS AND THE OUTBREAK OF VIOLENCE 77
over the next four years he accompanied the expeditions the gov-
ermment sent out to capture other Aborigines. Black Tom's most no-
table achievement was to guide the party of Gilbert Robertson,
which in November 1828 captured the Stony Creek tribal chief,
Umarrah (or. Eumarrah). Subsequently, Black Tom and Umarrah
both acted as guides to the Friendly Mission expeditions of George
Augustus Robinson that finally rounded up the remaining tribal
Aborigines and shipped them off to Flinders Island. In this position,
the only challenge Tom gave to Robinson’s authority was over
Tom's unrestrained appetite for the native women of the party, sev-
eral of whom became his lovers, much to his white leader's discom-
fort. 'He is a bad man,’ Robinson complained. “There is not a woman
but he is endeavouring to cohabit with.” It was on the Friendly Mis-
sion's expedition at Emu Bay in the north of the island in May 1832
that Tom contracted dysentery and died."
PASTORALISM, FENCES AND LAND ACCESS
As noted at the start of this chapter, the guerilla warfare thesis
advances two explanations why violence broke out in 1824: the
destruction of native game that left the Aborigines to starve, and the
alienation of Aborigines from their traditional lands by the expansion
of pastoralism. Chapter Four will take up the claims about native
e and starvation. Here, let us discuss the second of these reasons,
which Henry Reynolds calls the underlying problem of the escalating
conflict: the fierce competition over use of, and access to, land. This
thesis has a number of flaws.
For a start, its account of the growth of the pastoral economy up to
1824 is grossly exaggerated. Lyndall Ryan claims the year 1820 was
crucial for European-Aboriginal relations. By that year, she says, the
colonists had already ‘effectively depleted’ the Oyster Bay and North
Midlands tribes, even though ‘the Europeans occupied less than 15
er cent of Van Diemen's Land'." This statement gives the impres-
sion that the land alienated at the time amounted to something
approaching 15 per cent of the island, whereas in reality it was only a
fraction of this. According to Sharon Morgan’s detailed study of early
6 Robinson, diary, 20 December 1830, 24 December 1830, 1 September
1831, 8 September 1831, 10 September 1831, Friendly Mission, pp 298, 299,
418, 421-3
7 Plomley, Jorgen Jorgenson and the Aborigines, p 75; Robinson, diary 16 May
1832, Friendly Mission, p 608
71 Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 81
78 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
land grants, between 1803 and 1820 they amounted to 85 370 ac
thic "NC apa . 3 1 7 = ASKEN
which was a mere 0.5 per cent of land in the colony."
In 1823, there were 441,871 acres alloc
\ | ated in 1027 grants, by far
the largest area alienated in a single year. In some cases the grant
ses, ants
made that year went to settlers who were
already occupying the land
rants were not taken up until
The 1823 grants, however, still brc
the total land alienated since 1803 to only 527,241 acres, or 3.
cent of the island.
Ryan is also wrong about the size of the individual grants made
and their purpose. She says settlers arrived from London with letters
recommending they be granted between 400 and 800 hectares, or
990 to 1980 acres, on which they were to grow wool for the textile
mills of northern England.”* In reality, however, the early 1820s saw 4
continuation of the previous policy of small land grants. In 1820 the
average grant was 160 acres, in 1821 the average was 406 acres, in
1822 no land grants were made, and in 1823 the average was 430
acres.” A 400-acre farm was too small for profitable wool growing.
Rather than a pastoral economy based on sheep grazing, settlement in
the early 1820s was characterized by the same kind of small-scale
mixed farming as the previous two decades. A small number of fine
wool Merino rams were imported after 1820 but most sheep were
bred not for the export of their fleeces but for local consumption. In
1823, the royal commissioner and colonial investigator, J. T. Bigge,
observed that the predominant type of sheep in Van Diemen’s Land
was a mixture of Teeswater, Leicester and Bengal, breeds raised for
meat rather than wool.” In other words, Ryan’s attempt to provide a
quasi-Marxist explanation for the outbreak of Aboriginal violence in
1824, by linking it to developments in the imperial economy, does
not work.
The same is true of Henry Reynolds’s argument about the enclo-
sure of the land. As noted earlier, he claims that, as well as construct-
ing stone houses and farm buildings, the settlers laid out ‘miles of
fencing’ and planted ‘extensive hedgerows’. Reynolds’s evidence for
this came from only one contemporary comment by the Launceston
land owner Richard Dry, who told Archdeacon Broughton’s 1830
concerned, but in other cases the g years
later, and sometimes never.?? i
ter, and sometimes never. "ught
1 per
? Morgan, Land Settlement in Early Tasmania, p 13. These are my calculations
from her Table 1.1. Tasmania has an area of 26,393 square miles, or 68,358
square kilometres, or 16,891,520 acres.
? Morgan, Land Settlement in Early Tasmania, p 155
™ Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 83
? Morgan, Land Settlement in Early Tasmania, p 13. My calculations from
Table 1.1
7^ Morgan, Land Settlement in Early Tasmania, p 59
NE o umm
Due: BLACK BUSHILANGEILS AND THE OUTBREAK OF VIOLENCE 79
nmmctee of inquiry that the cause of Aboriginal hostility was their
^ ` ' it "p ‘ a
Axluwen. from their traditional land. They ‘daily witness our en-
à T
couchinent in the extensive Fences erected [sic] by the Settlers’.
rhe only other observation of this kind cited by Reynolds was made
in 1852 by John West in his History of Tasmania. West attributed the
outbreak of conflict to economic development and the enclosure of
the land. West wrote:
The rapid colonisation of the island from 1821 to 1824, and the diffusion
of settlers and servants through districts hitherto unlocated, added to the
irritation of the natives, and multiplied the agents of destruction. and
unfenced, and flocks and herds moving on hill and dale, left the motns
of the native hunters free; but hedges and homesteads were signals which
even the least rationality could not fail to understand, and on every reap-
pearance the natives found some favorite spot surrounded by new enclo-
sures, and no longer theirs."
This has all the appearance of a plausible scenario. As its author
says, even ‘the least rationality’ would find it understandable. Like the
jstoralism thesis, however, it exaggerates the degree to which the
settlers had alienated the land at the time.
When the early colonial government made a land grant, it required
the settler to ‘cultivate, fence and improve’ the property for five years
before he obtained freehold title." Despite these regulations, the
enclosure of properties was a slow process that only occurred years
after the granting of land. The evaluator of colonial policy J. T. Bigge
complained when he saw this in Van Diemen’s Land in 1820. “The
cultivated lands of each farm are entirely open, and except an estate of
Colonel Davey and one of Mr Lord, I did not observe a single
fence. There were three reasons for this: the expense, the lack of
surveyed boundaries, and the fact that the agricultural practice of the
time did not require grazing livestock to be fenced.
7 Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 30, citing AOT CSO 1/323/7578, p 289
(it is actually on p 290). The original document containing Dry’s comment
said ‘the extensive fences erecting by the Settlers’, not ‘erected’, as
transcribed by Reynolds. This might seem a minor point but Dry was using
the present tense to indicate that the fences were now being erected in 1830,
rather than erected several years earlier when the violence began.
8 West, History of Tasmania, p 272, cited Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 31
? Anne McKay (ed.), Journals of the Land Commissioners for Van Diemen’s
Land 1826-28, University of Tasmania and Tasmanian Historical Research
Association, Hobart, 1962, p 25
8 J, T. Bigge, Report of the Commissioner of Inquiry, on the State of Agriculture
and Trade in the Colony of New South Wales, London, 1823, cited by R. M.
Hartwell, The Economic Development of Van Diemen's Land 1820-1850,
Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1954, p 129
S0 Tur FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL Hist RY
The first colonial fence
5 were constructed ‘in the American mar
ner. This meant that w
hen land was cleared, the felled timber wy,
split and fences were constructed by post and rail without nails, which,
were in short supply." Fences of palings needed nails, so were not
common, There was no fencing wire in the early nineteenth centur,
so there were none of the timber and wire fences that we now associ.
ate with the Australian pastoral landscape. In 1824, Edward Curr
complained about the appearance of the settled areas, with their ab.
sence of English hedgerows and their prevalence of American log
fences." The cumbersome and expensive construction of log fence;
meant they were preserved only for the most necessary enclosures: to
keep livestock from gardens, vegetables, orchards and crops, and to
isolate stud animals. In the 1820s, some settlers began to plant the
hawthorn hedges that remain part of the Tasmanian landscape today.
However, this was also a slow and expensive process. The plants had
to survive several months of sea transport from England and one mile
of hedgerow required between 8000 and 10,500 plants. The early
hedges were used primarily as windbreaks for the house, and were
planted close to it. Before the 1830s, Sharon Morgan writes, ‘stone
walls were almost unknown, and hedges were rare’.
Until the land commissioners were appointed in 1826, the colony
was largely bereft of surveyors. Land grants were rarely based on pre-
cise boundaries and settlers were unclear about the exact demarcation
of their properties. Hence boundary fences were few.** This led to
one of the colony’s most common sources of dispute. On memesi
properties that lacked natural barriers, livestock invaded neighbours
land, became intermixed with other stock and spread disease. There
were so many quarrels over this problem that a law was uae aced in
1820 appointing pound-keepers to impound wandering stock.
When the three land commissioners made a complete tour of the
settled districts between 1826 and 1828, they complained about how
many properties were unfenced. They found the wealthiest man in
the colony, David Lord, was in possession of 20,000 acres of prime
land in the midlands and south-east. In the central midlands, from
Murderers Plains to York Plains, Lord had bought up and consoli-
8! King to Bowen, 18 October 1803, Historical Records of Australia, III, I, p
205
82 Morgan, Land Settlement in Early Tasmania, p 142, citing Edward Curr, An
Acount of the Colony of Van Diemen's Land, Principally Designed for the Use of
Emigrants, London, 1824
? Morgan, Land Settlement in Early Tasmania, pp 96, 142
*! Morgan, Land Settlement in Early Tasmania, p51
8° McKay (ed.) Journals of the Land Commissioners, p 87-8; Morgan, Land
Settlement in Early Tasmania, p 63
Duae: BLACK BUSHILCANGPIUS AND THE OUTIREAK OF VIOLENCE — 81
mV the choicest farms to create one extended property covering
wt ot the district, on which he grazed 1500 head of cattle and 4500
ay
rhe only improvement he makes on all these Farms, is one miserable Log
Hut upon Williams's hundred acre grant, He does not cut one Tree, he
makes no Fences, save enclosing about five or six acres, he employs no
more Men that suffice to keep his Sheep together, the Cattle being
allowed to roam a distance of eighteen or twenty miles ...°°
The land commissioners were fierce defenders of small farmers who
d establish a small property of from 100 to 400 acres. They
d of the practice whereby wealthy landowners had been
acreages around prime sites such as river fronts and springs,
thereby rendering all the adjoining land suitable only for stock runs,
which they left unfenced and unimproved. How could the small
farmer who wanted to improve his property, the commissioners asked
rhetorically, *afford to sell his Sheep, his Cattle, his Wool on the same
terms as men such as Simpson, Ritchie, Stocker, Gibson and Field
and such like? who possess themselves of immense Tracts, and who
often do not even support one Stock-keeper ...' They also cited the
example of Edward Lord, who had 30,000 acres of land, which ‘is at
resent nothing but Stock runs, occupied by ruffians of Stock keepers
under no controul, galloping after wild Cattle in every direction’.*”
Even by 1829, there were still very few fences in the colony. That
year, in his book The Present State of Van Diemen’s Land, H. Widow-
son complained this remained true not only of grazing land but even
of much of that under crops. ‘A great deal of land at present under
cultivation has never been enclosed,’ he wrote, ‘and much of it only
fenced in with the branches of trees piled on each other.’*
The most common reason for the lack of fences was that it was not
the practice to fence grazing animals, especially sheep, at the time.
The task of overseeing a flock belonged to the shepherd or stock-
keeper. Settlers had convict servants to fill this role. No one at the
time believed sheep needed fencing because they confined themselves
to pastures, did not forage in the woods and, apart from properties on
the edge of the mountain tiers where Tasmanian tigers were a prob-
lem, required little protection from predators. As Sharon Morgan
herself records, sheep were not fenced or penned. They roamed free
and fed at will. The replacement of shepherds and hut-keepers by
coul
despaire
granted
% McKay (ed.) Journals of the Land Commissioners, p 52
7 McKay (ed.) Journals of the Land Commissioners, p 12
% H, Widowson, The Present State of Van Diemen's Land, London, 1829,
cited by Hartwell, Economic Development of Van Diemen's Land, p 127
9 Morgan, Land Settlement in Early Tasmania, pp 57-8
R2 Tur FABRICATION OF ANORIGINAL HISTORY
the now-familiar practice of grazing sheep in fenced paddocks w4.
not widely adopted by the pastoral industry in Australia
1870s."
In other words, the portrait by Henry Reynolds of early Tasmanian
farms being surrounded by ‘miles of fencing’ that inhibited Aboriginal
passage is an anachronistic myth derived from a late nineteenth-cen.
tury vision of the pastoral landscape. In the 1820s, no matter what the
size of the farm, fences enclosed only a few acres, usually around the
house, garden, orchard, crops, stud and dairy. The bulk of the prop-
erty, with its pastures cleared for grazing, was invariably unfenced.
As the footnotes to this chapter acknowledge, a number of the facts
it relies upon come from Sharon Morgan's 1992 study, Land Settle-
ment in Early Tasmania. Morgan has performed the industrious task of
collating a great deal of information about the early land grants and
the uses to which the colonists put them. Her study is rich in facts but
poor, sadly, in interpretation. Such is the power of the now dominant
paradigm in Tasmanian history that, even though her own informa-
tion about the dearth of enclosure goes against the thesis advanced by
Reynolds, Ryan and West, she cannot see it herselt. In her chapter
on relations between settlers and Aborigines, she writes:
until the
The buildings and fences considered by many colonists as signs of Euro-
pean civilisation impeded the path of Aborigines and caused resentment.
Fences and hedges, slow though they were to be built, hindered the
natives’ progress over traditional hunting grounds. Friction was natural.’
This is a victory of theory over evidence. Morgan's own account
of just how slowly the fences and hedges were actually built proves
that up to 1823, when her study ends, there were far too few of them
to hinder much of the progress of the Aborigines at all.
? Keith Hancock, Discovering Monaro, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1972, pp 122-4
°! Morgan, Land Settlement in Early Tasmania, p 155
CHAPTER FOUR
i arfare thesis and the motives
rhe guerilla warfare thesis
of the Aborigines, 1824-1831
with the Australian newspaper in 1995 to launch his
book Fate of a Free People, Henry Reynolds described the guerilla
war waged by the Tasmanian Aborigines as a struggle of erede
proportions. ‘It was the biggest internal threat that Austr: : as dd
had. The Tasmanians, he said, were a superior force of gue a
&ehters who outclassed the bumbling, red-coated British soldiers who
ioa trained for the open fields of Europe, not the dense bush of Van
Diemen's Land. Before the Aborigines were finally overcome, the
Black War had taken 400 to 500 lives on both sides, a per capita
death toll Reynolds claimed was much higher than Australia suffered
in either World War One or World War Two. The Aborigines who
died were patriots, he said, killed on their home soil in defence of
their country, but their deaths have gone unrecognized. He wanted
the Australian War Memorial Act amended so that the Australian
National War Memorial could honour these guerilla fighters. Until
this happened, the Canberra war memorial ‘discriminates against the
Aborigines as a matter of policy’, he said. ‘Anzac Day will never be an
inclusive national day until the nation also commemorates and
mourns black Australians who died defending their homelands from
It an interview
S40 THE FABRICATION Ol ABORIGINAL HISTORY
invading Europeans, The Tasmanian guerillas were pot ot)
patriots, Reynolds said, they were also honourable
their British adversaries,
the T
fighters, unlike
‘It is clear from the reference material tha:
Wmanians were entirely motivated by self-defence, that they
Were not the aggressors,’ They were also more chivalrous. While
Reynolds claimed there were countless instances of black women
being raped by the Europeans during the war, he could find no refer
ence to Aborigines acting in a similar way.’
Some people reading these statements might dismiss them as mar-
keting hype, nothing more than a bevy of sensational claims designed
to draw attention to a new book. Reynolds, however, is serious
about all these points. He concludes Fate of a Free People with the
same demands for the National War Memorial and Anzac Day to
commemorate the guerillas of the Black War and others on the
mainland, and he has repeated them often in public speeches over the
past five years.? This chapter is an examination of the validity of this
case. As the previous chapter argued, the events of the first three years
of the so-called 'Black War' from 1824 to 1826 cannot reasonably be
interpreted as frontier warfare. This chapter provides a summary of
actions by Aborigines over the whole period 1824 to 1831, a critique
of orthodox versions of the story, and an alternative interpretation of
what actually happened. Ea
From 1824 to 1831 inclusive, there were a total of 729 incidents of
conflict between Aborigines and settlers. As Table 4.1 shows, the
period known as the Black War saw a total of 187 settlers killed and
211 wounded. The most intense period of hostilities was from 1828
to 1830. The worst year for violence against the person was 1828 in
which a total of 151 settlers or their convict servants were killed,
wounded or assaulted, but the year with the most number of hostile
incidents was clearly 1830. Given the size of the white population,
which increased from 12,303 people in 1824 to 26,640 in 1831, the
tally of casualties meant that roughly 2 per cent of the white popula-
tion were serious victims of Aboriginal assaults. On these grounds,
Reynolds is technically correct in his estimate of the scale of casual-
ties. The World War One total of 213,000 killed and wounded rep-
resented 4 per cent of the then Australian population of 5 million.
! Bruce Montgomery, ‘The First Patriots’, Australian, 3 April 1995, Features
p 10; Henry Reynolds, ‘A War to Remember’, Weekend Australian, 1-3
April 1995, Features p 3
? Bruce Montgomery, "The First Patriots’, p 10; Henry Reynolds, Fate of a
Free People, Penguin, Ringwood, 1995, p 64
? Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 211
pour: GUERILLA WARFARE THESIS AND MOTIVES OF THE ABORIGINES 85
PANLE 4.1 INCIDENTS AND ASSAULTS BY ABORIGINES ON
SETTLERS, VAN DIEMEN'S LAND, 1824-1831
So
Settlers Settlers Settlers, Dwellings Dwellings Assaults on Total
and and ser- servants plundered sct on fire stock/crops number
servants vants assaulted, and “stacks ofin
killed — wounded harassed destroyed dents
1824 10 2 3 1 2 0 11
1825 8 3 4 7 1 2 14
1826 21 6 13 13 1 0 29
1827 36 16 26 21 4 7 78
1828 40 48 63 63 8 12 146
1829 29 58 40 74 5 5 153
1830 32 53 57 115 9 8 227
1831 11 25 27 29 5 1 24
Total 187 211 233 323 32 35 729
C mmm
Source: N. J. B- Plomley, The Aboriginal /Settler Clash in Van Diemen's Land
1803-1831 (1992). This is a compilation from Plomley's tables 2, 5, 5 and 6.
The separate figures for those killed and wounded are calculated from his
appendix. The table includes assaults on the property and employees of the
Van Diemen's Land Company, which Plomley lists separately. The total
killed also includes three people Plomley listed as wounded (Esther Gough p
72, William Gangell p 94 and Mrs Cunningham, p 97) who later died from
their wounds. The number of incidents each year is less than the total of
separate offences such as killings, assaults, robberies and arson because some
incidents involved several offences. Plomley employed research assistants to
go through the archival records and newspapers of the time to compile a
tally of all incidents of violence. He produced a relatively sound piece of
work, whose sources I have double-checked. There are a small number of
mistakes, especially with page numbering of archive documents, and some
others mentioned in relevant footnotes, but overall the survey is largely true
to the originals, and there are only a few omissions to be found. Where there
are different versions of the one incident, Plomley resists the habit of most of
the orthodox school of always using the one most favourable to the Aborigi-
nes. Anyone pursuing Plomley's references in the Archives Office of Tasma-
nia needs to know the shorthand he adopted. He was working mainly from
the Colonial Secretary's Office file no. 1/316/7578 and a reference in his
survey such as ‘CSO 832’ is actually to CSO 1/316/7578 page 832.
SO Tut FABRICATION OF Alc WUGINAL HISTORY
The World War Two total of 45,000 killed ai
cent of the population of 7.5 million.’ So cas
nists of Van Diemen's Land lie proportiona
id wounded was ().6 v,
D per
ualties among the cole
g : lo
tely in between, [f NOE
added the number of Aborigines killed and wounded to the "Tasr,
nian total this would not change things much because, as Chapter
Ten documents, Aboriginal casualties were much lower than white.
But whatever adjustments we make, the numbers are hardly com
parable. The relatively tiny total in Tasmania is so out of proportion
to the numbers affected during the two world wars as to make com-
parison completely meaningless. As for these losses amounting to ‘the
greatest internal threat Australia has ever had’, this is a tabloid head-
line grabber, not a serious historical proposition.
Reynolds’s claim that the Aborigines were more gallant towards
women than their white counterparts is equally implausible. It is true
that there are no records of Tasmanian Aborigines raping white
women during the ‘Black War’, but they nonetheless murdered and
assaulted a number of them in circumstances that were disturbing
enough. One of the worst incidents occurred on 9 October 1828
near Oatlands where Aborigines killed the wife of Patrick Gough and
her daughter, aged four years. Both were speared, then clubbed to
death. They severely wounded another daughter, aged seven, and a
baby thirteen months old. They also killed the Goughs’ neighbour,
Anne Geary, putting an axe through her skull and spearing her several
times in the breast. The inquest into their deaths heard that, before
she died of her wounds, Esther Gough told how she fell to her knees
before her attackers and begged: ‘Spare the lives of my Picaninies',
One of the blacks replied in good English: ‘No you white bitch, we'll
kill you all.”
In both the Geary and Gough family killings, the natives waited
until the men were absent before attacking their huts. They did the
same two weeks later at Green Ponds when fifteen to twenty Abo-
rigines found the wife and two children of the Langford family at
home. The mother held her small son trying to protect him, but the
Aborigines speared him to death in her arms. They also speared his
fourteen-year-old sister, but she and her mother survived their
wounds.5 On 10 June 1830, some natives went to rob a dwelling at
iA
* Battle casualties in World War I and World War II, Australians: Historical
Statistics, ed. Wray Vamplew, in Australians: A Historical Library, Fairfax
Syme and Weldon, Sydney, 1987, pp 414-5
? Proceedings of an inquest on the bodies of Anne
11 October 1828, AOT CSO 1/316/7578
Burnett, 21 December 1830, AOT CSO 1
^ In this incident, Plomley, in Aborigi
records the daughter, not the son
Four: GUERRILLA WARFARE THESIS AND MOTIVES OF THE ABORIGINES 87
Dennistoun, near Bothwell on the Clyde River. The men were not
t home but Mary Daniels was there caring for her five-month-old
The Aborigines killed all three of them.’ Henry Reynolds
spares his readers details of this kind and thus avoids the need to
explain how the killing of little children and babies fitted into
Aboriginal guerilla warfare strategy.” All told, between 1824 and
1831, the Aborigines killed ten white women and seven children, and
wounded fifteen white women and nine children.’ That is, more than
white casualties were women and children.
TWINS.
ten per cent of
THE ‘STARVING NATIVES’ THESIS
Brian Plomley has argued that the impact of British colonisation on
Tasmanian Aboriginal culture was devastating. Within two decades it
roduced such a crisis within their society that the Aborigines were
reduced to starvation. ‘With the spread of settlement,’ Plomley says,
‘the Aborigines were deprived of their natural living areas, and this
led both to a disruption of their normal lives and to an increasing
scarcity of food and eventually to starvation. He says this was the
underlying cause of why the Aborigines adopted guerilla warfare:
After 1824 the attacks were purposeful, being motivated by a need to
drive the settlers from their territories in order to live their natural lives, as
well as by the starvation which was the outcome of that territorial occu-
pation."
Sharon Morgan agrees that hunger was one of the main reasons the
Aborigines took up violence:
October 1828, p 1, and Anstey to Burnett, 21 December 1830, AOT CSO
1/316/7578 p 766, named the boy, John Langford, as the fatality. Hobart
Town Courier, 1 November 1828, p 2, has further details.
7 ‘Nominal list of inquisitions held by Mr Anstey’, AOT CSO 1/316/7578,
pp 760-1; Hobart Town Courier, 19 June 1830, p 2
8 Reynolds does include the Gough family killings in a brief list of assaults
near Jericho. However, he provides no details such as the ages of the victims
or the circumstance of their death: Fate of a Free People, p 58. Moreover, he
omits any mention of the Langford or Daniels family killings.
9 This is a tally from the appendix to Plomley, Aboriginal/Settler Clash.
Plomley recorded Mrs Gough as wounded, as well as Mrs Cunningham,
who was attacked east of the Tamar in March 1831, as wounded. However,
both later died from their wounds, as two separate passages in George
Augustus Robinson’s diary make clear: Friendly Mission, pp 341, 455 n 155.
So the total here has two more female deaths than Plomley’s survey.
10 Plomley, Aboriginal/Settler Clash, p 12
1 Plomley, Aboriginal /Settler Clash, p 23
NN. Tut FABRICATION OF ADOILIGINAI HISTORY
Faced with ever-decreasing indigenous food sources, the Natives
forced to turn to European foodstuffs. This too caused friction:
settlers could not, or would not, see that they had destroyed the i
food chain and therefore saw no obligation to feed the people the
dispossessed,”
Were
Marry
land 4
y had
The notion of native starvation is now routinely passed off 45 4
truth so obvious it needs no empirical support. In his 1997 ABC
vision series, Frontier, Henry Reynolds claimed that the Tasmanian
tribes endured seven long years of war and hunger before they were
defeated." In a public debate with me in Sydney in November 2000,
he rejected the explanations I advanced for Aboriginal behaviour in
Van Diemen’s Land, claiming the cause was self-evident: ‘They were
starving,’ he said.'* Similarly, in her ABC Boyer lectures in 1999,
Inga Clendinnen repeated the claim, without specifically mentioning
Tasmania but with the thesis of its historians no doubt in mind. ‘Tt is
painfully clear that in some regions the food balance, always precari-
ous, tipped towards active starvation with white intrusion.'?
The one thing that is painfully clear, however, is that none of these
authors have bothered to think the issue through, let alone investigate
the evidence. Of all the claims about the impact of British settlement
on Aboriginal society, the thesis about starving natives is the least
plausible. There are two reasons that make it dubious in itself but
which none of these writers ever consider. First, when the hostilities
began in 1824, as Chapter Three demonstrated, the settlers had occu-
pied only 3.1 per cent of land in Tasmania. This land, of course,
contained some of the best pasture, and when roads and public con-
structions were added, the settled areas actually contained more land
than that officially granted to individual colonists. Nonetheless, the
non-alienated land still accounted for about 95 per cent of the island,
leaving plenty of fodder for kangaroos, emus, possums, wombats and
other native game. It is true, as Chapter Two records, that in the
early days of the colony the white settlers themselves supplemented
their supplies by hunting native game, mainly kangaroo. However,
this only lasted until January 1811 when more reliable supplies of tra-
tele-
12 Sharon Morgan, Land Settlement in Early Tasmania, Cambrid
Press, Melbourne, 1992, p 156
13 Episode One, ‘1788-1830 They must always consider us as enemies’,
Frontier, ABC Television, 5 March 1997
14 Reynolds, public debate with Keith Windschuttle, Bob Gould and Padd
McGuinness, Gould's Book Arcade, Newtown, 12 November 2000 d
15 [nga Clendinnen, True Stories, Boyer Lectures 1999, Australian
Broadcasting Corporation, ABC Books, 1999, p 48
ge University
FOUR: GUERILLA WARPARE THESIS AND MOTIVES OF THE ABORIGINES 89
ish food became available." Moreover, the settlers occu-
pied only a very small proportion of the coastline and estuaries from
which several tribes gained food such as shellfish, crayfish (the Abo-
ines did not eat scaled fish), swans, ducks and eggs. According to
dienal Brit
R :
the settler and roving party leader, Jorgen Jorgenson, the seasonal vis-
its to the seacoast by those tribes who gathered shellfish and eggs were
"lett uninterrupted’, even during the height of the ‘Black War."
Second, these writers forget what they have argued elsewhere
about the size of the Aboriginal population. Plomley says the pre-
contact population was about 5500. By the time of the ‘Black War it
had declined to less than one-tenth of that figure." Reynolds says
there were between 5000 and 7000 Tasmanians before white settle-
ment. By 1824, he claims this figure had fallen to 1500 and by 1851 it
was down to 350." Yet both of them want us to believe that this dra-
matic decline in the human population was accompanied by an even
greater decline in the population of kangaroos, possums and other
native game. However, if there were fewer Aboriginal mouths to
feed and thus far fewer animals that needed killing, the native game
population of Tasmania should have seen a corresponding increase. In
fact, the number of game animals — whose populations had been
regulated by thousands of years of human hunting — should have
soared once their principal predator was all but removed from the
natural environment. The thesis that the animal population would
have done the opposite — toppling from a peak in 1803 when it
could feed 5000 people to a trough in 1824 when it left 500 Aborigi-
nes to starve — is inherently implausible. A decline in the number of
hunters, other things being equal, will always cause an increase in the
number of the hunted.
Like all good hypotheses, this last one is confirmed by the empirical
data. One piece of information the orthodox historians are careful to
keep from their readers is that Reverend Broughton's Aborigines
Committee of 1830 investigated this very question. The committee
inquired if there was a shortage of native game and, if so, whether
this could have been a cause of the hostilities. The Oatlands land-
16 Marie Fels, ‘Culture Contact in the County of Buckinghamshire, Van
Diemen’s Land 1803-11’, Tasmanian Historical Research Association Papers and
Proceedings, June 1982, pp 50-9
1 N. J. B. Plomley (ed.), Jorgen Jorgenson and the Aborigines of Van Diemen’s
Land, Blubber Head Press, Hobart, 1991, p 78
18 Plomley, Aboriginal/Settler Clash, p 10. He cites H. M. Hull’s 1866 guess
that there were 340 Aborigines remaining in 1824 but says that is probably
too low. He says a more realistic figure would be about 350 by 1831.
? Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 4; Henry Reynolds, An Indelible Stain?
Viking, Melbourne, 2001, p 71
90.— Tur FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
owner James Hobbs told them the natives werc ii
garoos; they could still kill fifty or sixty of them at a time. George.
Espie complained that native game like kangaroos and possums were
in such numbers that they constituted a problem for Big River farm-
en like himself because they destroyed pease and wheat.” The Clyde
River landowner, Patrick Wood, observed in a letter to the commit-
tee that ‘there can have been no scarcity of food as the Kangaroo at
present seem to be more numerous than at any former period'?! The
committee’s conclusion was that ‘the Kangaroo actually
the districts most frequented by the natives’ .””
The local press took a similar view. The Hobart Town Courier ob-
served in 1832 that ‘the numbers of the kangaroo seem daily and
rapidly to increase’. It continued:
1 DO want of kar,
abounds in
Whether this arises from the latterly diminished slaughter among them,
owing to the decrease of the blacks who formerly fed upon them, or from
the effects of the dog act, which induced many to destroy their dogs and
to desist from the chase, or from the relish which the animal itself has ac-
quired for the corn and other artificial food it finds upon the cultivated
farms we cannot say, but certain it is, that not only patches, but whole
acres of corn in many situations are this year destroyed by their nightly
inroads, coming as they do in droves of fifties and hundreds. As an
instance we may mention that on Mr Gunn’s farm on the Coal river
alone, a fine field of 5 acres of wheat has lately been completely eaten
down by them.”
Other empirical data confirming this assessment was recorded in
the journals of George Augustus Robinson, who set out with a party
in January 1830 to traverse the island to recruit Aborigines for his
proposed sanctuary for them in Bass Strait. Plomley, the editor of
these journals, tries to argue that Robinson found ‘a depletion of food
supplies in areas not actually occupied due to the activity of kangaroo
hunters’.* Before he set out, Robinson himself was prepared to
believe this. On 23 November 1829 he wrote that there was 4 tradi-
. ? Minutes of Evidence, Committee for the A
February, 9 March 1830, British Parliamentary
219, 222
*! Wood to Aborigines Committee, 7 March 1830, AOT CSO 1/323/7578
p 296 :
? Report of the Aborigines Commi
Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 216
? Hobart Town Courier, 14 January 1832, p 2
^ N. J. B. Plomley, "The causes of the extinc
Appendix 4 of Friendly Missio
a
Augustus Robinson 1829-1834, Tasmanian Histories od Papers of George
Hobart, 1966, p 964
ffairs of the Aborigines, 23
Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, pp
ttee, 19 March 1830, British Parliamentary
pours GUEICILLA WAILPARE THESIS AND MOTIVES OF THE ABORIGINES 91
ien among the Aborigines that the white men ‘have driven them
into the forests, have killed their game and thus robbed them of their
chiet subsistence’. However, Robinson and his party of up to four-
teen convict servants and Aboriginal guides found no trouble in living
ott the land for the next two years. Everywhere they went on the
island they killed fresh game each day. Plomley’s claim about the
depletion of food supplies is denied by the evidence of the very work
he edited. Here is a sample of extracts from Robinson’s diary, selected
for their geographic and seasonal diversity:
23 May 1830, south of Sandy Cape on the west coast: Kangaroo abounds
very much in this part of the country.
17 August 1830, in the Surrey Hills in the north-west: The kangaroo were in
droves, bounding away in every direction, and resembled a troop of
horsemen galloping one after the other.
22 August 1830, on the Wilmot River in the north-west: The kangaroo
bounded before us as we passed. ... The whole of this country abounds
with game.
20 and 21 October 1830, near Cape Portland on the north-east coast: Saw sev-
eral hundreds of swans and numerous ducks and pelicans; an abundance of
young swan was swimming about and above a hundred swan's nests stud-
ded the water. I never saw so many before ... My natives swam to the
nests and obtained near a hundred eggs ... The kangaroo bounded before
us in every direction.
8 and 9 January 1831, south of St Patricks Head, on east coast: Saw numerous
kangaroo all this day, and wild cattle ... The natives killed five swans in
this river with stones, and two teal or ducks, which they ate ... On
crossing over some hills saw many boomer kangaroo, which would fre-
quently sit upon their hind quarters and cock up their ears and wait our
approach.
23 July 1831, inland from Ringarooma Bay in the north-east: Towards the
close of this afternoon came to a large plain of tolerable good feed; it was
of great extent and abounded in kangaroo ... I named it Kangaroo Park.
11 August 1831, near Anson’s River on the east coast: Caught today eight
kangaroo.
21 October 1831, adjacent settled districts, just north of Eastern Marshes: Kan-
garoo bounded before us in our way ... Kangaroo as before in abundance.
3 November 1831, within settled districts, property of Sir John Owen, just south
of Oatlands: The kangaroo bounded before us in all directions ... The
natives caught numerous opossums today. This animal is in abundance.
25 Robinson, diary, 23 November 1829, Friendly Mission, p 88
92 qur FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
5 November 1831, near Bothwell, on the Clyde River: Travelled over some
grassy hills, the kangaroo bounding in all directions around us and which
Were frequently chased by the natives and dogs.
28 and 29 November 1831, on the central plateau, north of Lake Echo: Kan-
groo was here in great numbers: from where I stood I counted fifty
feeding on the acclivity of the plain. Numerous wild cattle was here also
grazing, and the kangaroo might be seen feeding by the side of the cattle.
The natives caught seven kangaroo this evening ... kangaroo is in abun-
dance so that there would be no fear of their wanting food ... The natives
also caught several young ducks which they gave to me as a present.
Moreover, Robinson often recorded his concern about how very
wasteful of game his Aboriginal companions were:
2 November 1830, near Anson’s River: The natives hunted as they went
along and killed a great number of kangaroo, but left them behind, put-
ting them upon some fallen timber where they could be seen. Having a
long way to go the people did not carry them, yet they hunted with the
same zest as if they was starving for food. The kangaroo was exceeding
numerous.
20 and 23 October 1831, east of Oatlands: Caught abundance of kangaroo,
which the natives leave behind after cutting off the tail and hind legs ...
The natives hunted as on the previous day, and when they had obtained a
kangaroo would cut off the tail and hind legs, leaving the thighs and
carcass behind.
These diary entries describe conditions in the east, west, north, the
central midlands and the central plateau of the island, including areas
both distant from and close to the settled districts, during all four
seasons. None of them paint a picture of a countryside depleted of
game in which natives would starve.
Rather than exhausting the food supplies available to the natives,
the British colonists in fact augmented them. They brought with
them three important kinds of livestock: sheep, cattle and dogs. Of
the three, the dogs were actually the most valuable to the Aborigines.
They were hunting dogs, much like modern greyhounds and deer-
hounds, and were eminently suited to hunting kangaroo. The Abo-
rigines had never seen dogs until the British arrived but nonetheless
recognized their potential from the outset. They either traded or stole
them from settlers from 1804 onwards. The settlers often remarked
on how attached the Aborigines became to their dogs. ‘Dogs of the
English breed,’ the Hobart Town Gazette observed in 1824, ‘have been
perceived in considerable numbers with the Natives, whose remark-
able fondness for them is such, that they have been noticed to carry in
their travels the young pups which are unable to walk.”
% Hobart Town Gazette, 6 August 1824, p2
FOUR: GUERILLA WARI ARE THESIS AND MOTIVES OF THE ABORIGINES 93
By the 1820s, their numbers had increased to the stage where huge
ks of dogs accompanied native bands wherever they went. James
Lin 1830 that some tribes had 300 or 400 dogs.” Like other
NU f
} tobbs Salc ;
stories Hobbs told, this was probably an exapperation, but a more
reliable observer Wis the surveyor James Calder. He said that when
the last twenty-six members of the Big Raver and Oyster Bay tribes
gurrendered and walked down Elizabeth Street, Hobart, in January
1332 they had with them one hundred dogs.” When John Batman
raided an Aboriginal camp in September 1829 it contained about
sixty Aborigines and forty dogs.” At Port Sorell on the mid north
soist in September 1830, Robinson saw a band of eight Aboriginal
men plus women and children, who had twenty dogs. In November
1830, when a group of seven Aborigines from Ansons River joined
Robinson’s party, they brought their thirty dogs with them. He
described the scene in his diary:
As the people walked along they hunted kangaroo. Caught numerous
kangaroo, each of my people carrying one. To look back and see the
people following me with their numerous train of dogs was truly delight-
ful and would form a fine picture.”
The presence of these European dogs greatly enhanced the Abo-
rigines’ ability to hunt kangaroo and so increased their available food
supply. In particular, dogs made it much easier for their native owners
to target the forester or ‘boomer kangaroo, which easily outran
human pursuers. Describing the hunt in 1852, John West wrote: “A
tolerably good kangaroo, will generally give a run of from six to ten
miles.’ The dogs would chase and exhaust the animal, eventually
bailing it up so when the native hunter arrived he could despatch it
with a club. A good-sized boomer provided its hunters with fifty to
sixty kilograms of meat?! The dogs’ sense of smell also augmented the
range of game normally present in the Aboriginal diet. Robinson
observed dogs being used by Aborigines to find ‘badgers’ or wombats
in their underground burrows, as well as wallabies, emus, possums,
27 Minutes of Evidence, Committee for the Affairs of the Aborigines, 9
March 1830, British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 222
8. E. Calder, Some Account of the Wars, Extirpation, Haibits, &c. of the Native
Tribes of Tasmania, Henn and Co, Hobart, 1875, p 62. Calder arrived in
Hobart in 1829 and wrote as a witness to this event.
29 Batman to Anstey, 7 September 1829, AOT CSO 1/320/7578 pp 142-5
3 Robinson, diary, 2 November 1830, Friendly Mission, p 264
3! John West, The History of Tasmania, (1852) ed. A. G. L. Shaw, Angus and
Robertson, Sydney, 1981, pp 247-8, provides a striking description of the
hunt. The ‘boomer’ is the male of Macropus giganteus species.
94. THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
Kangaroo rats, and ‘hyaenas’ or Tasmanian tigers (thylacine). Even if
We discount their contribution to increasing the Aborigines’ food
supply, the mere presence of these dogs poses a fatal objection to the
Plomley and Reynolds starvation thesis. If the thesis was correct and
the natives really were starving, how could they possibly have fed
such an excessive number of dogs?
There was a similar story with sheep and cattle. The settlers pro-
vided a plentiful supply of these two nutritious and easily killed food
sources. By 1827, according to the English Parliamentary Blue Books,
there were 436,256 sheep in the colony; in 1830 there were 682,128.
At the same time cattle numbers increased from 67,190 to 91,088.
As Chapter Three showed, most of these animals were kept on un-
fenced pasture where they were vulnerable to theft. Instead. of the
high-risk strategy of raiding settlers’ huts and chancing gunfire, if the
natives had simply been hungry they could have safely picked off
animals as they grazed on the borders of pasture and woodland. While
there were a small number of spectacular killings of sheep, such as the
930 burnt to death in a grass fire in 1815, the Aborigines did not
show the kind of interest one would expect if they were starving.
Apart from infrequent incidents of this kind, settlers were not seri-
ously troubled by native theft or killing of livestock.
Moreover, contemporary observers noted that when they did kill
sheep or cattle, the Aborigines were not interested in eating them.
“The natives do not eat cattle or sheep,’ a resident of Van Diemen’s
Land wrote in 1819 to the Asiatic Journal in London, ‘but they often
destroy them, and, if not interrupted, burn the carcases.”*5 "They
wantonly kill sheep, but never eat them,' complained the midlands
pastoralist, William Adams Brodribb, to the 1830 inquiry into
Aboriginal affairs. His counterpart from the Big River district, George
Espie, said exactly the same: ‘None of the sheep killed by the natives
* Robinson, diary, 29 March 1830, 22 August 1830, 7 July 1831, 16 July
1831, 18 August 1831, 23 October 1831, 15 November 1831, 23 May 1833,
14 March 1834, Friendly Mission, pp 140, 204, 372, 379, 404—5, 489, 519,
728, 863. See also Rhys Jones, ‘Tasmanian Aborigines and Dogs’, Mankind,
7, 1970, pp 267-8
3 Cited by Lloyd Robson, A History of Tasmania, Vol I, Oxford University
Press, Melbourne, 1983, p 260. Lyndall Ryan says there were 200,000 sheep
in 1823 and one million by 1830, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, 2nd edn., Allen
and Unwin, Sydney, 1996, p 83, but her figures, as usual, are unreliable.
% Mary Nicholls (ed.) The Diary of the Reverend Robert Knopwood, 1803—
1838, Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Hobart, 1977, entry for 8
November 1815, p 216
* ‘Memoranda relating to Van Diemen’s L
| and’, transmitted to England by a
resident upon the Island, June 1819, Asiatic Journal, September 1820, p 219
y r . 121 Py
POUR GUEILILLA WARFARE THESIS AND MOTIVES OF THE ABORIGINES 95
were eaten," Even though these introduced animals might not have
initially been to the natives" taste, if they really were starving, they
surely would have expanded their cuisine to include leg of lamb and
ület of beet.
Sharon Morgan claims that native killing of sheep and cattle had
political motives. ‘Realising the value placed on livestock by the
Europeans,’ she argues, ‘they sought to destroy this mainstay of set-
tement’. This explains why they killed sheep and cattle but did not
eat them. Morgan has apparently forgotten that elsewhere she argues
that the Aborigines were really driven by hunger. As noted above,
she says they were forced to turn to European food stocks because the
settlers had ‘destroyed the island’s food chain’. If this were true, they
might have shown more interest in satisfying their appetites than their
antipathy.
Neither of Morgan’s explanations, however, is plausible. The sta-
tistics with which this chapter opened show that assaults by Aborigi-
nes on the livestock, crops and harvest stacks of the settlers were rela-
tively minor compared to their other hostile actions. As Table 4.1
shows, Plomley could find only thirty-five incidents of this kind
between 1824 and 1831. This was less than one tenth of the number
of huts robbed or set on fire and was the least preferred of all hostile
native actions. Given that it was much easier to kill livestock or fire a
crop than to attack a hut and confront the armed occupant, if the
Aborigines were serious about adopting this kind of economic
warfare the number of such incidents should have been much higher.
The conclusion, then, is hard to avoid. Starvation, hunger and
economic warfare had little to do with Aboriginal hostilities. None of
these motives provide the orthodox school with a credible explana-
tion for the causes of the ‘Black War’.
THE ‘GUERILLA WARFARE’ THEORY
Those historians who support the starving natives thesis usually
combine it with the guerilla warfare theory. The term ‘guerilla war-
fare’, as the previous chapter noted, derived from the tactics used on
the Peninsula against Napoleon. Instead of large, set-piece battles,
small groups of Spaniards would attack French forces and then
quickly withdraw. Repeated over a long period, the tactic was a way
for a small force to damage and, in particular, to demoralize a much
larger one. Henry Reynolds claims that Lieutenant-Governor Arthur
had fought in Spain and recognized he faced the same military
36 Minutes of evidence, 11 March 1830, British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies
Australia, 4, p 224 í
37 Morgan, Land Settlement in Early Tasmania, p 155
%6 Tur FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
tactic, "^ This is not true. Arthur's military career included Italy, S;
Egypt and the Netherlands, but never Spain.” Nonetheless no IRIS
one passage written by Arthur about conflict with the Aborigi
Reynolds interprets as confirmation of his theory. Arthur wrot
there 15
nes that
e
The species of warfare which we are carrying on with them is of the moss
distressing nature; they suddenly appear, commit some act of outrage and
then as suddenly vanish: if pursued it seems impossible to surround and
capture them,"
Reynolds claims Arthur's description anticipated the anti-colonial_
ist tactics of the twentieth century: it ‘could have come from the
manuals of guerilla warfare which proliferated in the 1960s’.*. He says
it shows Arthur had grasped the military problem confronting him. It
was ‘a classic statement of the frustrations of a commander of conven-
tional forces facing elusive guerilla bands’. However, the full text of
this statement reveals that Arthur was not talking about confronta-
tions between conventional forces and guerillas at all. He was dis-
cussing assaults by Aborigines on isolated stockmen on the fringes of
white settlement. Just before the statement Reynolds quotes, Arthur
gave the context for what he said: "Whenever they can successfully
attack a remote hut, they never fail to make the attempt, and seldom
spare the stockkeepers when they can surprise them.’ Reynolds omits
this part of the text to give the false impression that Arthur was talk-
ing about troops coming under surprise attack by Aboriginal warriors.
He misrepresents Arthur's concerns, which were reserved entirely for
isolated civilians.
The truth is that the Aborigines steered well clear of British troops.
Rather than attack or try to demoralize the colony's armed forces, the
Aborigines avoided them whenever they could. ‘The presence of sol-
diers,’ the Lake River pastoralist Roderic O'Connor told the 1830
committee of enquiry, 'prevents Natives from coming into the
neighbourhood.” He said, ‘the Natives watch the stock-huts inces-
santly, and if a soldier is in one they never come near'.? The record
?' Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 66
9? A. G. L. Shaw, Sir George Arthur, Bart, 1784-1854, Melbourne University
Press, Melbourne, 1980, pp 5-16
* Reynolds cites this passage (Fate of a Free People, p 223, n 59) from Arthur
to Murray, 12 September 1829, Historical Records of Australia, I, XIV, p 446.
This is the wrong volume; it is in XV, same page.
^ Henry Reynolds, ‘The Black War: A New Look at an Old Story’,
Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Papers and Proceedings, 31, 4,
December 1984, p 2.
? Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 66
? Minutes of evidence, 17 March 1830, British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies,
Australia, 4, p 226
FOUR: GUERILLA WARFARE THESIS AND MOTIVES OF THE ABORIGINES 97
of miliary encounters shows O'Connor's picture was largely accu-
rate. There were very few incidents during the ‘Black War’ in which
Aborigines directly confronted colonial troops. In 1828 Corporal
Hooper of the 40th Regiment was wounded in the shoulder by a
spear at Quoin (Coyne) | lill on the Clyde River." In October 1830,
during the Black Line military campaign, Aborigines trying to break
through colonial ranks at night speared a sentry in the leg and shoul-
der. In. 1831, two soldiers were wounded on Norfolk Plains.*” The
only. soldier recorded killed by Aborigines during the whole of the
purported ‘Black War’ was a private of the 63rd Regiment who died
at Boomer Creek, Oyster Bay, in September 1830, when a party of
Aborigines descended on the farm of George Meredith and killed two
men." These four incidents constituted the sum total of British mili-
tary casualties at the hands of Aborigines from 1824 to 1831. For a
guerilla war, this is not an impressive record.
Reynolds writes as if the question of whether Aboriginal assaults
amounted to warfare needs no supporting argument. He assumes it
was warfare from the outset and embeds the assumption within his
narrative. In October 1830, Reynolds says Arthur looked upon the
Aborigines as his warrior equivalent. “Governor Arthur showed an
old soldier’s respect for his Aboriginal adversaries.? But Reynolds
omits to tell his readers that Arthur specifically denied that Aboriginal
tactics amounted to anything that resembled real warfare. In Novem-
ber 1828, Arthur wrote to London:
It is doubtless very distressing that so many murders have been committed
by the Natives upon their [the settlers'] stockmen, but there is no decided
combined movement among the Native tribes, nor, although cunning and
artful in the extreme, any such systematic warfare exhibited by any of
44 Tasmanian, 19 December 1828, p 3; Hobart Town Courier, 20 December
1828, p 2
45 Hobart Town Courier, 30 October 1830, p 2. The wounded sentry was
normally employed as a shepherd, not as a soldier.
46 Hobart Town Courier, 26 March 1831, p 2
47 Francis Aubin, Report of the Outrages Committed by the Aborigines at
Great Swan Port, AOT CSO 1/316/7578 p 841; Colonial Times, 24
September 1830, p 3. There were another two men killed who were still
known by their old military titles. One was Captain Bartholomew Thomas
who, with James Parker, was killed by the blacks on his property near Port
Sorell in September 1831 in a highly publicized incident: Plomley,
Aboriginal/Settler Clash, p 99 has list of references. However, ‘Captain’
Thomas had resigned his commission in England in 1814 and was no longer
serving. The same was true of ‘Searjent’ William Gangell, speared in
October 1830 at his farm at Pitt Water and who died later of his wounds:
Hobart Town Courier, 30 October 1830, p 2
55 Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 36
98 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
them as need excite the least apprehension in the Government, for T
D * J jé
blacks, however large their number, have never yet ye š :
y entured to attack
party consisting of even three armed men.”
Arthur repeated these sentiments several times. It is true th
on occasion use the term ‘warfare’ to describe Aboriginal actions but
it was always clear from the context that he never meant either tradi-
tional set-piece warfare or guerilla warfare. Even at the height of the
hostilities in November 1830, he wrote:
at he did
although their natural timidity still prevents them from openly attacking
even two armed persons, however great their number, yet they will, with
à patience quite inexhaustible, watch a cottage or a field for days together,
until the unsuspecting inhabitants afford some opening, of which the say-
ages instantly avail themselves, and suddenly spear to death the defenceless
victims of their indiscriminate vengeance; and success in various instances
seems now to have made them as eager in this mode of warfare (their ob-
ject being to plunder as well as to destroy the white inhabitants,) as they
were in pursuing the kangaroo. Two Europeans who will face them will
drive 50 savages before them, but still they return and watch until their
unerring spears can bring some victim to the ground.
Nothing here resembles the grudging respect of an old soldier for
his adversaries. In this context, Arthur's use of the term ‘warfare’ does
not concede to the Aborigines any status as warrior counterparts. It is
a figure of speech, a surrogate term for mere violence. Similarly, in
October 1828, when they made their decision to impose martial law
in the settled districts, the members of Arthur's Executive Council
spoke in broad terms of a general uprising by the Aborigines. The
minutes recorded: ‘The outrages of the aboriginal Natives amount to
a complete declaration of hostilities against the settlers generally.'
However, on the same page, the council acknowledged the reality of
the Aborigines' lack of either political or military organisation: 'so
totally do they appear to be without government amongst themselves,
that the Council much doubt if any reliance could be placed upon
any negotiation which might be entered into with those who appear
to be their chiefs, or with any tribe collectively.'?!
The evidence about what happened on the Aborigines' side of the
frontier in the 1820s shows it did not amount to warfare in any plau-
sible meaning of the term. The overwhelming majority of the Abo-
? Arthur to Murray,
Australia, 4, p 181
°° Arthur to Murray, 20 Nove
Colonies, Australia, 4, p 233
5! Minutes of the Executive Council, 31 October 1828, British Parliamentary
Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 183
4 November 1828, British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies,
mber 1830, British Parliamentary Papers,
FOUR: GUERILLA WARPARE THESIS AND MOTIVES OF THE ABORIGINES 99
rines targets. Were not troops or police but the convict stockmen
who worked as assigned servants on the most outlying land of the
white settlements, Some of these men were employed on their own,
others with a mate or an overseer. In the 1820s these men, though
convicts, were usually armed with muskets because of the threat of
Aboriginal assault. However, while they were clearing fields, chop-
sing down trees or splitting timber, they had to put down their guns
while they worked. Most of the attacks by Aborigines occurred dur-
ing unguarded moments of this kind. In other words, the whites were
usually assaulted or killed while they were unarmed. Often, the blacks
would lie in the thickly forested hills for days watching stock-huts on
the plain below, waiting for the right moment to strike.
In her chapter entitled “War: The Aboriginal Response’, Lyndall
Ryan has five pages of description of assaults by Aborigines between
1824 and 1830 that fit this pattern." In almost every case, the action
consisted of the natives approaching a hut containing from one to
three people, who they greatly outnumbered, then assaulting or kill-
ing the inhabitants and making off with quantities of food, blankets
and portable goods. A small minority of the incidents she records
were provoked by revenge for assaults by settlers. On the surface,
most of the actions by the Aborigines were nothing more than what
would be recognized as crimes in any human culture: robbery, assault
and murder.
For the guerilla warfare thesis to be credible, these acts have to be
elevated above the level of crime or revenge. For this they needed
two qualities: a political objective and a form of organization to
achieve their end. It is true, as Reynolds demonstrates, that there
were some settlers in the early colonial period who interpreted Abo-
riginal violence as patriotism and the defence of their country. But
the fact that Reynolds has to rely entirely on the colonists to express
these ideas is illuminating in itself. Despite their best efforts, Rey-
nolds, Ryan and Plomley have never found a statement made by a
tribal Aborigine during the Black War that expressed a patriotic or
nationalist sentiment.
There is not even a statement of this kind to be found in the diaries
of George Augustus Robinson in which he records in considerable
detail the numerous conversations he had with Aborigines between
1829 and 1834. Robinson himself thought the Aborigines were patri-
ots and wrote in November 1829 that 'they have a tradition among
them that the white men have usurped their territory? But this is
Robinson speaking, not an Aborigine, and was recorded in his diary
? Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, pp 115-21
? Robinson, diary, 23 November 1929, Friendly Mission, p 88
100 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
before his expedition started out. Similarly, in 1832 he also wrote that
Aborigines complained ‘that their country had been taken from
them’. This was not a diary entry but an official report he wrote in
Hobart in January 1832, à month after he had captured the last out-
standing band of the Big River—Oyster Bay tribes. He made a similar
comment in June 1832 while at Cape Grim, but again this entry did
not record a conversation with an Aborigine.” Tellingly, Robinson
never recorded even one phrase in his discussions with Aborigines in
which they express these ideas themselves. In Robinson’s diaries, the
Aborigines give plenty of explanations for their actions based on indi-
vidual wrongs, such as being assaulted by whites and having their
Women stolen or enticed away, but none about defending their
country.
The best the orthodox school can come up with are two invectives
heard by victims during Aboriginal attacks on settlers. The first was
heard on 3 November 1826: ‘go away, go away’; the second on 21
February 1830: ‘parrawar, parrawar, go away you white bugger, what
business have you here? Orthodox historians routinely quote these
lines, thinking it self-evident that they express nationalist complaints
about dispossession. Brian Plomley says they ‘suggest their reason for
attacking was a wish to rid their country of the European settlers? .*
Sharon Morgan thinks they showed the natives wanted to be rid of
the brutality and racism the invaders brought with them.” The only
thing these comments really suggest is how desperate these historians
are to shore up their thesis with evidence so transparently uncon-
vincing. The reason for historians’ inability to produce genuinely
patriotic statements from the Aborigines during the Black War is sim-
ple: none were made. This absence is telling. Had a tribal native ever
made a statement of this kind, we can be sure it would have featured
prominently in both the contemporary and the historical literature.
The only comment by an Aborigine that comes even close to
being a complaint about dispossession was allegedly made by Black
Tom in November 1828 during an interview with the Lieutenant-
Governor. At the time, Tom was employed as a member of Gilbert
Robertson’s roving party. In discussing his policies for ending the
hostilities, Arthur said he would set up a territory for the natives from
which white men would be banned from entry. Tom replied that the
Aborigines could not be confined to any territory and they would
?! Robinson, report, 25 January 1832, Friendly Mission, p 571.
5 Robinson, diary, 4 June 1832, Friendly Mission, p 612
°° Plomley, Aboriginal /Settler Clash, P 22; Reynolds cites the same invective,
Fate of a Free People, p 48
5 Morgan, Land Settlement in Early Tasmania, p 157
ÉOUI: GUEILLLA WARFARE THESIS AND MOTIVES OF THE A
j ABORIGINE 101
leave and spear more whites, Arthur replied that he would jail those
who did. Tom replied: |
Put him in à gaol, Mata Guberna!! You take it him own country, take it
him black woman, kill 't right out, all him litta child den a ae bm
yw your gaol, Ah, Mata Guberna, dat a very good way. ose cent DM rah
way — ‘pose all same dat black un! I nebber like dat way. You better ill
it right out. * i
This conversation is not from a government source but from
Henry Melville’s book denouncing Arthur’s policy towards the Abo-
rigines. The dialogue was, Melville says, ‘reported by a by-stander’,
whom he does not name. In itself, this is highly unlikely since Tom
did not speak in the kind of American Negro vernacular reproduced
by Melville. Moreover, no one in Australia, black or white, addressed
those in authority as ‘Mata’ or Master. Several other accounts of
statements by Tom indicated he spoke like an Englishman. His white
foster mother said ‘he spoke English perfectly’, as he would have
since he was brought up from early childhood in the middle-class
household of the Hobart merchant Thomas Birch. Even if we accept
the conversation as authentic, however, it still does not count as the
opinion of a tribal Aborigine, which Tom was not.
In fact, the sheer paucity of such sentiments is itself evidence that
political motives were unlikely to have been behind the outbreak of
violence. If the Aborigines really had political objectives, then, to
give themselves at least a platform for negotiation, they would have
made the colonists well aware of them. The fact that they never in
twenty-five years made any political approaches to the British, who
they knew were much more powerful and numerous than they, and
never attempted any kind of meeting, bargaining or negotiation with
them, speaks of a people who not only had no political objectives but
no sense of a collective interest of any kind.
In Fate of a Free People, Henry Reynolds attempts to put as favour-
able a gloss as he can on the political abilities of the Tasmanians, por-
traying their final capitulations to George Augustus Robinson
between 1831 and 1834 as attempts at negotiating ‘terms of settle-
ment’.© As Chapter Seven argues, however, these were not proce-
dures conducted by viable communities but abject surrenders, enacted
in most cases by collections of individuals from several different tribes
that had all but disintegrated. In the whole period of their relationship
58 quoted by Henry Melville, The History of Van Diemen's Land, ed. George
Mackaness, Horwitz-Grahame, Sydney, 1965, p 76
59 Tom's foster mother told this to James Bonwick, The Last of the
Tasmanians, Sampson, Low, Son and Marston, London, 1870, p 96
9 Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 151
102 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
with the British after 1803, the Tasmanian Abori
evidence of anything that deserved the name of polit
The second quality that would have elevated Aboriginal violence.
into something more than criminal behaviour would have been some
form of military organization. But, again, this is Conspicuous by its
absence. In fact, this was one of the great frustrations of Arthur's fis
gime, The indigenous Tasmanians were most unlike the indigenou
tribes of North America, who had political authorities, military com-
manders and military alliances. In Van Diemen’s Land, Arthur could
find no one to negotiate with. While the minutes of his Executive
Council in August 1830 did say that the murders of settlers by the
natives ‘can be considered in no other light than as acts of warfare
against the settlers generally, and that a warfare of the most dreadful
description’, at the same time they also complained about Aborigines
‘who live in tribes independent of each other, and who appear to be
without government of any kind, and ... are without sense of the
obligation of promises’.“! As noted earlier, Arthur also said that ‘there
is no decided combined movement among the Native tribes, nor ...
any such systematic warfare exhibited by any of them as need excite
the least apprehension in the Government’. Not even the most sym-
pathetic of the colonists disagreed with this.
None of the historians who support the guerilla warfare thesis have
ever shown Arthur was mistaken. The Aborigines never developed
any of the forms of organization, command, strategy, intelligence or
weapons supply that have been associated with genuine guerilla war-
fare in other countries over the past two hundred years. Even though
the historians of Tasmania use the term, none of them have ever dis-
cussed its meaning in any detail to demonstrate what they are trying
to prove. They never advance any criteria by which an action could
be judged as guerilla warfare or otherwise. Any kind of black hostility
from 1824 onwards is automatically labelled this way, with no critical
analysis ever thought necessary. The clearest illustration of this is the
following statement by Lyndall Ryan describing the actions of a
group of Tasmanian Aborigines who were taken across Bass Strait to
the Port Phillip District (Victoria), where they absconded:
gines showed no
ical skills at all,
In August 1841, Truganini, Matilda, Fanny, Timmy and Pevay, had be-
gun a series of raids in the Western Port-Dandenong districts, looting
shepherds’ huts and wounding four stockkeepers. Their tactics had all the
marks of sustained guerilla resistance to white settlement.
*! Minutes of the Executive Council, 27 Au
Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, pp 235, 236
*? Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 197
gust 1830, British Parliamentary
poun: GUERILLA WARFARE THESIS ———— — 103
Now, none of this can have had anything to do with guerilla war-
re, These raids were not made on enemy troops but, as usual, on
- > ’ alls
yemote
4m a comp
Jp as anyone from Europe. The notion that they were offering
to white incursions onto the tribal lands of mainland
with whom they had no cultural, linguistic, tribal or kin
any kind, is absurd. But this is what passes for histori-
cal analysis in the book described by Henry Reynolds as *by far the
best and most scholarly work on the Tasmanian Aborigines'.^
The argument that the hostilities amounted to a patriotic guerilla
depends entirely upon interpretations of the Aborigines’ overt
actions made by white historians. In making this case, these historians
have not tried to stand outside the parameters of their own culture to
encompass the very different mentality of the Tasmanian natives. In-
stead, they have taken concepts derived from the political structure af
the modern world and imposed them, with no cultural filter of any
kind, onto the mental universe of a hunter-gatherer people. The
strategy of guerilla warfare was adopted by European nationalists in
the early nineteenth century. In the 1950s and 1960s it was taken up
by a number of anti-colonial political movements in Africa, Latin
America and South-East Asia. The orthodox historians of Tasmania
want us to believe that the Aborigines intuitively anticipated all this
by spontaneously adopting a form of combat that was not a part of
their existing cultural repertoire and whose methods and objectives
they had never read about or heard explained. This is not history; it is
the imposition onto Aboriginal history of an anachronistic and incon-
gruous piece of ideology.
shepherds. Moreover, these ‘guerillas’ were in what was to
m letely foreign country where they were intruders just as
muc
resistance
Aborigines,
connections of
war
ABORIGINAL CONCEPTS OF LAND OWNERSHIP AND TRESPASS
The assumption by the orthodox school that British occupation of
Aboriginal territory meant that conflict would have been ‘natural’ is
another assumption that deserves to be investigated rather than simply
asserted as an obvious truth.” It might seem natural to a European
mind, accustomed to the notions of measuring territory, dividing it
into areas and conferring exclusive usage on them, to resent the in-
trusion of newcomers onto one's own tracts of land. However, we
cannot impose the notion of exclusive use of private property, or
even the concept of ‘land’ itself, onto the mentality of nomadic
hunter-gatherer tribesmen without at least some evidence that they
6 cover blurb on Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, 2nd edn. 1996
64 ‘Friction was natural’, according to Morgan, Land Settlement in Early
Tasmania, p 155
104. THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
thought this way. To do so is to breach the historian's duty to try to
see the world through the eyes of his subjects. One of the long-
standing principles of the discipline is that historians should not lin.
pose their own values, judgements, biases and assumptions onto the
people they study. In the nineteenth century, the influential German
school of historiography said historians should aspire to verstehen, that
is, the ability to think themselves into the mentalities of their sub-
jects.“ This has always been one of the historian’s most difficult tasks.
It is hard enough to think oneself into the mentality of people who
lived at different times in one's own culture, let alone those of other
cultures and other times. Nonetheless, the obligation is always there.
Yet this is precisely what the orthodox historians of Tasmania have
failed to do when they discuss Aboriginal attitudes to land tenure.
They have assumed that the presence of the settlers on the land
caused resentment and violence for no better reason than this is how
they themselves would feel if someone else moved onto their land. As
Reynolds has demonstrated, there were a number of colonists at the
time who sympathized with the Aborigines’ plight and tried to see
things from their perspective. One of the most eloquent spokesmen
Reynolds cites, the Launceston Advertisers correspondent ‘J. E' (J. E.
Calder), asked of the natives: ‘are they not rebellious subjects but an
injured nation, defending in their own way, their rightful posses-
sions?’ To see things this way is to look through the eyes of Eng-
land. Every concept in this statement — rebellion, subjects, nation,
even ‘rightful possessions’ — derives from European culture. Men
like Calder were doing no more than saying how they, as Englishmen,
would respond if they saw their country invaded. It is not good
enough, as Reynolds has done, to simply quote these contemporary
Englishmen as evidence of the native mentality. They were operating
with the same Euro-centric assumptions as the orthodox historians
themselves. Significantly, not one of the colonial sympathizers ever
cited a comment by the Aborigines themselves about their views on
the subject. None of these men — James Calder, Richard Dry, Gil-
bert Robertson, Henry Melville, George Augustus Robinson, R. M.
Ayrton, or the newspaper correspondents ‘Zeno’ and ‘A Border Set-
tler — ever provided a direct quotation from an Aborigine objecting
to his dispossession from the land by the colonists.”
$ Verstehen is a concept best known as part of the philosophy of history of
Wilhelm Dilthey. While some modern cultural historians think the concept
is exclusively confined to an interpretative and literary approach to history, it
is quite compatible with an empirical approach to the discipline.
56 Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 84. For identification of ‘J. E? as Calder,
see my Chapter Two, p 36 s
57 Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, pp 30-3, 83—5
FOUR: GUERILLA WARFARE THESIS AND MOTIVES OF THE ABORIGINES 105
Some orthodox historians, especially Lyndall Ryan, have supported
" thesis with evidence from anthropological studies about the at-
ae of the Tasmanian Aborigines towards the territories on which
ne hunted and foraged.^ This evidence comes from observations
asd ata time when the discipline of anthropology was in its infancy.
phe last groups of Aborigines were removed to Flinders dand i the
early 18305 before any extended field studies of their tribal life had
i ducted. The most ‘scientific’? studies were made by the
prench maritime explorers Jacques de Labillardière in 1792-3 and
prancois Péron during voyages from 1800 to 1803, but neither spoke
native languages and both spent only short periods with the Aborigi-
nes. For historians and anthropologists, the principal source for in-
formation about all aspects of Tasmanian Aboriginal life, including
information about their tribal territories, are the diaries written by
George Augustus Robinson during his ‘Friendly Mission’ from 1829
to 1834. Robinson had no academic training but wherever he went
he recorded ethnographic information, with an eye to eventually
publishing it himself. Modern anthropologists have stressed how lim-
ited are the conclusions that may be drawn from his diaries, especially
since they were written at a time when Aboriginal society was
breaking down irretrievably. Nonetheless, the six years of Robinson’s
observations provide the nearest equivalent to anthropological field-
work among the Tasmanians that we have. The most comprehensive
survey of Robinson’s ethnographic data was made in 1974 by Rhys
Jones. .
At the time of British colonization, Jones argues, the basic social
unit in Tasmania was the band, which usually numbered from forty
to seventy people, including children. Each band had its own terri-
tory, the core of which was a prominent geographical location and
foraging zone, such as a headland or estuary. Each band’s territory
occupied about 200 to 300 square miles, which was known as the
‘country’ of the band it belonged to. Although bands lived mainly in
the vicinity of their country they also foraged widely on the territo-
ries of other bands. In some cases this was sanctioned by their
neighbours, in other cases 1t was resisted. It all depended on the tribal
affiliation and the relationships both among bands and between tribes.
been con
6 Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, Chapter One
9 Rhys Jones, “Tasmanian Tribes’, appendix to Norman Tindale, Aboriginal
Tribes of Australia: Their Terrain, Environmental Controls, Distribution, Limits
and Proper Names, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1974. A
more recent study by Brian Plomley was published in 1992, but it is a much
slighter account: N. J. B. Plomley, The Tasmanian Tribes and Cicatrices as
Tribal Indicators among the Tasmanian Aborigines, Occasional Paper 5, Queen
Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston, 1992
106 THe FABRICATION Or ABORIGINAL HISTORY
There is g Te oe :
Is good evidence, Jones argues, for the existence. of at least
fitty-three to fifty-five bands. Bands were part of larger tribal affilia-
tons, There Were nine major tribal groups and all were cultural rather
than political associations, composed of bands who shared a language
and intermarriage. The borders of tribal territory ranged from well-
defined lines associated with prominent geographical features to broad
transition. zones. between friendly tribes. Bands often entered and
passed through the territory of neighbouring and even distant tribes
along well-defined tracks.
Jones himself acknowledges there were so many exceptions to the
boundaries of his map (reproduced on page 368), that they make it
misleading. Tasmanian tribal divisions should not be read as a
patchwork of small states like Europe, with fixed boundaries. The
Aborigines held very fluid versions of their territory, which changed
with the seasons. Here is a partial list of their movements: the people
from the south-west around Port Davey paid regular visits to, and
spoke the language of, the people on the south-east and on Bruny
Island. They also made regular visits up the west coast, as far north as
the Arthur River, and sometimes to Cape Grim. Some of them even
had a name for Table Cape on the north coast. The bands from the
north-west, who normally ranged from Circular Head to Sandy
Cape, sometimes travelled as far east as the Mersey River, as far south
as Port Davey, and as far inland as the Surrey Hills where they met
people from Big River. People from Bruny Island made seasonal visits
along the southern coast as far west as the sealing grounds of the
Maatsuker and De Witt Islands. They also visited the Tasman
Peninsula on the east coast and were sometimes seen at Oyster Bay.
The Oyster Bay Aborigines traversed the same country on the east
coast but also went inland, deep inside the territory of the Big River
tribe, travelling as far west as the Ouse River and Lake Echo. They
also went up the east coast, as far north as the Bay of Fires. The
Oyster Bay Aborigines could converse with people from both the
south-east and the north-east. The coastal people of the north
travelled as far south as Lake Echo, in Big River territory. And the
Big River people were the most mobile of all, annually visiting Cape
Grim on the far north-west tip of the island, Port Sorell on the mid
north coast, Oyster Bay on the east coast and Pitt Water and Storm
Bay in the south.”
? Jones, “Tasmanian Tribes’, pp 331—46. In describing these movements,
Jones uses the tribal categories applied by the colonists rather than those of
the Aborigines. To call a group, for instance, ‘the Big River tribe’ or “Oyster
Bay people’ is actually to apply European terminology and to identify them
in geographic terms invented by the colonists rather than those of Aboriginal
culture, which did not recognize these categories. Brian Plomley is highly
HULA WARFARE TI 1ESIS AND MOTIVES OF THE ABORIGINES 107
yy: GUE
pol Ww
their mobility, Jones argues each of the bands had a keen
NUS : 3p ve a arri
pes : possession and of the exclusive use of territory, as well as the
yer oue" lcome incursions 1 e]
» of trespass: To unwe s into their own country,
1i , n z 1
youl led with violence. Jones writes:
hey respons
Movements outside this territory, and of alien bands into it, were carefully
i D .
anctioned and had reciprocal economic advantages to the bands con-
cemed. Trespass was usually a challenge to or punished by war."
If Jones's analysis is accurate, the Aborigines certainly had the
mental framework and cultural predisposition to respond violently to
the presence of interlopers on their land. The problem with this ar-
gument, however, is that the evidence Jones himself presents does not
support it.
Jones has gone through the 1000 published pages of Robinson’s
diaries and extracted information about each tribal group's location,
language, population, seasonal movements and political relationships.
He has then compiled this information under a profile of each of the
nine tribes he identifies. So it is possible to look at his summary of
information about each tribe to see how possessive it was about its
territory and how often it engaged in conflicts with other tribes over
breaches of its territorial sovereignty. Jones records a number of the
ies Robinson gave why members of some tribes and bands
E piss alee Among the North West tribe, for instance, the
den ort Davey, Pieman River and Sandy Cape had joined
ogether to fight the West Point band. This quarrel had started,
Robinson recorded, when some Sandy Cape men had speared and
abducted some women from the West Point band.” On another
Occasion, bands from Oyster Bay and the Tasman Peninsula had
united to fight a band from the Great Lake district because the latter
had refused to give them red ochre and shell necklaces. In the ensuing
struggle, several Great Lake women were killed or abducted.” One of
the most common reason for fighting among tribes was the existence
of long-standing vendettas. Robinson recorded the case of an
Aboriginal boy in his party who came from what Jones called the
North tribe. The other natives said he was likely to be killed by
north-eastern Aborigines because of a long-standing war in which his
father had already been killed. This war was perpetuated for no
critical of Jones’s categorisation for just this reason: Plomley, The Tasmanian
Tribes and Cicatrices, pp 15-16
71 Jones, ‘Tasmanian Tribes’, p 328
72 Jones, "Tasmanian Tribes’, p 333
73 Jones, “Tasmanian Tribes’, p 340
108 Tut FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
known reason apart from revenge for previous killings on both
sides.”
In Jones's own analysis of tribal conflicts,
where territorial intrusion might have
September 1830 when three native
he offers only one case
led to conflict. This was in
s from Robinson’s travelling party
left him on the north coast to return to their own country. Two of
them met a party of hostile natives who chased and tried to kill them.
However, when you check the relevant diary entry, you find Rob-
inson does not suggest any reason at all why these men were chased.
Jones makes the supposition that it was because they were ‘intruders’
on the territory of their attackers but the chase could just as easily
have been provoked by any one of the previously documented rea-
sons. There is no indication in Robinson’s diary either way.”
If you go through all the diary entries, you find there are numerous
references to internecine conflicts between Aboriginal bands and
tribes and plenty of reasons given for them. However, the offence of
trespass is conspicuous by its absence. I read the whole of Plomley's
edition of Robinson’s diaries looking for confirmation of Jones’
statement that ‘trespass was usually a challenge to or punished by
war’, but could find none. I then double-checked three of Plomley’s
index entries: the forty references in the index to tribal matters: inter-
tribal animosity and conflict; the eight references to tribal matters: migra-
tions and movements of tribes and the eighteen references to tribal matters:
tribal boundaries etc. None of these sixty-six references provides even
one example of trespass provoking violence.
This is not because Robinson failed to discuss the reasons for con-
flict between tribes. As Jones’s own summary shows, Robinson re-
corded these details when he knew of them. The most common rea-
son for inter-tribal warfare was the abduction of women. The second
most common cause was the existence of a long-standing vendetta
between bands in which one killing had to be repaid in kind, and it
avenged in turn. My own tally of the causes of inter-tribal conflict
recorded in Robinson’s diaries is:
Disputes over women: ten ”°
Long-standing vendettas: five 7’
™ Jones, ‘Tasmanian Tribes’, p 345
3 Jones, ‘Tasmanian Tribes’, p 334; Robinson, diary, 26 September 1830,
Friendly Mission, p 220
7* Robinson, diary, 21 June 1830, 24 July 1830, 25 October 1830, 16 July
1831, 15 November 1831, 11 December 1831, 15 December 1831, 19-20-
22 June 1832, 19-21 June 1834, Friendly Mission, pp 181, 187, 257, 379
520, 548, 554, 618-9, 887-8
FOUR: GUERILLA WARFARE THESIS AND MOTIVES OF THE ABORIGINES — 109
Contlicts over goods, including game, ochre and guns; three ”
ribal honour and treaties: two ” s
ln the majority of his records of inter-tribal hostilities, B.obinsor
does not venture. their cause because his discussion with his rt
aatormants Was Not prolonged enough, but in several cases he bd the
opportunity to hear the details of tribal conflict at great length pow
necine combat and the injury and death wreaked on other qm was
vie of the favourite topics of native story tellers. The poroi
opinion that, before the British arrived, the Aborigines enjoyed "
arcadian existence that was 'inoffensive, innocent and hap ^ "is
belied by the pleasure they took in describing the pain and sufferin i
they regularly inflicted on their tribal enemies. On 15 July 1831. "s
example, Robinson made the following diary entry. E
Tonight Woorrady entertained us with a relation of the exploits of his
nation and neighbouring nations or allies. ... Said that the Brayhe-
lukequonne natives spear plenty of his and neighbouring tribes, that they
stop behind trees and when they see a native go by himself they go and
spear him. When the natives relate those exploits they do it by singing it
accompanying the same with different gestures corresponding with the
circumstances of the story — the manner of fighting, the blows given
where inflicted and how, whether by spear, waddy or stones, or ae oa
or cutting with sharp stones, pointing to the parts of the wounded:
Wooraddy is very animated in his relation of the circumstances of his
nation, and having a good voice it is peculiarly interesting to attend to
him.?!
It is telling that in all these native accounts of inter-tribal hostilities,
some of which took hours to narrate, there is not one reference to
trespass as a cause of conflict. There are no statements of the kind:
‘we fought them because they came onto our territory’, or any vari-
ants thereof. This absence is itself strong evidence that the culture of
the Tasmanian Aborigines did not have such a concept.
A more recent analysis of Tasmanian Aboriginal tribal and territo-
rial divisions by Brian Plomley supports this interpretation, even
7 Robinson, diary, 28 March 1830, 30 August 1830, 13 November 1831,
15 December 1831, 19 June 1834, Friendly Mission, pp 140, 416, 517, 554,
887
78 Robinson, diary, 25 September 1830, 24 January 1834, 28 February 1824,
Friendly Mission, pp 219, 837, 854
79 Robinson, diary, 25 October 1830, 1 August 1831, Friendly Mission, pp
257, 392
9 J, E, Launceston Advertiser, cited by Henry Reynolds, Fate of a Free People,
p 84
3! Robinson, diary, 15 July 1831, Friendly Mission, pp 378-9. See also diary,
31 May 1830, Friendly Mission, p 166
x. *1t 1111090009090 9090 A 4 54
HO Tur Pamu ATION OF ADOIUGINAL Hisrony
though Plomley himself starts from the assumption that tribal
al vro
must have had some restrictions on access to their territory, He a.
» He say
| | . 5s t Sand that ther,
Was probably some regulation of this access, However, in hi
analysis of the evidence from Robinson’s diary, Plomley
could find none. He says the coastal tribes permitted the in]
to cross their territories to visit the coast, but then
that various native roads gave access to tribal territorie
ou
admits he
and tribe
acknowledge..
‘The circumstances under which permission was given to them fà dis
so are quite unknown.'? He should have added that whether any
permission was ever required, sought or given is equally unknown,
This was also true of the very concept of ‘permission’ itself. There is
no evidence that the Aborigines had such a concept in relation to
access to land.
Overall, Robinson’s diaries indicate that some Aborigines did
identify themselves with certain territories to which they had an
emotional affinity because of childhood and family connections. For
instance, when Robinson was on the high plains on the west bank of
the Ouse River in mid-November 1831, one woman who accompa-
nied him said this was the place of her nativity and was the country of
the Lairmairrener nation. Beyond this, however, there is no evi.
dence from what we know of Tasmanian Aboriginal culture that they
had a concept of what other societies know as ‘land’ at all. They did
not even have the sacred sites found in some mainland Aboriginal
cultures. They certainly had the notion that the game and other fruits
of the land belonged to them, as Chapter Two discusses. But the idea
of 'land' itself as property is quite different and is a concept that
derives from agricultural society, not that of hunter-gatherers. The
Aborigines did not even have a word for it. None of the four
vocabularies of Tasmanian Aboriginal language compiled in the
nineteenth century, nor any of the lists of their phrases, sentences Or
songs, contained the word ‘land’. Nor did they have words for ‘own’,
‘possess’ or ‘property’, or any of their derivatives.** In her attempt to
excoriate English colonists for settling the country, Sharon Morgan
claims they displaced the existing landowners:
To the Aborigines, the land was the centre of life. They knew it inti-
mately, and without it they were set adrift. They belonged to the land as
much as it belonged to them.9*
#2 Plomley, The Tasmanian Tribes and Cicatrices, pp 9, 14
83 Robinson, diary, 13 and 19 November 1831
^ H, Ling Roth, The Aborigines of Tasmania, F
1899, Appendices A, B, C, D, E and F, pp
*5 Morgan, Land Settlement in Early Tasmania, p 154
pout GUPRILLA WARFARE THESIS AND MOTIVES OF THE ABORIGINES 111
nat Moran has simply plucked these loaded phrases out of late
wentieth century black politics and offers no ethnographic or any
ather kind of contemporary evidence in their support — because
herw Is none. Nowhere in Robinson’s extensive diaries, nor in any of
he other studies of Tasmanian Aboriginal language and culture, is
vany suggestion of land as property. The notions of the British,
ther
agricultural society in general, of the exclusive possession of
and of
territory and the defence of it by law or by force, were not part of the
Aborigines’ mental universe. In short, the Tasmanian Aborigines did
not own the land. The concept was not part of their culture.
THE DELAYED RESPONSE TO THE BRITISH PRESENCE
The strongest argument that the colonists’ possession of their land was
not the reason behind the Aborigines’ violence was that they took so
long to respond to the British presence. All the orthodox historians
except Ryan agree that for the first twenty years of European settle-
ment, relations between the Aborigines and the settlers were peaceful.
From 1803 until 1824, attacks were irregular, their frequency was low
— an average of one or two a year, mostly in retaliation for assaults
on themselves — and the colonists regarded the natives, as noted in
the previous chapter, as ‘the most peaceable creatures in the universe’.
In his survey of all incidents of native attacks on settlers, Brian Plom-
ley admits: ‘Between 1803 and 1823 there was no concerted effort by
the Aborigines to drive the settlers from the lands they had appropri-
ated.’® If the Aborigines had a concept of preserving their own land
against invaders, then this should have been evident right from the
outset. It would have been at first contact when the intrusion would
have been the most offensive to native sensibilities.
I have only found two documented incidents in the period of ini-
tial colonisation that could possibly be interpreted as Aboriginal
assaults on intruders for trespass, rather than disputes over the taking
of native game. The first occurred in November 1804 when about
eighty Aborigines came into the newly established Port Dalrymple
camp and attacked the guard of marines. They seized the sergeant and
tried to throw him into the sea but were driven off by gunfire, which
killed one and wounded another." The second incident occurred late
in 1805 when the storekeeper Alexander Riley, and a soldier, Private
Bent, out surveying a stock route for the Port Dalrymple settlement,
encountered a group of fifty natives who wounded them with
% Plomley, Aboriginal /Settler Clash, p 13
87 Paterson to King, 26 November 1804, Historical Records of Australia, III, I,
p 607. It is probably stretching things too far even to blame this assault on
resistance to trespass. It is more plausibly interpreted as attempted robbery.
112 Tut FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
spears," Even if other historians want to interpret some other inc;
dents this way, it is clear their number would still be small. »
was the time when the intruders were numerically weakest
cally at their most vulnerable.
Elsewhere in the South Pacific, this combination did lead to im-
mediate violence. British sailors encountered sustained hostilities in
the eighteenth century during their first attempts to make landfalls in
the fiercely territorial Polynesian societies of Tahiti and New Zea-
land. When Captain Samuel Wallis tried to enter Matavai Bay in
1767, he was surrounded by between 400 and 600 Tahitian canoes
and showered with rocks. Captain James Cook’s first visit to New
Zealand in 1769 was greeted with violent opposition by the Maoris,
as had been Abel Tasman’s first attempt to land on the South Island in
1642.
If the Tasmanian Aborigines had a concept of trespass that obliged
them to challenge intruders to war, it was unlikely they would have
waited twenty years before they put it into practice against the Brit-
ish. After the initial shock of the appearance of these strange new
people, the Aborigines quickly recognized them as men like them-
selves. They never regarded them as supernatural beings and were not
afraid of them. As the conflicts over kangaroo hunting in Chapter
Two demonstrated, whenever they found the British taking native
game, they confiscated it under threat of violence. They continued to
do this even after they had experienced the firepower of British mus-
kets. The Aborigines clearly had a sense of proprietorial rights to-
wards their game that impelled them to respond. Just as clearly, how-
ever, they did not put the same value on the occupation of their ter-
ritory. If, like other indigenous societies of the South Pacific, their
culture had defined the British as invaders of their land, then the
Aborigines would have been obliged to act immediately, not delay
the process for two decades.
Moreover, as noted in the previous chapter, some groups of Abo-
rigines had been frequenting Hobart, Richmond and the southern
midlands townships since 1813-14. If they were coming in to the
white settlements for food and shelter more than ten years before the
hostilities began, this also indicates that some of them, at least, did not
Yet this
and physi-
* Paterson to King, December 1805, Historical Records of Australia, III, 1, pp
649—50
* J. E. Heeres (ed.) Abel Janszoon Tasman’s Journal of his Discovery of Van
Diemen's Land and New Zealand in 1642, Amsterdam, 1898; George
Robertson, The Discovery of Tahiti: A Journal of the Second Voyage of HMS
Dolphin Round the World 1766-1768, ed. H. Carrington, Hakluyt Society,
London, 1948; J. C. Beaglehole, The Life of Captain James Cook, Stanford
University Press, Stanford, 1974
IESIS AND MOTIVES OF THE ABORIGINES 113
four! GUERILLA WARFARE TH
ders who deserved to be punished for dis-
4 che colonists as inva
LEM OF THE PORT DAVEY MOB
roup of Aborigines whose actions and motives clearly
do not fit the thesis that Aboriginal hostilities represented a patriotic
defence of their homelands. For this reason, the orthodox historians
rarely mention them. There is evidence that suggests the Port Davey
Aborigines were one of the most active bands in murdering and
robbing white settlers in 1829. In July that year, when George
Augustus Robinson was providing rations to the Aborigines on
Bruny Island, a group of nine of the Port Davey band arrived to visit
their friends at his mission. The next day, after they had left, one of
the Bruny Island women told Robinson about their role in the
hostilities.
THE PROB
There js one &
bove all oth-
I learnt to my greatest surprise that this very tribe had been a
ve filled our
ers most active in the perpetration of those atrocities which ha
newspaper columns and caused such a general consternation throughout
s aes districts of this colony. This accounts for the sudden departure
s M a being apprehensive of remaining lest they should be
en by the iron rod of justice. It now appears beyond a shadow ofa
doubt that the Port Davey tribe are in league with others who have con-
jointly carried on their bloody massacre.”
Rake Just because a native told Robinson this story and he
" it in his diary does not make it true. Nonetheless, in
Cs o buried was confirmation the Port Davey mob un-
Ede Mes c when twelve Aborigines attacked a
orfolk district and speared its owner. Robinson
went with four constables to investigate the incident and interviewed
the farmer before he died from his wounds. Robinson found a num-
ber of indicators that the Port Davey mob was responsible, such as the
description of the offenders, their language and behaviour, and the
direction from which they came. He concluded that this attack, plus a
series of others in the district at the same time, was the work of the
natives from Port Davey.”!
This band of Aborigines poses a number of problems for the or-
thodox thesis. No one had taken their land or disturbed their hunting
grounds. They largely inhabited the south and west coasts, from south
of Macquarie Harbour to the South East Cape. There was no white
settlement in their area in 1829 and, in fact, there is still none, even
today. It remains uninhabited wilderness. Moreover, the Port Davey
29, Friendly Mission, P 67
er 1829, Friendly Mission, pp 91, 107 n 63
90 Robinson, diary, 11 July 18
?! Robinson, diary, 20 Decemb
ooo ———
114 Tur FABRICATION OF ABORUGINAI History
blacks had no hunting grounds that the
y had to defend fron
invaders. Away from the immedi
ate coastline,
ous, barren, and equally useless for hunting, farming or grazing, The
Aborigines lived mostly on the rocky coast where their staple diet was
not Kangaroo but shellfish. So they had no patriotic
motives for assaults and murders in the settled districts o
the island.
1 Colonial
the land is Mountain
Or territorial]
n the east of
Rather than try to account for this discrepancy in their thesis, the
orthodox historians simply pretend the Port Davey mob's actions
never happened. Reynolds does not mention them in either of his
books on Tasmania. Lyndall Ryan has an appendix in her book
where she records the number of Europeans killed by individual
tribes between 1800 and 1835. She gives all the tribes some white
deaths to their credit, except the South West tribe, that is, the Port
Davey mob, who score nil.? Yet it is hard to believe that Reynolds
and Ryan could be unaware of their activities, since both have made
extensive use of Robinson’s diaries, the very document in which he
records their involvement in the ‘bloody massacre’ of white settlers.
Because the Port Davey mob not only fails to support their thesis but
also provides an example contrary to it, the members of the orthodox
school have simply airbrushed them out of history.
HISTORICAL ORTHODOXY AND THE CONTROL OF DEBATE
Overall, then, the thesis that the Aborigines engaged in guerilla
warfare in response to the violation of their territory and the usurpa-
tion of their tribal lands is implausible. Their hostilities were not of
the guerilla kind and they did not act as if they regarded the colonists
as trespassers. To say this, however, is not to argue that the arrival of
the British did not have a profound effect on the Aborigines nor to
claim that they accepted the colonists with equanimity. There must
have been a profound psychological trauma in Tasmania, just as there
was everywhere else in the Pacific when isolated native tribesmen,
who had previously imagined they were the only people in all the
world, were forced to come to terms, virtually overnight, with an
alarming expansion of their mental universe, as well as the question-
ing of their religions, the breaking of their taboos, and the restruc-
turing of their hierarchies.
There have long been debates amo
ng historians and anthropologists
over the impact of the arrival of Eur
opeans elsewhere in the Pacific.??
FOUR: GUERILLA WARFARE THESIS AND MOTIVES OF THE ABORIGINES 115
These debates have ranged across historical evidence left by European
observers and anthropological analyses of native custom, religion and
culture, Their aim has been to explain how the pre-existing culture
of the native peoples of the Americas and the Pacific islands
responded when history so abruptly intervened with the arrival of the
European explorers, missionaries, traders and colonists in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Tasmania, by contrast, such
debates are notable for how superficial they have been. You can read
almost the entire body of work of the orthodox historians and, apart
from the guerilla warfare thesis, never come away with any sense of
how Aboriginal culture and religion reacted to the arrival of the
strangers, Or indeed any sense that their cultural reaction even needs
to be considered. Apart from the work of Brian Plomley and Rhys
Jones, there has been little cross-disciplinary debate or intellectual
fertilization between anthropology and history. Even Plomley sepa-
rates most of his writings into one or the other of the two fields of
study and offers only a cursory discussion of the cultural consequences
of the colonization of Aboriginal land.” His most extensive analysis of
the British disruption of tribal culture is confined to four pages to-
wards the end of his commentary in Friendly Mission, where he writes:
The occupation of the tribal territories may also in some degree have
disrupted the cultural life of the tribe, but it is unlikely that it would have
done so in any other sense than in preventing the use by the tribe of
familiar camping grounds, drinking places and hunting and food-gathering
areas, because the Tasmanian aborigines lacked the highly organized
sacred life of the Australian aborigines, which was identified with the
spirit of place.”
These comments are not reproduced here simply because they
support the thesis of this book. It is also to underline the fact that the
academic literature contains so few comments of this kind. It is
important to recognize, however, that the absence of such a debate is
not a mere oversight. Nor can it be blamed on the paucity of the
Tasmanian evidence, because this has been an endemic problem for
over the impact of first contact between the British and the Hawaiian
islanders in the eighteenth century. For a summary and commentary see
Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social
Theorists are Murdering our Past, 4th edition, Encounter Books, San Francisco,
2000, Chapters Three and Nine.
% Brian Plomley’s The Tasmanian Aborigines, Plomley Foundation,
Launceston, 1993, is a time-free anthropological study of their pre-contact
culture and society, in contrast to his introductions and commentaries on
Robinson’s diaries and Jorgenson’s chronicle, which trace the historic details
of their relations with the colonists.
?5 Plomley, Friendly Mission, p 967
116. Tur FABRICATION OF Anon
INAL HISTORY
attempts everywhere in the Pacific to
other cultures, however
of information out of v
seriously tried,
understand. first contact, |
| een able to tease
ery limited evidence, In
» Scholars have | a good d ;
^ ‘ OB Cal
l'asmania, no one has
The responsibility for this lies in the wa
uon of Tasmania has stifled debate.
history, especially its defere
have done more to close
else. This interpretation h
need to probe Aborigin
tO get
y the orthodox interpreta
The assumptions of orthodox
nce to the concept of guerilla warfare,
discussion on this question than anything
as made its supporters feel absolved from the
al culture further, Instead, they have been able
away with the ideological sleight of hand that a
hunter-gatherer people made the same kind of response as the
national unification movements of Europe in the nineteenth century
and the anti-colonial struggles of Asia and Africa in the twentieth.
Moreover, the orthodoxy has functioned as a moral regulator that
has inhibited other historians from thinking beyond its parameters. It
has denigrated those who might doubt that the Aborigines were
anything but valiant defenders of their traditional lands. If you dare to
question the nobility of the Aboriginal response and the compensa-
tion due to their descendants, you invite political censure. For in-
stance, Lyndall Ryan has denounced both Brian Plomley and
Vivienne Rae-Ellis for failing to support current Aboriginal demands
for land, for engaging in ‘the politics of denial’, and for acting as
‘apologists’ for the British invasion.”°
Rather than be publicly charged with such cultural offences, any
historian sceptical of the orthodox story has either kept quiet or
walked away from the subject. In other words, Tasmanian history has
deferred to a political ideology that has prevented thought, proscribed
research and impeded the development of a more convincing inter-
pretation grounded in the Aborigines’ own culture. With the objec-
tive of breaking these constraints, the rest of this chapter presents an
alternative thesis about Aboriginal motivations.
nomadic
BROUGHTON’S FINDINGS: VENGEANCE AND PLUNDER
In February 1830, Lieutenant-Governor Arthur appointed a com-
mittee of inquiry into the escalating violence by the Aborigines. He
asked the committee to investigate the reasons for the outbreak and
advise him on the policy he should adopt in response. The new An-
glican Archdeacon of New South Wales, William Grant Broughton,
was visiting Hobart at the time and Arthur prevailed upon him to
chair the committee. Broughton was a well-educated man. He had a
"^ The denunciations of Plomley and Rae
de -Ellis are in the introduction to the
2nd edition of Ryan’s The Aboriginal Tasmanians, pp xxiv—xxvi
poun: GUERILLA WARFARE THESIS AND MOTIVES OF THE ABORIGINES 117
pa amd MA from Cambridge University and was a literary scholar
ww publications to his name. At his primary visitation in St James
"ur "E “ss T ( x is 7
sured, Sydney, in December 1829, he had announced that his pol-
t
sc the church would have a paternal care for the lower orders of
av N
de colony, especially its convicts and Aborigines. He immediately
steps to finance a revival of missionary activities among the
saves." With such a background and such concerns, one would ex-
sect his findings about Van Diemen’s Land to be considered seriously
bv historians. His specific brief was to investigate the causes of the
hostilities. One might therefore have anticipated that Broughton’s
report would figure prominently in historical discussions about the
causes of the Black War.
Among most orthodox historians of Tasmania, however, the
opposite is the case. They have provided very little discussion of
Broughton’s conclusions. This is not because they have not read his
report. A number of authors have mined the minutes of his commit-
tee's hearings to extract evidence from witnesses to suit their own
interpretation. None, however, have properly discussed the argu-
ments that Broughton himself put forward. Henry Reynolds tries to
pass off the report as worthless because of one phrase it used. At one
stage, Broughton described Aboriginal violence as the result of ‘a
wanton and savage spirit inherent in them'.? So Reynolds dismisses
the report as a classical statement of ‘the compulsions of savagery’ and
considers it unworthy of any further attention.” Lloyd Robson dis-
cusses the committee and some of the statements made by its wit-
nesses, indicating he has read the minutes of evidence. But he obvi-
ously did not bother to read the main report, for he does not even
realize that Broughton was on the committee, let alone that he signed
the report himself." Only Lyndall Ryan treats the report as the
rook
7 G. P. Shaw, Patriarch and Patriot: William Grant Broughton 1788—1853,
Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1978, pp 23, 41-3
% Report of the Aborigines Committee, 19 March 1830, British Parliamentary
Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 207. The original transcripts of this
committee from February to September 1830, later reprinted in the British
Parliamentary Papers, are in the Archives Office of Tasmania at CBE/1, pp 3
ff. Some of the minutes are under its original name, the Committee for the
Care and Treatment of the Captured Aborigines. In his select bibliography
in Fate of a Free People, Reynolds lists other papers relating to the committee
as being located at AOT CSO 1/ 318/7578. This is wrong. The correct
location is AOT CSO 1/319/7578. Submissions to the committee from
local settlers and related documents are located at AOT CSO 1/323/7578,
pp 67-383
” Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 67
1 Robson, History of Tasmania, Vol I, pp 216-8. For some reason hard to
understand, Robson lists the other committee members but omits
MS Tur FAnRICATK IN OF ABORIGINA! History
policy document it
Was. She
merease
d policing of the sc
by the press, However,
the committee ide
discusses its
ttled districts
she too avoids discussing the
ntified for the hostilities. ™
The reason these historians are so shy about informing,
of the main findings of this report is not hard to find. |
are directly at odds with their own theses about Aboriginal Patriotism
starvation and guerilla warfare, Rather than explainin
reasoning and evidence and then deb
Were sound, as they should h
his case was never made.
recommendations
five
and describes their rece
Ption
principal cause.
their readers
ts arguments
g Broughton’s
ating whether his conclusions
ave done, the orthodox school acts as if
Broughton advanced two explanations for the violence: revenge
and plunder. He thought revenge was the cause of early Aboriginal
grievance but that the desire to plunder the food and household
goods of the colonists subsequently took over. His inquiry went back
to the start of settlement in search of causes. It accepted the evidence
of some witnesses that the Aborigines had grounds for complaint over
the ‘lamentable encounter’ at Risdon Cove. The report said the esti-
mates of Aboriginal dead were ‘as high as 50’, even though it re-
mained sceptical of the accuracy of this figure:
the Committee from the experience they have had in the course of this
inquiry of the facility with which numbers are magnified, as well as from
other statements contradictory of the above, are induced to hope that the
> 102
estimate is greatly overrated.
The report also accepted that the Aborigines had been ill-treated
by convicts and bushrangers. The latter had carried off native women
and children, while the former were probably guilty of a number of
atrocities. The committee noted proclamations made by former
Lieutenant-Governors Collins, Davey and Sorell, condemning such
acts of white ‘barbarity’. The committee said it had:
no hesitation in tracing to the manifold insults and injuries which these
unhappy people have sustained from the dissolute and abandoned charac-
ters whom they have unfortunately encountered, the universal and per-
manent excitement of that spirit which now prevails, and which leads
them to wreak indiscriminate vengeance, as often as they find Opportu-
nity, on the persons and property of the white population.
Broughton, even though the main report itself, published on 19 March
1830, is signed with Broughton's name as chairman.
! Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, pp 107-8
12 Report of the Aborigines Committee, 19 March 1830, British
Parliamentary Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 209
"? Report of the Aborigines Committee, 19 Marc
h 1830, British
Parlíamentary Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 210
POUR: GUBRILLA WARFARE TI IESIS AND MOTIVES OF THE ABORIGINES 119
However, the report did not confine its accusations to the criminal
elements and lower orders. It included the full range of settlers among
those it held responsible:
Phere is too much reason to apprehend that, as the white population
spread itself more widely over the island, and the settlers came more fre-
quently in contact with the Natives, many outrages were committed
which no interposition of the government, however well disposed, could,
with the means at its command, have been able to prevent. It would in-
deed appear that there prevailed at this period too general a forgetfulness
of those rights of ordinary compassion to which, as human beings, and as
the original occupants of the soil, these defenceless and ignorant people
were justly entitled. They were sacrificed in many instances to momentary
caprice or anger, as if the life of a savage had been unworthy of the slight-
est consideration; and they sustained the most unjustifiable treatment in
defending themselves against outrages which it was not to be expected
that any race of men should submit to without resistance, or endure with-
out imbibing a spirit of hatred and revenge."
The report quoted Sorell’s view that the ‘spirit of hatred and re-
venge’ among the Aborigines had not been directed simply at those
responsible for particular acts against them but had generated ‘a strong
thirst for revenge against all white men’.
After advancing the ‘indiscriminate vengeance’ thesis, however, the
report said it was impossible ‘with perfect certainty’ to say whether
the events at Risdon Cove and elsewhere had continued to influence
the native feelings towards the white population. All that was certain
was that relations between the two had never been perfectly secure. It
then gave examples of settlers who attempted to befriend Aborigines
with offers of gifts, but whose friendship had been betrayed. Some
stockmen, the committee reported, had provided natives with food
and shelter in what appeared to be ‘friendly intercourse’ that
continued over several days. But they had been repaid with violence
and murder:
even on their retirement from houses where, as above stated, they [Abo-
rigines] had been kindly received and entertained, they have been known
to put to death, with the utmost wantonness and inhumanity, stock and
hut-keepers whom they fell in with in retired stations at a distance from
protection, and who, there is every reason to believe, had never given
them the slightest provocation. ^?
1% Report of the Aborigines Committee, 19 March 1830, British
Parliamentary Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 208
15 Report of the Aborigines Committee, 19 March 1830, British
Parliamentary Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 210
UNO Tur Fanny ATION OP ANORIGINAL HISTORY
Behaviour of this kind battle
d the committee so it offered «
Would now regard as
What we
à psychological explanation, arguing the Abo
ames shared "à lurking: spirit of cruelty and mischie
Wanton and savage spirit inherent in them
mischiet and cruelty"; The report then we
vous craft’ and ‘4
, and impelling them to
nt on to argue, however,
that the current hostilities could no longer be explained simply as re
yenge. The mischief that now most engaged the Aborigines, the
committee argued, was the desire for European food and goods. This
had overtaken revenge as the principal cause of their actions.
They are not now acting the part of injured men, seeking to avenge the
Wrong they have sustained, but rather that of marauders stimulated by
eagerness for plunder, and the desire for artificial luxuries, the use of
which has now become familiar to them.
It was this argument that Arthur's Executive Council eventually
used in August 1830 when it took the decision to mount the Black
Line to make a decisive military action to try to end the hostilities.
The council said:
the love of plunder has of late much increased among them, yet they are
equally if not chiefly actuated by a love of murder. *?
Now, there is no serious dispute among historians that part of the
Aborigines! motivation was revenge. Some had been victims of vio-
lence by settlers and their response had been directed, as Broughton
said, indiscriminately at the whole of the white population. Reynolds
assembles some of the evidence for revenge in Fate of a Free People,
including some comments from sympathetic colonists. George Au-
gustus Robinson, whom he relies upon most, claimed revenge was
the Aborigines’ principal motive. He wrote in his diary:
they are actuated solely by revenge, revenge to the whites for the dire
enormities that had been perpetrated upon their progenitors. They bear a
deadly animosity to the white inhabitant on this account, and there is
scarcely one among them but what has some monstrous cruelty to relate
which had been committed upon some of their kindred or nation or peo-
ple.!1
106
Report of the Aborigines Committee, 19 March 1830, British
Parliamentary Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 210
'7 Report of the Aborigines Committee, 19 March 1830, British
Parliamentary Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 218
"^ Minutes of the Executive Council, 27 August 1830, British Parliamentary
Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 259
"7 Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, pp 31-2
" Robinson, diary, 14 December 1831, Friendly Mission, p 553
wo COMME ~
FOUR: GUERILLA WARFARE THESIS AND MOTIVES OF THE ABORIGINES 121
~ see EAEE "
n N sneer E v i
2/ sere n P d ] Dh ,
prensa] Nan m à
B ü eee NS aeri thom int) fence ^ * 2
MeL C , í (f
yer tg $ VM ] "y
Á ab Ju CB ax
"Malegeyo tuin | MET A os 4 Toure
Jr | n Wat ^ P e lew sandy nede
mi ie “He y5 VE
Lap. "i Thowin
n Mieten Pipe qz
* t V HA. Diag)
furshes a4
n / OXSTERBAY r
Hehhe |. Ó 5
DerylagMilrbina or Fleuricu B. ud
Gorm GJS
, diac! by Baudin 1802 PW o
s iJXwan Pore a2
A. Bailly (Fare NS.
Cust XO ; 3
l Taillefor L? «
A Prinatetne B White Kur
cathe > ones
IN
Av C. Bougainville
7 SAD n
US, Pn, g Bor Pori Montbazir-
White Marsh Mtr Bp p da Nort or Green J.
eB! Drumid
T rage of Tarman M42. when he diac" £ named VDinenia Lt
o High Rock & C Prod 5Herdricke
Bladenans B.
- ae
CPU oh
asp An's Peninsula
Oyster Bay, central midlands and Hobart Town. Detail from map by J. Arrowsmith,
London, 1832 (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales)
Robinson then went on to repeat half a dozen anecdotes told him
by the natives about cruelties and murders perpetrated by whites.
Even though these anecdotes are couched in the same melodramatic
hyperbole on display above, there is little doubt the Aborigines’
believed stories of this kind and used them to justify their own attacks
on the settlers and their servants. Whether these stories are typical,
reliable or even true, is another matter, which is taken up in Chapter
Eight. Here it should simply be recorded that, whether warranted or
not, revenge was certainly an Aboriginal purpose. Acknowledging
this, of course, does not concede anything to the orthodox interpre-
122. Tur FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL History
tation that the Aborigines were engagr
ed in a patriotic war using guer-
lla tactics, Retaliation for abuse, eve
n though the response might be
indiscriminately targeted at white people in g
zeneral, does not amount
al or territorial motives.
Even though he acknowledged its existence,
anmed that revenge took a distant second place to the principal cause
he identified for Aboriginal hostilities: the desire for plunder. The
tollowing section examines the evidence for this motive.
to warfare and does not imply any politic
however, Broughton
A TASTE OF CIVIL LIFE
Few historians today would accept that the behaviour of Aborigines
or anyone else could be explained in terms of inherent spirits of
‘cruelty’ or ‘savagery’. However, most would acknowledge that the
spirit of mammon still remains a valid, indeed timeless, stimulus for
black people, as much as it does for white. Even the orthodox histori-
ans of Tasmania agree that the vast majority of the hostile actions by
the Aborigines involved the robbery of the colonists’ material goods.
However, they shrink from the Broughton committee’s term ‘plun-
der’ and instead argue that this kind of robbery can be accommodated
within their thesis about guerilla warfare. Reynolds, for example,
acknowledges that the Aborigines prized a wide range of European
commodities.
The settlers found abundant evidence of Aboriginal adaptation of Euro-
pean material culture — large amounts of flour made into damper, teapots
and tea, clothes and blankets neatly sewn with European needles, clay
pipes and tobacco. By the time of the Black War even the more remote
tribes were addicted to tobacco and tea.!!!
But he then goes on to argue that the reason for the acceleration of
robbery by the blacks during the late 1820s was due to the demands
of the guerilla war:
European food was of critical importance to the war effort — it was teady
to use, could be carried and stored, and would not spoil ... the most im-
portant reason for switching to European food was to relieve the Aborigi-
nes of the arduous food quest which, given the ever-present pressure of
the European roving parties, was intensely dangerous.!?
Sharon Morgan uses the same argument: ‘the use of European food
was an important tactic in guerilla warfare, since it allowed the
Natives to spend more time attacking the enemy or to stay out of
sight’.'’’ Similarly, Brian Plomley says the Aboriginal theft of so many
11 Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 45
"2 Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 47
13 Morgan, Land Settlement in Early Tasmania, p 156
FOUR: GUERILLA WARFARE THESIS AND MOTIVES OF THE ABORIGINES 123
blankets and bed clothing was due to a ‘new need’ generated by the
‘Ye A . edi
conditions of warfare:
This need had been brought about by the constant harrying by the Rov
ing Parties, by the stockmen and by the shepherds, which kept the Abo
rigines on the move, unable to have the warmth and shelter they were
accustomed to, and needed for living. Having blankets and the like, the
Aborigines could not only be warm but could abandon their camps at a
moments. notice and still be warm wherever they made a halt, even if
they had to do without fire because the smoke would attract pursuers to
4
them.
All of these comments are pure speculation. 'They all assume the
existence of a guerilla war and attempt to interpret Aboriginal actions
within the framework of that assumption. However, the empirical
evidence 1s strongly against them. Take, for instance, Plomley's con-
jecture about how the Aborigines would have substituted blankets for
campfires so as not to signal their position to their pursuers. The evi-
dence of what they actually did is the opposite of Plomley's supposi-
tion about what they might have done. The period when the blacks
were under the most pressure was during the Black Line of October
and November 1830. Yet even when hounded by more than 2000
pursuers, they continued to light their fires. On 25 October, the for-
mer soldier Edward Atkyns Walpole was reconnoitring in advance of
the line, south of Prosser's Bay on the south-east coast, looking for
Aborigines who had been forced towards Forestier's Peninsula, when
he saw a group of about fifty blacks. According to the Hobart Town
Courier, ‘he discovered the natives hunting, and watched them
making their fires and forming their encampment’.' Shortly
afterwards, another pursuit party was in the same region. The same
newspaper reported: “The party unexpectedly arrived at a spot where
a large tribe of the blacks had recently encamped, the fires not having
yet expired.’ At the same time, near Pitt Water, the newspaper wrote:
‘A small mob of about 7 were seen standing around a fire by two men
who went through the hills.’ "^ So, even though the natives were
closely pressed, and even though it was not a cold time of the year
and these were not cold locations — late spring, on the coast, at sea
level — they still lit their fires, despite Plomley’s theory that they
wouldn’t. Moreover, throughout 1830 and 1831, when George
Augustus Robinson was trekking across the island to recruit tribal
Aborigines for his ‘Friendly Mission’, he invariably first detected their
"4 Plomley, Aboriginal/Settler Clash, p 23
"5 Hobart Town Courier, 6 November 1830, p 2
"6 Hobart Town Courier, 13 November 1830, p2
El __ c —— c ———Á——— EO
3 kE
124 Tur Fannie ATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
presence through the distant smoke of their fires, which none of them
attempted to conceal,
The empirical evidence of the Aborigines’ actions suggests a quite
ditlerent set of objectives to those conjectured by the guerilla w
e arfare
theorists, For a st
art, the most common single action they took was to
rob stock-keepers’ huts and settlers’ dwellings of their contents. As
Table 4.1 shows, there were 323 incidents of this kind. Most of the
assaults and murders of settlers and their convict servants took place
during robberies. Had the Aborigines really been engaged in patriotic
guerilla warfare, they would have been more concerned to destroy
the colonists’ means of livelihood and that way drive them from the
land. They would have attacked the settlers’ stock, crops and build-
ings. Yet such attacks accounted for only a fraction of the total. There
were 32 cases of arson and 35 assaults on stock and crops. That is,
there were ten times as many incidents of robbery than destruction of
stock and crops. Robbery occurred ten times more often than arson.
Moreover, the evidence of what the Aborigines actually stole in
their raids also suggests motives other than guerilla warfare. Plomley
himself compiled data from all the reports about Aboriginal attacks to
show exactly what they stole. Table 4.2 summarises this evidence.
TABLE 4.2 INCIDENTS OF ABORIGINAL THEFT FROM SETTLERS’
DWELLINGS 1824-1831
Stolen goods No. incidents
Food Flour 61
Sugar 58
Tea 38
Food, general 36
Potatoes 10
House wares Blankets 59
Bedding 42
Clothing 32
Knives 23
eo
Source: N. J. B. Plomley, The Aboriginal/Settler Clash in Van Diemen’s Land
1803-1831 (1992). This is a compilation from Plomley’s Table 4. The
number of incidents is considerably less than those in Table 4.1 but includes
all those cases where what was stolen was recorded in detail.
FOUR: GUERILLA WARPARE THESIS AND MOTIVES OF THE ABORIGINES 125
This data does not account for all the cases of robbery in Table 4.1
because the details of what was stolen were not recorded in every
case, Nonetheless, this is the best data we have, or are likely to have.
It plainly does not support the guerilla warfare thesis. Of the top three
food items stolen, only one of them, flour, could in any remote sense
have been of use in the ‘war effort’. Refined sugar and tea have little
nutritional value. They are addictive luxury foods. If they had been
serious about waging war, the first thing the Aborigines would have
stolen from the settlers was their weapons, perhaps to use themselves
but more particularly to deprive their ‘enemy’ of their use.'!” It is true
there were a small number of reports in 1830 and 1831 of Aborigines
stealing English muskets and storing them in armouries, but there
were not enough of them for Plomley to record in his tally. Of all
household hardware that could be used as weapons, Table 4.2 shows
only knives were stolen in any quantity. They showed little interest in
axes or tomahawks. The overwhelming choice the Aborigines made
was to steal blankets and bedding. To a people who for thousands of
years had gone about and slept naked, even through winters in Tas-
mania's snow-covered high country, blankets and bedding could not
plausibly be regarded as necessities. Like sugar and tea, they were
European luxuries.
There was no question about the strong Aboriginal demand for
these products. George Augustus Robinson used them as incentives
to keep his own native guides attached to his party. In November
1830 he wrote of his guides: ‘the whole of the natives are incessant in
asking for bread and sugar, and are passionately fond of it.' And when
he could not supply them: *My natives appeared dissatisfied in being
without flour and tea and sugar. I ... counselled the natives, but they
appeared to consider nothing but having flour.’ "° The portrait of
Aborigines captivated by British processed food and consumer goods
was widely shared by settlers at the time. In fact, many settlers ex-
plained the hostilities entirely in these terms. Jorgen Jorgenson wrote:
The fact is that from an over-anxiety to civilize them, and promote a
friendly intercourse, the Government and the Colonists taught them to
relish our luxuries. They were amply supplied with blankets, tea, sugar,
bread and flour. Once accustomed to these luxuries they could not after-
117 One observer noted that guns were of little use to the Aborigines
themselves. ‘A firelock in the hands of a savage man, though he may fully
comprehend its management, we conceive, is but a harmless weapon. It will
be almost impossible for him to obtain a supply of powder and shot, or to
keep the former dry if he should get it, and his gun, exposed to all weathers,
would soon become rusty and unserviceable.’ Hobart Town Courier, 6
November 1830, p 2
118 Robinson, 8 November 1830, Friendly Mission, pp 510, 521
126 .— THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
Wands dispense with them, and hence numberless robbe
. rics were perpc-
trated; these were often resisted, and succeeded Numerous murders The
halt tame mobs were the first to commence, and they again instructed the
wild tribes, t
Two witnesses to the 1830 committee of inquiry used the same
explanation. James Brodie of Bothwell said he
their primary object; they will have flour, sugar, and good blankets’.
Roderic O'Connor, the Lake River landowner and surveyor, said:
‘all they are now actuated by is a love of plunder: the chief thing they
want is bread, and prefer getting a sack of flour by robbing a hut, to
hunting for opossums.'? The diaries of George Augustus Robinson
confirm these accounts. In discussing attacks by the Big River tribe in
the Bothwell district he wrote in November 1831:
“conceives plunder
Flour is their object, also tea, sugar and blankets. They cannot do without
these; they have acquired the use of them from the whites. Most of the
Big River tribe smoke tobacco.’!”!
Even Henry Melville, whose history of Van Diemen’s Land pro-
tested about the injustices done to the Aborigines, explained the
motives behind Aboriginal hostilities in the same way:
Their savage state made them insensible to all that was endeavoured for
their good; and the whole result of this, and other similar efforts, has been
to give them such a taste of civil life, as to stimulate à desire of possessing
themselves of sugar, blankets, and other articles in use with the settlers,
that were previously unknown to them, and to procure which they have
constantly committed cruel robberies.'??
The earlier discussion of the guerilla warfare thesis was critical of
the practice of historians who relied solely on the views of white set-
tlers as explanations for Aboriginal motives. Here, by quoting the
findings of the Broughton committee, and the Observations of
Jorgenson, Brodie, O'Connor, Robinson and Melville, this chapter
obviously uses the same tactic in support of its own interpretation.
However, the difference is that this is far from being the only kind of
evidence provided. I am also offering evidence of Aboriginal deci-
sion-making in terms of the nature of their assaults (Table 4.1) and of
Aboriginal preferences in the items they stole from white settlers
'? Plomley, Jorgen Jorgenson and the Aborigines, p 78
'? Minutes of evidence before the Committee for the Affairs of the
Aborigines, 23 February, 17 March 1830, British Parliamentary Papers,
Colonies, Australia, 4, pp 219, 227
?! Robinson, 8 November 1830, Friendly Mission, p 508
122 Melville, History of Van Diemen’s Land,
1832 edition of the Van Diemen's Land Al
publications.
p 60 n. He was quoting from the
manack, one of his own
FOUR: GUERILLA WARFARE THESIS AND MOTIVES OF THE ABORIGINES 127
(Table 4.2 and below), all of which confirm the settlers’ observations.
Moreover, I can provide some evidence from Aborigines themselves
giving their own explanations of their actions. I will discuss the latter
shortly but first let me point out why they resorted to the plunder of
white goods rather than other, legal forms of acquisition.
The Aborigines, it is true, had other options to obtain these prod-
ucts without stealing them. They might have earned money to buy
them. There were a small number of Tasmanian Aborigines who
took this alternative. Some acted as trackers and guides to the police
who searched for bushrangers and hostile blacks. After the conflict of
the 1820s and 1830s had ended, some joined whaling and fishing
crews and some became farmers. For most, however, the hostilities
intervened before enough time had passed for them to adopt the
customs and work ethic required to join the colonial labour force. In
the brief, twenty-year period of colonization, only a small number
had assimilated into white society.
The other legal alternative was charity. They could be supplied by
white benefactors, as had happened in November 1824 when the
Oyster Bay Aborigines came in to Hobart Town. As Chapter Three
recorded, Arthur initially hoped that by providing rations to these and
other Aborigines, he would win their affection. Mendicant status,
however, left them at the mercy of white generosity, whereas outlaw
status left them in charge of their own fortunes.
There is some evidence, in fact, that they relished the latter status.
In a despatch from Emu Bay in July 1830, Robinson recorded their
pleasure in their deeds:
At the time several of the most popular songs of the hostile Aborigines
consisted in relations of the outrages committed by Blacks on the whites,
in which they repeat in minute details their predatory proceedings, such
as taking away firearms, tea, sugar, etc., and kneading flour into bread.'”
123 In 1830 Arthur granted the Tasmanian Aborigine named Black Bill, or
William Ponsonby, 100 acres of land in reward for services to John Batman’s
roving party: Morgan, Land Settlement in Early Tasmania, pp 159-60. An
Aboriginal woman, Dolly Dalrymple who had been reared since childhood
in the family of Jacob Mountgarrett, was granted land by Arthur in Perth
township in 1831: Diana Wyllie, Dolly Dalrymple, Wylie, Childers, 2004, p
35. Two other Aborigines, John Crook and John Stewart, originally from
Sydney, received grants of land in Tasmania: Robinson, Friendly Mission, p
474 n 277; William Lanne returned to Tasmania from Flinders Island and in
the 1860s sailed with fishing and whaling ships: Bonwick, The Last of the
Tasmanians, pp 394-5. Plomley records other unnamed Aborigines involved
in whaling who went abroad as far as New Zealand and Mauritius: Friendly
Mission, pp 686 n 18, 801 n5
124 quoted in Plomley, Jorgen Jorgenson and the Aborigines, p 78
128. THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL Hisrory
When the Aborigines the
households, even those involving murder, the
principal aims were the theft of proce
In 1834, when Robinson visite
MeCasker, whose wife had bee
years before, one of the native
called she had been present
mselves described their attacks on white
y emphasized that their
ssed food and consumer goods,
d the Westbury farm of Patrick
n killed in an Aboriginal attack three
women of his F
riendly Mission re-
at the incident:
Jenny told me it was the Big River tribe that killed Mrs McCasker,
Mountepeliater and his son went in first and one killed Mrs M whilst the
other took the flour. They went back the same way to the northward and
made up the flour into damper at night and afterwards went into their
own country. She said they took plenty flour, sugar, tobacco &c. !5
The police report at the time of this incident confirmed Jenny’s ac-
count of events. It said the fifteen-man Aboriginal party who killed
Mary McCasker carried off three hundredweight of flour, eighteen
knives and forks, eight pairs of blankets, half a chest of tea, one hun-
dredweight of sugar, twenty pounds of tobacco, two casks of butter
weighing thirty pounds each, two muskets, one fowling piece and
three caps of gunpowder.” .
The reasons why Aboriginal thieves had little compunction about
killing anyone they found in their way, like Mary McCasker, was that
their own culture had no sanctions against the murder of anyone
outside their immediate clan. Internecine warfare was rife in indige-
nous society and killing others was a common and familiar practice
among Aboriginal males. Indeed, as recorded earlier, the stories the
Tasmanian Aborigines told around their campfires often recorded
their pleasure in the death and pain they could inflict on anyone ont-
side their own group. They told Robinson they enjoyed killing. ‘He
has heard them boast with much pleasure of the murders they have
committed on the whites." It is clear from the contemporary reports
about Aboriginal killings of many white settlers that their murders
were incidental accompaniments to robbery. The whites were un-
armed and posed no deterrent to the Aborigines’ main objective.
They were killed simply because they could be. l
Overall, then, the spread of white settlement in the 1820s was cer-
tainly a major cause of the increase in black violence, but not for the
reasons the orthodox school proposes. Far from generating black
resentment, the expansion of settlement instead gave the Aborigines
75 Robinson, Friendly Mission, p 835
1% Smith to Burnett, 31 January 1831, AOT CSO 1/316/7578, p 851
7 Minutes of the Executive Council, 23 February 1831, British Parliamentary
Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 253, reporting an interview with Robinson
by the council.
FOUR: GUERILLA WARFARE THESIS AND MOTIVES OF THE ABORIGINES 129
more opportunity and more temptation to engage in robbery and
murder, two customs they had come to relish.
To clinch this argument, there is one final piece of evidence to
present. This is the kind that the advocates of the patriotic war thesis
have never been able to produce to support their own case: testimony
from a tribal Aborigine explaining his actions. This testimony is, ad-
mittedly, a paraphrase by a white journalist, but otherwise is a direct
expression of Aboriginal opinion. On 5 September 1830, the Colonial
Times reported that one of the convict servants of Captain Patrick
Wood, a farmer on the Clyde River near Bothwell, had clashed with
a group of natives robbing his hut, some of whom he shot. He
brought one of the survivors in to Hobart Town to claim the reward
then on offer of five pounds. Lieutenant-Governor Arthur decided
that the captive should be interrogated. The newspaper continued:
His Excellency ordered one of the black Natives who are under the
charge of Mr Robinson, of the New-town Road, to be sent for to act as
interpreter, and by his assistance endeavoured to obtain some information
from the prisoner, but we understand all that could be got from him was
that the white man had destroyed several of his companions, and that he
had most reason to complain; that when the tribe attacked the hut 3t was
in order to obtain food, and such articles as the whites had introduced
amongst them, and which now instead of being luxuries as formerly, had
become necessities, which they could not any other way procure."
THE ‘BLACK WAR’: A SUMMARY
To conclude, let me summarize the argument of this and the previous
chapter. The hostilities of the Aborigines did not amount to either
conventional or guerilla warfare. For its first three years, from 1824 to
1826, the ‘war’ was little more than the actions of a small group of
black bushrangers led by two men, Musquito and Black Tom, neither
of whom was a tribal Aborigine. The former was a native of Sydney
who had no ethnic or cultural connection to the Tasmanian people
or to any territory on the island; the latter was a Tasmanian Aborigine
who had been reared since childhood in a middle-class white house-
hold in Hobart Town. Moreover, these actions began at a time when
white farms and pastoral property had not yet seriously deprived the
Aborigines of much land or barred them from passage over it.
For the entire period of the ‘Black War’ from 1824 to 1831, there
is no evidence the Aborigines had any military, political or patriotic
objectives. Nor did they have any military or other kind of organisa-
128 Colonial Times, 3 September 1830, p 3. At the time, the editor of this
newspaper was Henry Melville and, since this was not a report sent in by a
regional correspondent, he was probably its author.
139. Dur EAHRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
von, They never engaged in anything that could be defined as war-
tare, Almost all their victims were unarmed settlers, stock-keepers and
their families in isolated locations.
As far as we can tell from the ethnographic evidence, the Aborigi-
nes did not have the kind of attitude to the land that would lead them
to wage sustained warfare in its defence. If they had had strong terri-
torial instincts, the Aborigines would have displayed them in the first
twenty years of British colonization when they would have been
most affronted. In these two decades, however, the Aborigines made
little attempt to resist the trespass of the intruders. Some bands
willingly came in to the white settlement seeking food and household
goods. The Aborigines were never starving or even seriously deprived
of traditional food. In fact, the evidence shows that, at the height of
the conflict, native game abounded throughout the island.
Instead, the motives for the outbreak of robbery and violence by
tribal Aborigines from 1827 to 1831 lay in a combination of revenge
and plunder. There were some who wanted to revenge themselves on
those white colonists who had injured them or their kinfolk. This
revenge took the form of indiscriminate violence against any whites
they encountered. However, the principal reason for Aboriginal vio-
lence was their desire for British consumer goods, especially flour,
sugar, tea, blankets and bedding. Excluded from the labour force and
having no way except begging of legally acquiring what to them were
highly desirable luxury products, tribal Aborigines chose to plunder
them from the huts and homesteads of settlers instead, and to kill any
whites they found in their way. The actions of the Aborigines were
not noble: they never rose beyond robbery, assault and murder.
In short, the orthodox school of history's attempt to dignify this
story does not work. For Henry Reynolds to call it the biggest inter-
nal threat Australia has ever faced, when it cost the lives of only 187
settlers in eight years, is to exalt these events far beyond their signifi-
ana oe for the Tasmanian Aborigines to be commemorated in
memorials for their patriotic defence of their country
ort mnt de en dmm Faire dace the
ae in 2 ies of the Aborigines were unarmed
women and children. The ‘Black
War i i 1 i
x go bes see Land was not a heroic tale. It was à tragedy
gines adopted such senseless vi i i
i viole l i
tms were themselves, der d
CHAPTER FIVE
Historical scholarship and the invention of
massacre stories, 1815—1830
HIS chapter offers a close assessment of the quality of evidence
deployed by members of the orthodox school of Aboriginal his-
tory in Van Diemen’s Land. It focuses on several large-scale massacres
of Aborigines, which these historians allege were committed by Brit-
ish colonists in the period 1826 to 1830, plus one earlier incident in
1815. It is largely a critique of the methodology of two of the writers
this school endorses as its most scholarly and distinguished contribu-
tors.
Since it was published in 1981, Lyndall Ryan's The Aboriginal
Tasmanians has been the principal work on its subject. It derives from
her PhD thesis of 1975 and is still in print twenty years after it first
appeared, making it one of the more successful books of Australian
history.’ Over this period, other historians have often cited Ryan as
the leading authority on the conflict between blacks and whites in the
colony. Henry Reynolds describes Ryan as one of the most
'respected and conscientious scholars’ in the field and says her book is
! Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, University of Queensland Press,
St Lucia, 1981; 2nd edn. Allen and Unwin, St Leonards, 1996; The
Aborigines in Tasmania, 1800—1974 and their problems with the Europeans,
PhD thesis, School of Historical, Philosophical and Political Studies,
Macquarie University, 1975
132. Tut FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAI History
"by far the best and most scholarly work on the Tasmanian Aborigine.
in the twentieth century’. =
The evidence and citations examined below come from th
edition of Ryan's book, published in 1996, in which she had the
opportunity to tidy up the mistakes that inevitably creep into a work
of this scope. In the preface to the second edition, Ryan said she had
done this, She had corrected some of the first edition’s factual and
typographical errors and updated the story of Tasmanian Aboriginal
land rights to the 1990s. She also reassessed some of the language and
concepts she used in the first edition and critically reviewed the major
works of literature published since her own first appeared? So the
critique made here is not of a work of youthful enthusiasm in which
some carelessness might be excused. Its author has had twenty years
to reconsider her original claims and correct her errors.
This chapter also examines some of the evidence about Aboriginal
massacres used by Lloyd Robson in A History of Tasmania, the award-
winning, two-volume work that is now widely regarded as the most
scholarly and the definitive history of the island.* In other words, this
is an examination of the orthodox version of this history through the
mature works of its strongest proponents.
Scholarly history distinguishes itself from popular works by pro-
viding references to its sources. It does this through the device of the
footnote. Today, publishers tend to remove footnotes from the bot-
tom of the page and place them at the end of the book, thereby
transforming them into endnotes, but the principle is the same. The
role of the footnote is to make historians publicly accountable. Foot-
notes verify that the historian has evidence for the claims he or she
makes. In traditional history teaching, the distinction was once clear:
‘the text persuades, the notes prove’. The footnote’s role is to permit
a reader to check the author’s sources, references, facts, quotations
and generalisations. Footnotes allow readers to find the original
source to determine whether a quotation has been accurately tran-
scribed and whether it contains the information the author claims. To
act in a properly scholarly fashion, authors should be able to support,
€ second
? Henry Reynolds, “From armband to blindfold”, The Australian’s Review of
Books, March 2001, p 9; cover blurb for second edition of The Aboriginal
Tasmanians
? Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, pp xviii-xxxii
* Lloyd Robson, A History of Tasmania, Volume I, Oxford University Press,
Melbourne, 1983
? Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History, Harvard University
Press, Cambridge, MA, 1997, p15; Gertrude Himmelfarb, ‘Where have all
the footnotes gone?’ On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture
and Society, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1994, pp 127-8
FIVE: HISTORICAL SCHOLARSHIP AND INVENTI IN OF MASSACRE 133
CRE STORIES J-
through their footnotes, e ery factual claim they 1 ke
S v “ > nake.
MM e iar In particular,
if à work of history makes a contentious claim the ;
"
à - V. Ao p author often gives
it a footnote and uses that footnote’s text to comment on is eni
dence about the controversy itself.
Most readers, of course, take historians’ ev; =
have neither the time iea eer eana Sor el pey e
whatever other resource has been "— y Don m ee i
for authenticity. However fsatmotes rM i P p neis s
nad , notes always allow the potential for
others, especially doubters or critics, to do this. So, even if the process
ot verification is rarely followed up, the footnote nonetheless func-
tions as a means of keeping historians honest. Footnotes are one of
the principal reasons why those who practise scholarly history can be
trusted, and cam trust one another, to tell the truth. Unfortunately,
not all historians deserve this trust because some fudge their work by
not doing the research they have claimed or, in some cases, by
inventing sources or falsifying their content. However, those who
make claims they cannot substantiate usually get found out, sooner or
later, by someone checking their footnotes.
An ideal work of history would provide a footnote for every claim
it made. In most cases, however, this would mean one footnote per
sentence, which would clog up and extend the length of the work.
Publishers also believe this would decrease readability and increase
their costs. So the practice has arisen in which many authors put one
footnote at the end of a paragraph and then use it to cite several
sources to cover all the claims made in that paragraph. This might suit
readers and publishers but it makes the task of verifying authors’
claims much more difficult. To check an assertion, you now have to
look up all the sources cited for a whole paragraph to find the rele-
vant one.
Anyway, this is the style of footnoting adopted by both Lyndall
Ryan and Lloyd Robson. It is why, in what follows, that when I try
to verify their claims, I have to discuss several sources at a time rather
than only one. This makes the chapter rather heavy going, both to
write and no doubt to read, but, given the importance of the subject,
it is the only choice. Some of the accusations made by Ryan and
Robson amount to outright mass murder by those under the com-
mand of the colonial authorities. If this were true, then the colonial
6 The worst example in Anthony Grafton's history of the footnote was that
of the Dominican monk Annius of Viterbo who in 1498 published twenty-
four volumes of ancient history purportedly written by Babylonian and
Egyptian priests, all with an elaborate network of cross references that
supported each other, apparently proving that the royal families of northern
Europe were descended from the ancient Trojans. All his sources, however,
were later shown to be forgeries.
134 Yir FADHRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
authorities themselves were guilty of criminal conduct and much of
the orthodox case about the moral status of British imperialism in
Pasmania would be confirmed. So a detailed exploration of the foot-
Hotes is unavoidable,
THE Prrr WATER MASSACRE AND ABYSSINIAN DISPERSAL
Up to the end of 1826, the evidence available to Lieutenant-Gover-
nor Arthur suggested that Aboriginal assaults on settlers were largely
the work of town blacks and tame mobs. As well as Musquito, Black
Jack, Black Tom and the natives from Kangaroo Point, two more
joined the list that year. In October, a party of Aborigines killed two
stockmen and wounded a third near the Clyde River. They were led
by ‘a half-civilized black’ from the settlement at Macquarie Harbour.’
In December on Partridge Island, off South Bruny Island, two con-
vict assigned servants were assaulted by a group of twelve natives led
by Bruni Jack, also known as Boomer, an Aborigine who spoke Eng-
lish and who was well known to Bruny Island settlers. Hence, when
Arthur initially addressed the escalation of Aboriginal violence, he
presumed that tame blacks were behind it. He declared in a govern-
ment notice on 29 November 1826 that, despite the kindness shown
to them by settlers and their servants, they had responded by com-
mitting ‘treacherous and sanguinary acts’:
An impression however still remains that these Savages are stimulated to
acts of Atrocity by one or more leaders who, from their previous Inter-
course with Europeans, may have acquired sufficient intelligence to draw
them into Crime and Danger. The capture of these Individuals therefore
becomes an Object of the first Importance.”
To capture these leaders, Arthur sought to enlist the support of
ordinary settlers. At this stage, he stopped short of declaring martial
law but authorized settlers who were menaced by the natives in the
form of ‘attack, robbery or murder’ to take up arms and, joining with
the military, to drive them off by force, 'treating them as open Ene-
mies'. Until this time, settlers had been constrained by British law in
their dealings with the Aborigines. Like any British subject, an ordi-
nary settler could only lawfully kill an Aborigine in self-defence or in
immediate pursuit after a serious assault. So Arthur's call for settlers to
7 Report of Aborigines Committee of 1830, British Parliamentary Papers,
Colonies, Australia, 4, p 211
5 Statements by William Cox and Andrew Swanson, 6 December 1826,
AOT CSO 1/316/7578 pp 815-26
? Government Notice, Colonial Secretary's Office, 29 November 1826
published in Hobart Town Gazette, 9 December 1826 p 1; also in British
Parliamentary Papers, 4, pp 192-3
,
Fe: HISTORICAL SCHOLARSHIP AND INVENTION OF MASSACRE STORIES 135
become directly involved was the most dramatic change in govern-
ment policy towards the Aborigines since colonisation. Lyndall Ryan
avs white retaliation began at once. Arthur's actions, she writes:
led to an immediate affray with forty Oyster Bay Aborigines at Pittwater
in which fourteen Aborigines were killed and ten captured. Another
group ot Dig River people were dispersed from the Abyssinia arca and
two were shot. ®
The first of these two incidents, the affray at Pitt Water, was well
known at the time, although not as many Aborigines were involved
as Ryan claims. This was the capture of Black Tom and his nine
companions. Given the alarm that his assaults had generated amongst
settlers, his arrest was written up in detail in the local newspapers.
However, there was no mention in the press, nor in any contempo-
rary document that has made its way into the archives, that fourteen
Aborigines were killed at the same time. Neither the leader of the
captors, Chief District Constable Alexander Laing, nor Black Tom
himself ever said, then or later, that there were Aborigines killed in
this incident."
Ryan provides a footnote with three sources to verify her informa-
tion: Gordon to Colonial Secretary, 9 December 1826, in the Colo-
nial Secretary's Office papers, Volume 1/331, File 7578; Hobart Town
Courier, 15 November 1826; and Colonial Times, 1 December 1826.
None of them, however, provide any confirmation at all. In 1826
James Gordon was Police Magistrate and Coroner for the Pitt Water
district, in which position he wrote a number of letters to the Colo-
nial Secretary. However, there is no document of his from 9 Decem-
ber 1826 in volume 1/331 of the file, as Ryan indicates. Nor is it in
either volume 1/316 or volume 1/320, which also contain letters and
reports by magistrates about Aboriginal affairs. Indeed, there is no
document anywhere in the Archives Office of Tasmania written by
Gordon either on this date or about this incident, except a note in
January 1827 advising the Colonial Secretary that the natives arrested
in December were still in jail, with no charges laid against them, and
recommending they be supplied with rations and released." The
© Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 92
!! Laing later wrote his memoirs, ‘The Alexander Laing Story: District Police
Constable, Pitt Water, Tasmania 1819-1 838', AOT NS 116/1, which
discusses the arrest on p 56, though with several obvious mistakes. Black
Tom later became a member of George Augustus Robinson’s *Friendly
Mission’ and many conversations with him were recorded in Robinson’s
diaries.
12 Gordon to Colonial Secretary, 5 January 1827, AOT CSO 8/109 pp 60-
1. Gordon gave a good indication of how conciliatory the authorities were
136 Tur PAMUCATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
reference Ryan cites from the Hobart Town Courier proved equally
elusive, This is not surprising since this newspaper was not published
on 15 November 1826. Its first edition did not appear until almost a
year later, on 20 October 1827. There was a report of the incident in
the Hobart Town Gazette on 16 December 1826 but, like the Colonial
limes, it reported the capture of Black Tom and his band but did not
mention any killings. The Colonial Times, incidentally, reported the
capture on 15 December, not 1 December.
While the sources provided by Ryan lend no support to her claim
that fourteen Aborigines were killed in this incident, there is one later
account that has some likeness to it. Ryan does not cite it as evi-
dence, but in his testimony before the 1830 Aboriginal affairs inquiry,
Gilbert Robertson, former chief constable of the Richmond district,
described an incident in which he claimed fourteen Aborigines were
killed. Robertson told the committee:
The Richmond police, three years ago, killed 14 of the Natives, who had
got upon a hill, and threw stones down upon them; the police expended
all their ammunition, and being afraid to run away, at length charged with
the bayonet, and the natives fled."
There is some resemblance between this account and Ryan’s claim.
"Three years ago' would have been March 1827, which is near
enough. Robertson does not indicate where this encounter took
place but the Pitt Water location cited by Ryan was adjacent to the
Richmond police district that Robertson mentions. However, while
there are likenesses, there are also discrepancies between the two
accounts. Ryan says forty Oyster Bay Aborigines took part in the
fight but Robertson doesn't give any total. Ryan describes only one
affray in December in which both the killings and capture took place,
so she is at odds with Robertson, whose evidence made no mention
of any capture of Aborigines at the time nor of the well-publicized
arrest of the notorious Black Tom.
at this time. He said Lieutenant-Governor Arthur had in a conversation
‘suggested the Propriety of releasing them as there is no charge against them
of any outrage committed; with which I fully coincide'. And rather than be
prosecuted for murder, he recommended that Black Tom should return to
Hobart Town ‘where I think he will find a Home with his old Mistress’, that
is, Mrs Thomas Birch, his white foster mother.
13 Gilbert Robertson, minutes of evidence before the Committee for the
Affairs of the Aborigines, 3 March 1830, British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies
Australia, 4, p 221; John West retold the story in 1852 in his A History of
Tasmania, ed. A. G. L. Shaw, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1981, p 280
where he paraphrased Robertson’s evidence without adding to it. West
thought the incident took place in 1828.
pive: HISTORICAL SCHC JLAILSHTP AND INVENTION OF MASSACRE STORIES 137
Moreover, there is no contemporary evidence to corroborate
Robertson's story, Thomas Lascelles was then police magistrate of
Richmond but none of his papers in either Historical Records of Austra-
lia, Series III, on Van Diemen's Land, or in the archives of the
Colonial Secretary's Office, mention an attack of this kind. He would
have been obliged to report such an incident, had it occurred, and he
had nothing to hide about it. Indeed, given the encouragement pro-
vided by Arthur's notice of 29 November, both he and his police
would have been commended for risking themselves in an action like
this. None of the contemporary newspapers, which were very inter-
ested in publishing stories about conflict with the blacks, reported this
incident. In. other words, no one but Gilbert Robertson seems to
have heard of it. As demonstrated below, Robertson was a notori-
ously unreliable witness, prone to exaggerating rumours about vio-
lence done to the blacks. It appears this was how Robertson’s peers
regarded his evidence in 1830. The final report of the Aborigines
Committee did not take this claim seriously enough to mention it,
even though the report accepted other hearsay evidence even further
removed in time, such as the various accounts of what happened at
Risdon Cove in 1804.
The second conflict described by Ryan in late 1826 is the incident
in which a group of Big River Aborigines were ‘dispersed’ from the
Abyssinia area and two were shot. Abyssinia was the high country
between the River Clyde and the River Jordan, with Bothwell to its
north and New Norfolk to its south. This time, Ryan recounts an
event that was well documented and in which two Aborigines were
certainly reported killed. As told by the settler Thomas Wells in a
letter to Arthur on 26 November 1826, the incident occurred near
his property Allenvale, on the Macquarie Plains, halfway between
New Norfolk and Hamilton, to the immediate south of Abyssinia. A
oup of Aborigines approached four men out splitting shingles. The
leader of the blacks ‘could speak very good English', so was possibly
Black Tom. The natives killed two of the men, speared one and beat
up the fourth. They then menaced a nearby farmer but ran off when
he produced a gun. They were ‘closely pursued the same day' by the
settlers, Wells wrote, and towards evening there was a confrontation
between armed parties of blacks and whites. Two Aborigines were
shot dead. After this, the Aborigines escaped, leaving twenty-four
spears behind them.”
4 Documents by and about Lascelles are in Historical Records of Australia, III,
Vols II-VI
15 Wells to Arthur, 26 November 1826, AOT CSO 1/316/7578, pp 12-14.
The same incident was reported by Michael Steel of Gretna, Macquarie
Plains, in a letter 21 February 1827, in Gwyneth and Hume Dow, Landfall in
138 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
Ryan presents these killings as if they were part of a process of 'dis.
pening’ the natives from Abyssinia, that is, of setting out to clear
them from the whole district. But Wells’s letter, the only source of
information we have on this event, describes the killings as the
outcome of a fatal assault initiated by Aborigines, followed by a hot
pursuit and a struggle between two armed bands. This is not the
meaning of ‘dispersal’, Moreover, Ryan gets the causal sequence the
wrong way around. She intimates these two killings took place in the
aftermath of Arthur’s notice of 29 November. In fact, they occurred
on 22 November. Wells informed Arthur in a letter of 26 November.
It is most likely that Wells’s report was actually one of those that
disturbed Arthur enough to take the decision to issue his notice,
Before finishing with the Abyssinian killings, it is worth underlin-
ing again the quality of Ryan’s referencing here. Her book actually
records the same incident twice, the first time on page 92, the second
on page 117. In her first report, she cites the same sources for the
events at Abyssinia as for the fourteen allegedly killed at Pitt Water —
the letter from Gordon to the Colonial Secretary on 9 December
1826, the Hobart Town Courier of 15 November 1826 and the Colonial
Times of 1 December 1826.5 As noted earlier, the letter from Gordon
does not exist and the Hobart Town Courier did not begin publication
until October 1827. There was a Colonial Times published on |
December but it does not mention any incident at Abyssinia. Only in
her second discussion does Ryan accurately cite her source as the
Wells document." But in the same footnote to this second report,
Ryan also cites once more the non-existent Hobart Town Courier of 25
November 1826 and the Colonial Times of 6 December 1826. There
was no Colonial Times published on that date. The closest edition was
on 8 December but, again, it does not discuss any conflict at Abys-
sinia.
Ironically, Ryan has missed the opportunity to add another two
deaths of Aborigines at Abyssinia to her tally. Had she seen it, she
would have found the Hobart Town Gazette of 2 December 1826
reported not only the killing of the two timber splitters near Allen-
vale, described above, but another incident five miles from Bothwell
in which a stock-keeper was attacked in his hut. He locked his door
and windows but the Aborigines set fire to his roof to drive him out.
He fired on them and shot two, after which they retreated and he put
out the fire." The newspaper said this conflict took place ‘last week’,
Van Diemen’s Land: The Steels’ Quest Jor Greener Pastures, Footprint,
Footscray, 1990, p 45
' Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 92, p 100 n 13
7 Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 117, p 122 n 6.
'8 Hobart Town Gazette, 2 December 1826, p3
AE HISTORICAL SCHOLARSHIP AND INVENTION OF MASSACRE STORIES 139
h means It also pre-dated Arthur’s 29 November proclamation.
spe nming and sequence of events suggest that the same Aborigines
aoled in the Allenvale assault were responsible.
overall. then, instead of Ryan’s assertion that Governor Arthur's
w November proclamation led directly to the death of sixteen
\borigines, there is no good reason to beleve that any natives were
Lilled in its immediate aftermath. Her claim that fourteen died at Pitt
Water is supported neither by the sources she cites nor by any other
credible evidence at the time. Both the two shootings near Allenvale
and the other two near Bothwell occurred the week before Arthur’s
ssued, so they could not have been a consequence of it.
wv n
notice was 1
NORTHERN VIGILANTES AND THE PORT DALRYMPLE MASSACRE
West from Launceston, along the Meander River, some of the bloodiest
skirmishes of the war were already taking place. In May 1827 the Port
Dalrymple band of the North Midlands tribe visited Norfolk Plains
(Longford). First they killed a kangaroo hunter at Western Lagoon in re-
prisal for shooting Aboriginal men. Then in July they burned down the
house of a prominent settler because his stockmen had seized Aboriginal
women. Finally in November they speared three more of this settler's
stockmen and clubbed another three to death at Western Lagoon. In re-
taliation, stock-keepers at Norfolk Plains formed a vigilante group and in
December massacred a number of Port Dalrymple Aborigines at the junc-
tion of Brumby Creek and the Lake River.””
This is the account of hostilities Ryan provides for the northern
districts of Van Diemen’s Land in 1827. It is true that this was a par-
ticularly bloody year in the north in terms of black versus white con-
flict. In fact, until then there had been only a handful of killings on
either side in the whole of this region since colonization. The year
1827 really marked the beginning of violence in the northern settle-
ments. Nonetheless, most of the above account is pure fiction. Very
little of Ryan’s narrative is supported either by the references she pro-
vides herself or by the sources used by other historians. In particular,
none of her sources claim there was a vigilante group of stock-keep-
ers formed on this occasion, nor any massacre of the Port Dalrymple
Aborigines.
The sources Ryan provides for her narrative above are as follows:
three letters to the Colonial Secretary from, respectively, Smith in
May 1827, Mulgrave on 23 June 1827 and Dalrymple on 1 July 1827;
the Hobart Town Courier of 28 July 1827; a page from the journals of
the Land Commissioners from 1-6 February 1828; a report from
Anstey to Arthur on 4 December 1827; and a copy of the garrison
Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 92
140 :
TUE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
tia of Vis 40th Regiment on 29 November 1827. ?" There is very
tem any of these documents, however, that supports her claims.
Phere is no letter about conflict with Aborigines from anyone
named Smith written to the Colonial Secretary in May 1827 in vol-
ume 1/316, file 7578, of the Colonial Secretary's Office papers
where Ryan indicates. There are, however, two depositions from ihe
Superintendent of police at Launceston, Peter Mulgrave, on 26 June
(not 23 June) and two more from him on 30 June about this
subject." There is a report from Captain Patrick Dalrymple of the
40th Regiment on 1 July 1827 in the volume Ryan indicates, but it
Was written to Captain John Montagu of the same regiment, not to
the Colonial Secretary.” All five of these documents refer to the one
incident at the Western Marshes (not Western Lagoon), fifty miles to
the west of Launceston (south of Westbury and Deloraine on the
Western or Meander River) on 23 and 24 June.
On the 23rd, a party of Aborigines attacked the assigned servant
John Harling and his overseer William Knight, while they were out
felling a tree. Knight was speared and then battered to death but Har-
ling escaped and raised the alarm. The next day Corporal John Shin-
ers of the 40th Regiment led a police constable and three stockmen
in pursuit of the offenders. They found the native camp and that
night rushed it, getting off three shots before the Aborigines
disappeared. Next morning, they found no bodies but deduced that
one native had been wounded because there was a trail of blood in
the footprints of one man. Mulgrave took statements of evidence
about these events from Harling and three of the men in the pursuit
party, one of whom was named Henry Smith,? while Dalrymple
reported on Shiners’s role in the affair.
20 Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 100, n 14.
21 Mulgrave to Colonial Secretary, 26 June 1827, AOT CSO 1/316/7578,
pp 15-24; 30 June 1827, AOT CSO 1/316/7578, pp 28-37
? Dalrymple to Montagu, 1 July 1827, AOT CSO 1/316/7578, pp 38-40
23 This might be where Ryan got the name Smith for the non-existent May
document. However, Henry Smith was an illiterate convict, who signed his
statement with a mark, so he was unlikely to have been the author of a letter
to the Colonial Secretary. There was a police magistrate named Malcolm
Laing Smith at Norfolk Plains, who on 8 July 1828 reported an attack by
Aborigines on the hut of Thomas Ritchie, in which they speared one of his
stock-keepers, AOT CSO 1/316/7578 p 49. On 10 January 1831 magistrate
Smith wrote a report, Murders and Depredations by Aborigines at Norfolk
Plains over the previous five years. This report, which Ryan does not cite, is
in AOT CSO 1/316/7578 pp 803-7. It does mention an incident in May
1827 but it does not support Ryan’s version of events (see also footnote 31
below).
FE: HISTORICAL SCHOLARSHIP AND INVENTION OF MASSACRE STORIES 141
R yan's next source is the Hobart Town Courier of 28 July 1827. This
cannot be right because, as noted earlier, this paper did not begin
publication until October that year. There was an edition of the
Hobart Town Gazette on that date which had one story about the
Aborigines. It said a group of fifty chased and wounded a shepherd at
Saltpan Plain, near Tunbridge in the central midlands, And that a bi
belonging to Captain Wood near the Clyde River in the Abyssinia
district had been pillaged. Both these locations, however, are » long
way from Launceston and Norfolk Plains and thus have no relevance
to Ryan’s account of conflict in the north.
The Journals of the Land Commissioners, which are Ryan’s next
source, Were written between 1826 and 1828 by three men who
were appointed to traverse Van Diemen’s Land and survey and subdi-
vide the colony. The page Ryan cites records details of one commis-
sioner's visit to Norfolk Plains from 1 to 6 February 1828. It contains
one mention of conflict between natives and colonists. This described
how a settler named Urqhart, who was farming under the Western
Tiers, had been pursued by the natives, 'escaping them most miracu-
lously, and how one of his men had been wounded. Urghart later
returned to his hut protected by a party of soldiers. The diary entry
does not say when these events occurred.” Two days later, further
north, the diary records that ‘mysterious Murders have also been
committed in this recess [a piece of Crown Land], and have hitherto
remain undetected.’ There is no indication, however, when these
murders occurred nor the race of either the perpetrators or the vic-
tms. The rest of the commissioner's diary for February, when he
travelled throughout the Norfolk Plains, makes no mention of Abo-
rigines at all. He did observe that one ‘native’ named Saltmarsh now
owned Reid’s farm of 300 acres.2° However, Mr Saltmarsh was not
an Aboriginal pastoralist but a native-born white man, whose father
arrived as a convict on the First Fleet.”
The report from Anstey to Arthur on 4 December 1827, which is
Ryan’s next reference, is a strange inclusion in her list of sources since
it has nothing to do with Norfolk Plains or anywhere else in the
north. Thomas Anstey was appointed police magistrate for the Oat-
lands district in March 1827.” His territory was the south midlands
district. Anstey did write a letter to Governor Arthur on 4 December
? Anne McKay (ed.), Journals of the Land Commissioners for Van Diemen's
Land 1826-28, University of Tasmania and Tasmanian Historical Research
Association, Hobart, 1962, p 74
5 Journals of the Land Commissioners, p 74
% Journals of the Land Commissioners, p 75
2 Robson, A History of Tasmania, Vol I, pp 60-1
B Historical Records of Australia, Ill, V, p 609
iin aa
e $00 04 bó (41i
142 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
1827 on the subject of the Aborigines. However,
he described I
bloody skirmishes or vigilante raids but | iet t iii
OOdy sKirmishes or vigilante raids but how quiet th
ings were:
No outrage has been committed by them [Aborig
ines], in the Dis
Green. Ponds,
Bath or Methven, since the murder of Chief Cc
Bennett, nearly two months ago; — nor do I believe that any of th
Natives have been seen in either of the three districts since that
although the contrary has been asserted by one or two Convicts,”
tricts of
Stable
e Black
event,
Ryan’s final source is a page from the British Parliamentary Paper
collection of documents about the military operations against the
Aborigines. That page records the garrison orders of the 40th Regi.
ment issued by the Brigade Major's Office in Hobart on 29 Novem.
ber 1827." These orders state that because of ‘several murders’ by
Aborigines of stock-keepers ‘in different parts of the interior of the
island’, four officers and thirty soldiers of the regiment were to march
north from Hobart. Six were to strengthen the existing detachment at
Ross and the remainder were to go to Norfolk Plains. In addition,
eleven men from the 40th Regiment stationed at Oyster Bay were to
march north to St Paul's Plains to ‘protect the country ... from the
attacks of the Natives’. While these orders make it clear that the north
of the colony was a scene of violence by Aborigines, there is nothing
in them about any response by the settlers. As noted above, other
members of the 40th Regiment were already in the north where they
had seen some action in June that resulted in one native being
wounded. Apart from this, however, there is nothing in the docu-
ment Ryan cites to show that the regiment was more actively en-
gaged than this.
In other words, of all Ryan's footnoted sources only one is con-
nected to any of the events she describes in the north in 1827. The
one incident that fits her sources was at the Western Marshes in June
in which one stockman was killed and one Aborigine wounded. This
hardly qualifies, however, as 'some of the bloodiest skirmishes of the
war'. Her other details lack any support whatsoever in the sources she
cites. None of them mention any kangaroo hunter being killed by
Aborigines or him killing Aboriginal men.?' There is nothing in any
of her sources about stockmen seizing Aboriginal women. There is
? Anstey to Arthur, 4 December 1827, AOT CSO 1/320/7578, pp 3-4
% British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, pp 193-4 (or pp 21-2 in
the alternative pagination to which Ryan refers)
*! While there was a report written in 1831 about a kangaroo hunter, John
Smith, being killed at Norfolk Plains in May 1827, this is not a reference
cited by Ryan and it made no mention of him shooting Aboriginal men:
Report of Murders and Depredations by Aborigines at Norfolk Plains by
Malcolm Laing Smith, 10 January 1831, AOT CSO 1/316/7578 pp 803-7
Ft HISTORICAL SCHOI ARSHIP AND INVENTION OF MASSACRE STORIES — 143
ention of any events at Western Lagoon. None of her sources
no nm : : NP
refer to any settlers forming a vigilante group or discuss any massacre
y the Port Dalrymple Aborigines at Lake River or anywhere else.
M
This is a remarkable catalogue of misrepresentation for one paragraph
indeed, it must set some kind of record in Australian historiogra-
phy and can hardly be explained away as an accident or a mistake.
This is not to say there was little conflict in the north in 1827, far
om it, That year in the whole colony there were thirty-three whites
killed or who went missing believed killed by Aborigines. No less
than twenty-six of them were from districts within fifty miles of
Launceston.” These figures are from a survey by Brian Plomley, by
far the most empirically reliable of those historians of the conflict.
Despite the number of whites he records killed in 1827, he does not
confirm Ryan’s claim that many Aborigines were also killed. In fact,
Plomley's survey records the total number of Aboriginal casualties in
the north in 1827 as one shot at the Western Marshes on 18 June,
and ‘some’ natives wounded near Quamby Bluff on 24 June.?
(However, on checking the sources Plomley provides for these
events, I found they both referred to the one incident, the pursuit of
the killers of William Knight, discussed earlier, where one native was
shot and wounded.) In particular, Plomley did not find any evidence
of a massacre of Port Dalrymple Aborigines at the junction of
Brumby Creek and Lake River in December 1827, or anywhere else
or at any other time. Moreover, despite the movement of the 40th
Regiment to Norfolk Plains at the time, there is no contemporary
record of any Aborigines being killed or wounded there in December
by its soldiers or, indeed, by anyone else.
THE OYSTER BAY AND CAMPBELL TOWN MASSACRES
Lloyd Robson has long been a well-known historian of Australia. He
was a member of the History Department at the University of Mel-
bourne from 1964 until he retired in 1988. His books include an
influential statistical study of the convicts transported to Australia and
a similar treatment of the soldiers of the first AIF of World War One.
His magnum opus was the two-volume A History of Tasmania (1983
and 1991), which won him major literary awards. The entry on
Robson in the Oxford Companion to Australian History warmly
commends him on the grounds that ‘he did not allow his rigorous
? My calculation from the listings for 1827 in N. J. B. Plomley, The
Aboriginal /Settler Clash in Van Diemen’s Land 1803-1831, Queen Victoria
Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston, 1992, pp 62-6
? Plomley, Aboriginal/Settler Clash, p 63. Plomley locates the second
Western Marshes incident at Quamby Bluff, which is nearby.
144. Tur FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
methodology to overcome his sensitivity’. Instead, he is lauded for
Maintaining a ‘moral passion’ in his history writing, especially in his
‘condemnation of frontier violence"? This is all too true. Let me
illustrate, with two examples from Robson’s first volume on
Tasmania, what happens when moral sensitivity prevails over
historical methodology,
In 1830, the settler James Hobbs told the government inquiry into
Aboriginal affairs of a mass killing of Aborigines fifteen years earlier,
This is how Robson reports Hobbs’s testimony:
About 1815, said Hobbs, he saw 300 sheep killed by the Aborigines at
Oyster Bay as a result of which twenty-two Aborigines were murdered
the next day by a party of the 48th Regiment.”
Robson presents this as an eye-witness account, but what Hobbs
actually said in his testimony was:
It was reported about 15 years ago that the Natives killed 300 sheep at
Oyster Bay, but did not eat any of them, and that 22 of the Natives were
killed next day by part of the 48th Regiment.”
In other words, Hobbs was plainly recounting a story he had heard,
not events he saw. It would have been difficult for him to observe
anything that happened at Oyster Bay in 1815 because at the time he
was living in India. Hobbs had been part of the Derwent River col-
ony between 1804 and 1809 as both a settler and naval officer. He
then went to India to make a career in commerce and did not return
to Van Diemen’s Land until 1822.°”
If Hobbs’s story were true, the mass killing would have been an
illegal operation, perpetrated by government soldiers who were not in
hot pursuit after an assault by blacks but who had a day to consider
their response. It would have been a gross and murderous over-
reaction to the killing of some sheep. One might have expected a
historian concerned about the truth to seek some corroboration about
retaliation and bloodshed on this scale. Robson, however, reports
Hobbs’s testimony and raises no questions about it.
The reason he chose this course is apparent to anyone who has
gone through the archives for this period. For there is no corrobo-
?* '(Leslie) Lloyd Robson’, Oxford Companion to Australian History, eds.
Graham Davison, John Hirst, Stuart Macintyre, Oxford University Press,
Melbourne, 1998, p 562
? Robson, History of Tasmania, Vol I, p 50
36 James Hobbs, evidence to Aboriginal Affairs Committee, 9 March 1830
British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 222
?' E. R. Pretyman, ‘James Hobbs’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol 1
A-H, p 442-3 Jf apa Veh,
,
Five: HISTORICAL SCHOLARSHIP AND INVENTION OF MASSACRE STORIES 145
rating evidence. No one but Hobbs has ever mentioned this event.
No press report of such an event has ever been cited. The two prin-
cipal printed. sources of government information for 1815 are the
Historic Records of Australia, Series IH, Volume II, and the collection of
governors’ despatches and documents on Australia published in the
British Parliamentary Papers. Neither of these sources records an inci-
dent of this kind in that year. This is not because those in authority
were trying to hide or downplay the level of violence in the colony.
On the contrary, a large proportion of Lieutenant-Governor Davey’s
despatches to his superiors in Sydney and London in 1815 dealt with
violent conflict in the interior of Van Diemen’s Land. But this was all
about conflict between white bushrangers and settlers. Davey made
no mention of mounting any action against the Aborigines. The 48th
Regiment was stationed at the time in Hobart and there were no
orders recorded about an excursion to so distant a region as Oyster
Bay. Had any members of the regiment gone there, this would
normally have attracted some published comment, if only about the
expense involved, which the Lieutenant-Governor would have had
to justify.
The only recorded incident that even vaguely resembles Hobbs’s
story at this time was an entry in Reverend Knopwood’s diary of 8
November 1815 where he says the natives had killed 930 sheep
belonging to a settler named Morgan by setting fire to his pasture
land. However, this event took place at ‘Scantlands Plains’ (Scanlans
Plains), near what later became the settlement of Oatlands, a long way
from Oyster Bay. Knopwood does not mention any reprisals.**
The strongest reason for doubting Hobbs's story is that in 1815
there were not 300 sheep at Oyster Bay for the Aborigines to kill.
There is good information available about the spread of land settle-
ment in Van Diemen's Land. In 1815, farming and pastoralism were
still clustered around the two principal settlements on the Derwent
River and Pitt Water in the South, and Port Dalrymple and Norfolk
Plains in the north. None of the central midlands had yet been
occupied. There were no settlements at Oyster Bay or, indeed, at any
place on the east coast of the island. The closest land grant to Oyster
Bay in 1815 was at Brushy Plains (Runnymede), south of the Prosser
River. The first settler to discover land suitable for pastures at Oyster
Bay was George Meredith in April 1821 and the first white man
38 Mary Nicholls (ed.) The Diary of the Reverend Robert Knopwood 1803—1838,
Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Hobart, 1977, entry for 8
November 1815, p 216
146 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
Known to inhabit the district was William Talbot later that year.»
The first official land grant at Oyster Bay was not made until 18230
While it is possible there might have been some unrecorded, illegal
squatting by graziers beyond the officially sanctioned settlements, thi
phenomenon was never as extensive in Tasmania as on the mainland,
But it is virtually certain there was no illicit flock of sheep grazing as
far away as Oyster Bay in 1815. A clandestine squatter would have
had no convicts as assigned servants to shepherd them. Moreover, it is
hardly likely that members of the 48th Regiment would have been
despatched on an expedition to defend the interests of an illegal
squatter in unsurveyed territory. l
We may well ask why Lloyd Robson failed to point out any of
these problems for Hobbs’s story. There was adequate information
about land settlement available when Robson prepared his book.“
Indeed, he wrote a whole chapter on the subject. How could the
author of the award-winning, definitive history of Tasmania have
been ignorant of the timing of the spread of settlement? Either he was
unaware there were no settlers at Oyster Bay in 1815, which reflects
poorly on his scholarship, or he was aware but failed to mention it
because he did not want to spoil Hobbs’s massacre story, which
reflects poorly on his integrity. "MEN
Another piece of 1830 testimony used by Robson in his history
was a story told by Gilbert Robertson. The year before, Robertson
had been leader of one of the roving parties that traversed the settled
districts and their hinterlands, trying to capture marauding Aborigi-
nes. In his evidence to the Aboriginal Affairs Committee, Robertson
reported an incident that he said occurred in 1828 under the Western
Tiers, to the west of Campbell Town. After twenty-five or thirty
natives had robbed a settler's hut, a party of constables and soldiers
from the 40th Regiment pursued them, and perpetrated what
appeared to be the greatest massacre of Aborigines in the Australian
colonies to that time, with a total of seventy natives slaughtered.
Lloyd Robson gave Robertson’s evidence about this incident a major
? See entries for George Meredith and William Talbot, Australian Dictionary
of Biography, Volume 2, I-Z, 1788-1850, Melbourne University Press,
Melbourne, 1967
* Sharon Morgan, Land Settlement in Early Tasmania, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 1992, pp 16—23, especially map 4, Location of Grants to
1816, and map 7, Location of Grants to 1823.
*' Plomley, Friendly Mission, Map 1, Settlement in Tasmania 1804-18, p 40;
Peter Scott, ‘Land Settlement’ in Atlas of Tasmania, ed. J. L. Davies,
Department of Land and Surveys, Hobart, 1965, p 43; plus the ADB entries
for Meredith and Talbot in footnote 39.
FIVE: HISTORICAL SCHOLARSHIP AND INVENTION OF MASSACRE STORIES 147
treatment. He reproduced an almost verbatim version. of his
testimony. Robson wrote:
What Robertson charged was that great. ravages were committed by a
party ot four or five police and some of the 40th Regiment sent out from
Campbell Town against the Aborigines. These murderers, said Robertson,
yot the Aborigines between two perpendicular rocks where there was a
sort. of shelf formation, and killed some seventy by firing off all their
ammunition and then dragging the women and children from crevices in
the rocks and dashing out their brains, after which those who escaped the
massacre watched from away off until the Europeans withdrew and then
placed the bodies of the dead in hollow trees. With this party were men
named Morley, Grant and Dugdale, said Robertson, and they destroyed
an entire tribe.”
Now, Robson does not unconditionally endorse Robertson’s evi-
dence. Before he reproduces it, he says it raised a subject ‘that led to
later denials, and that illustrates the difficulty of getting some truth
about the war, for if ever there was a case of the victors writing his-
tory this is it. Robson also notes later that Dr Adam Turnbull dis-
puted Robertson’s story. Robson paraphrased Turnbull saying ‘that
all kinds of numbers had been mentioned in relation to murdered
Aborigines, and the whole thing was ridiculous’. Robson finished:
‘Whether or not that was the best word to describe murder, another
witness agreed with the doctor, asserting that he had gone to the
place of the so-called massacre and found no bodies at all.“
No one could accuse Robson here of not telling both sides of this
story. This is technically correct but, clearly, the weight he gives to
one side is wholly disproportionate to the other. The claim that there
was a massacre is given in full detail, down to the names of those
allegedly responsible and even what happened to the bodies. 'The
denial, however, is treated dismissively. The author's objective here is
not to show that this is a disputed story. On the contrary, his rhetori-
cal intent is to lead the reader to conclude there were some colonists
who were so shameless they would not only lie about so serious a
matter but would also attempt to trivialize the murder of Aborigines
as ‘ridiculous’.
However, most people who read with an open mind the full testi-
mony of the two witnesses who denied this incident are likely to
come to a very different conclusion. The other witness who agreed
with the doctor was William Robertson, a merchant and farmer from
Campbell Town, who gave evidence to the committee the next day.
Unlike Gilbert Robertson, he was actually at the scene. He said he
Robson, History of Tasmania, Vol 1, p 217
? Robson, History of Tasmania, Vol 1, p 217
VAS Ph FABIRUCATION OF ABOIUGINAL HISTORY
Went to the site alter hearing a rumour that seventy natives had been
killed the day before, He persuaded the soldiers to show him the
gully where the killings took place:
| went there the next day after the attack was said to have taken place
with the party; they said they had killed seven of the Natives, but
appeared disinclined to go into the gulley. I told the corporal (40th R egi-
ment) that I would go into the gulley; we went, but found no bodies, and
he then said, ‘to tell you the truth, we did not kill any of them, we had
been out a long time and had done nothing’, and he said it in bravado.
Dugdale and Morley were with the party but they said nothing; there
were the bodies of three dogs laying near three small fires; there was
plenty of room for the Natives to have escaped in every direction; there
was a thick scrub on the north-eastside; this was at the very time there
was a rumour that 70 Natives has been killed the day before at that place;
I saw no blood in the gulley.
This is a very different version of this incident, yet even though
Lloyd Robson mentions its existence, he has deceived his readers by
omitting most of its content. Plainly, the evidence of someone who
had gone to the site of an alleged massacre, but had seen neither
bodies nor blood, and who had extracted a confession that the story
had been invented, should have been reported by any historian who
wanted to tell the whole truth about this incident. This is particularly
so when it confirmed other evidence that Dr Turnbull had given the
committee, the details of which Robson also omitted. Turnbull had
said:
Heard about two years ago that Mr Robertson’s hut was robbed (not far
from Campbell Town) by 25 or 30 natives; it was immediately afterwards
reported that 100, 70, 40, 50 and then 17 of them had been killed; did
not believe any of them had been killed; no bodies were found; believed
the report was utterly ridiculous; the report was first partially believed, but
afterwards utterly disbelieved.
Robson also failed to record that the Aboriginal Affairs Committee
did not take Gilbert Robertson's evidence seriously enough to
include any mention of it in their main report. This was despite the
fact that the committee was willing to accept other atrocity stories
based on hearsay, such as the high death count at Risdon Cove and
the claim that the convict James Carrett forced an Aboriginal woman
to wear the head of her murdered husband strung around her neck.“
Plainly, the committee felt the rebuttals by William Robertson and
Dr Turnbull decided the issue.
“ Report of the Aborigines Committee, 19 March 1830, British Parliamentary
Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 208
FIVE: HISTORICAL SCHOLARSHIP AND INVENTION OF MASSACRE STORIES — 149
Subsequently, there have been only à small number of historians
who have found the story of the Campbell Town massacre credible.
This is the main reason it does not feature in all the historical
accounts. of the conflict in ‘Tasmania and why, generally, it has not
gone down às one of the worst in Australian history, which it other-
wise would have been. Nonetheless, there are still some who have
repeated Gilbert Robertson’s claims without mentioning they were
immediately disputed. This includes four of the popular authors on
this subject: James Bonwick in The Last of the Tasmanians (1870),
Clive Turnbull in Black War (1948),“° David Davies in The Last of the
Tasmanians (1973),*” and Bruce Elder in Blood on the Wattle (1998).**
Authors like these who present only one side of this and similar
incidents, or those like Lloyd Robson who hedge them with half-
hearted qualifications, are sending a distinct signal: they have little
interest in exploring the truth but a considerable interest in exploiting
the politics of these stories.
THE DEATH TOLL OF THE ROVING PARTIES
In the first three months of 1828, there were twenty-seven separate
assaults on British settlers by the Aborigines. They killed eleven white
stockmen.^? In April, Lieutenant-Governor Arthur responded with a
policy to expel all Aborigines from the settled districts. ‘I am at length
convinced,’ he said, ‘of the absolute necessity of separating the
Aborigines from the white inhabitants, and of removing the former
entirely from the settled districts, until their habits shall become more
civilized.'^? In April 1828 he issued a general proclamation authorising
the military to capture and remove Aborigines from the areas of
settlement. He also ordered all magistrates and their deputies to
conform to his directions for 'the retirement or expulsion of the
Aborigines from the settled districts’. They were to ‘resort to
whatever means a severe and inevitable necessity may dictate and
45 James Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians, or The Black War in Van
Diemen’s Land, Sampson, Low, Son and Marston, London, 1870, p 64
46 Clive Turnbull, Black War: The Extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines,
(1948), Sun Books, Melbourne, 1974, p 40 n12
? David Davies, The Last of the Tasmanians, Shakespeare Head Press, Sydney,
1973, p 64. Davies mistakenly attributes the story of this incident to George
Augustus Robinson.
55 Bruce Elder, Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatment of Aboriginal
Australians since 1788, New Holland Publishers, Sydney, 1998, p 34
? Plomley, Aboriginal/Settler Clash, pp 66-8
5 Arthur to Huskisson, 17 April 1828, British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies,
Australia, 4, p 177
TU
| Vit: FABRICATION OF ADORIGINAL HISTORY
require’ *! However, he emphasized that no civilians had the right to
Use force against the natives unless in self-defence or under the
directions of the military or a magistrate.
Arthur's proclamation said he would set up a line of military posts
along the borders of settlement to enforce the policy. There were
already a total of eleven military stations throughout the settled dis-
tricts whose main job was supervising the convicts. They were at
Launceston, Oyster Bay, Brighton, Clyde, New Norfolk, Punt South
Esk, St Paul's Plains, Isis, Norfolk Plains, Oatlands and Macquarie
Harbour. Rather than establish any new posts, the orders to the mili-
tary at the existing posts were to actively patrol throughout the dis-
tricts where they were stationed.” The strategy, in practice, was to
make the military presence visibly known. Instead of remaining sta-
tionary at their garrisons, these military posts were to demonstrate
their mobility by sending armed and red-coated detachments on long,
sweeping patrols. The sight of these soldiers would intimidate the
Aborigines and keep them out of the settled districts.
The new policy, however, made little impact. Between May and
the end of October 1828, there were another forty-one assaults in
which fifteen settlers were killed. Among those killed in October
were Esther Gough, her four-year-old daughter and her neighbour,
Anne Geary, who all lived near the apparently well-garrisoned town
of Oatlands. These assaults spread what the Hobart Town Courier called
‘the greatest consternation and alarm"?
On 1 November 1828 Arthur responded by declaring martial law
in the settled districts?! He did not take this decision with any
satisfaction. ‘I cannot divest myself of the consideration that all
aggression originated with the white inhabitants,’ he had written in
January 1828, 'and that therefore much ought to be endured in return
before the blacks are treated as an open and accredited enemy by the
government.'? But the alarm felt by the settlers led him to define
them precisely this way. Although martial law represented the
ultimate failure of the policy of conciliation, Arthur told his superiors
in London that his aim was not to annihilate the Aborigines but to
51 Arthur, Proclamation, 15 April 1828, British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies
Australia, 4, pp 194-6
?? Brigade major to officers on detachments, 21 April 1828; Brigade major to
Captain Walpole, 30 September 1828, British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies
Australia, 4, pp 196-8 ,
53 Hobart Town Courier, 25 October 1828, p 1
54 Proclamation by Arthur, 1 November 1 iti í
Colonies, pues 4, pp 183-4 did Si pS,
55 Arthur to Goderich, 10 January 1828, British Parliam
? " f .
Australia, 4, p 176 entary Papers, Colonies
AvE: HISTORICAL SCHOLARSHIP AND INVENTION OF MASSACRE STORIES 151
force them out of the settled districts. He had instructed his
magistrates and military officers to resort to arms only as a last resort.
But he acknowledged the ultimate intent behind his proclamation:
‘Terror may have the effect which no proferred measures of
conciliation have been capable of inducing."^
The main tactic Arthur devised to implement this ‘terror’ was to
establish. bands of what were called ‘roving parties’ to traverse the
settled districts and capture any Aborigines they could and to shoot
any who resisted arrest. Between November 1828 and May 1829, six
official roving parties were formed, each headed by a constable
supported by between five and ten trusted convicts plus an Aboriginal
tracker or guide. Three roving parties were headed by the chief dis-
trict constable of Richmond, Gilbert Robertson, and three by the
former convict, explorer and adventurer Jorgen Jorgenson. If the
convicts performed satisfactorily for a twelve-month period, they
received a ticket-of-leave. There was also a roving party established
later in 1829 by the settler John Batman, which patrolled the territory
between his property near Ben Lomond and Oyster Bay. Initially, all
these parties were under the general command of Thomas Anstey,
police magistrate for the Oatlands district.
The tactic of the roving party met with an early success when one
group, led by Robertson and guided by the previously apprehended
Black Tom, captured five Aborigines, including two chiefs of the
Stoney Creek tribe, Umarrah and Jemmie, in November 1828."
According to Lyndall Ryan, however, the roving parties killed many
more Aborigines than they captured. Here are the details she provides
of the carnage they wreaked:
Between November 1828 and November 1830 the roving parties cap-
tured about twenty Aborigines and killed about sixty.
The settlers also began to exploit their knowledge of the Aborigines’ sea-
sonal patterns of movement. When a band of the Oyster Day tribe visited
Moulting Lagoon in January 1829, they found the settlers waiting for
them. Ten were shot dead and three taken prisoner. When a band of Big
River people reached the Eastern Marshes in March en route to the east
coast, Gilbert Robertson’s party was waiting and killed five and captured
another."
This death toll has now entered the international literature. In his
book indicting Western imperialism for its slaughter of tribal people,
56 Arthur to Murray, 4 November 1828, British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies
Australia, 4, p 181
57 Robertson to Arthur, 17 November 1828, AOT CSO 1/331/7578 pp
168-177. Umarrah’s name was also spelt Eumarrah and Yumarra.
58 Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 102
152. Tur FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
Guardian journalist Mark Cocker says the ‘roving parties were known
to have killed sixty Aborigines and taken about another twenty
alive’. ® He cites Ryan as his authority. The Canberra military histo-
rian John Connor has perpetuated the same story. His book on Aus-
tralian ‘frontier wars’, which is little more than a summary of the sec-
ondary sources of the orthodox school, also cites Ryan’s claim that
the roving parties killed sixty Aborigines. However, just like Ryan's
account of the conflict in the north of the colony in 1827, every
claim in the above passage is fictitious. Her tally of killings by the
roving parties is completely false. So is her story that Robertson F
party killed five of them. It is true that Robertson’s men did Pu
in capturing one Aborigine in this period but this was not under the
circumstances Ryan describes nor anywhere near the mcs
Marshes. Nor did any settlers lie in wait for Aborigines at Moulting
Lagoon and kill ten of them.
Ryan backs her claim that sixty Aborigines were killed with a foot-
note that contains three references. The first is a letter from Governor
Arthur to the Colonial Secretary on 27 May 1829. Arthur did write a
letter on this date and it was about the roving parties. It is in the ar-
chive location where Ryan indicates: volume 1/317, file 7578, of the
Colonial Secretary's Office papers, on pages 15-18. Its subject matter,
however, is the number of men that should comprise Gilbert
Robertson’s parties, whether they should all be due for a ticket-of-
leave as a result of their service, and about the rations that should be
provided for them. It does not mention any Aborigines being killed,
let alone sixty. Her second reference is a page of commentary by
Brian Plomley in Friendly Mission, his edition of the journals of
George Augustus Robinson. This page does discuss the actions of the
roving parties and the information available about them, but about
Aboriginal deaths it only has this to say: ‘How many natives were
killed in all these operations is hardly mentioned.^' Ryan’s third
reference is a very long footnote by Plomley from the same edition of
Robinson’s journals, dealing mainly with the personal background of
the Sydney Aborigines brought to Van Diemen's Land to act as police
guides. It does not mention any Aborigines killed by the roving par-
ties but at one stage it does say that Batman's party captured eleven
natives in September 1829.” In short, none of Ryan’s footnotes sup-
port her assertion.
5 Mark Cocker, Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe’s Conflict with Tribal
Peoples, Jonathan Cape, London, 1998, p 149
© John Connor, The Australian Frontier Wars 1788-1
NSW Press, Sydney, 2002, p 145 n 48
6! Plomley, Friendly Mission, p 30
62 Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp 472-4
$38, University of
Pwr: HISTORICAL SCHOLARSHIP AND INVENTION OF MASSACRE STORIES — 153
Apart trom Ryan, no other historian has ever claimed the roving
parties killed sixty Aborigines, or anything like this number, at this
ame. Itis revealing that the PhD thesis from which this claim derives
ws mere circumspect. In 1975, Ryan’s thesis summarized the situation
this way!
Between November 1828 and November 1830 the roving parties dis-
posed of about sixty Aborigines in the settled districts either by capture or
IA
murder.
Now, this is quite a different claim. It gives no precise number of
those killed, and the total 'disposed of' is about sixty. In the thesis,
there is no footnote to this sentence. However, in 1981, for its
publication as a book and for a more public audience, Ryan inflated
the total to eighty, of whom she was now confident that about sixty
had been killed. She added the footnoted references discussed above,
thus dressing up her conclusion as a finding based on scholarly
research, when it was nothing of the kind.
The truth is that the roving parties were widely regarded at the
time as ineffectual, either in capturing Aborigines or in removing
them from the scene. The report of the Aborigines Committee of
1830 declared them ‘worse than useless. Arthur himself confessed
they ‘had proved quite unavailing as a general security’. He said the
Aborigines completely outwitted the roving parties:
The total want of information as to the situation of the tribes at any par-
ticular time; the facility and rapidity with which they moved to some
secret hiding place, after committing any atrocity, which they had only
attempted when sure of success, rendered pursuit on such occasions in
most instances fruitless, for the rugged and woody nature of the country
in which they took refuge was sure to baffle any attempt to trace them in
their course.”
He might have added three further reasons given by Jorgen
Jorgenson:
1. Want of a plan for combined operations.
2. A total lack of discipline.
$ Lyndall Ryan, The Aborigines in Tasmania, 1800-1974, and their
problems with the Europeans, p 98
é Report of the Aborigines Committee 1850, British Parliamentary Papers,
Colonies Australia, 4, p 217
6 Memorandum by Arthur, 20 November 1830, British Parliamentary Papers,
Colonies Australia, 4, p 244
154
Uu] AMUCA TION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
3, Inveterate laziness Which induces the partics to proceed over the ies
ground. they can find from one place to another, and the natives thus
i 1 t6
knowing their customary tracks can easily avoid them.
lt was this ineptitude and almost complete lack of results that by
February 1830 led Arthur to resort to offering a bounty for the cap-
ture oU Aborigines of five pounds an adult and two pounds a child.
Ryan's claim that. Robertson's party killed five at the Eastern
Marshes in March is yet another piece of invention. The diaries of the
Parties Robertson commanded from November 1828 antil February
1830 are held by the Archives Office of Tasmania. Nowhere do
they mention any killings at Eastern Marshes or, indeed, anywhere
else. The most intense period of their activity was from 1 January to
13 March 1829, when the diary gives a daily account of a sixty-five-
day trek from Richmond up most of the east coast and return. The
party did not have any violent confrontation with Aborigines at this
time. In March, instead of lying in wait to shoot the blacks, the typi-
cal diary entries record the following:
5th: Rained all day spoiled our provisions, and put out our fire We
remained at Kearney’s bog in a miserable plight — Saw Number of Old
Native Huts — but no fresh Traces
6th: ... saw no fresh trace of Natives
7th: ... heard nothing of the blacks
8th: Remained at Rofs all day Baking and Washing it being afternoon
before we could get our Rations.^?
The only Aborigine they came across was one old, unarmed man
and his dog living on their own in the bush near George River in the
north-east of the island. When he was brought to Hobart on 27
February, the Hobart Town Courier reported that he had been one ofa
party of six and that the other five had been ‘shot in the pursuit’.
The roving party’s diary, however, makes it clear this otherwise un-
& N. J. B. Plomley (ed.) Jorgen Jorgenson and the Aborigines of Van Diemen’s
Land, Blubber Head Press, Hobart, 1991, p 25, citing a letter by Jorgenson
to Anstey, 29 July 1829
* Journal of the proceedings of a party employed under the direction of
Gilbert Robertson, 1 January 1829-13 March 1829, AOT CSO
1/331/7578, pp 114-31; Journal of a party under the immediate orders of
Gilbert Robertson, 2 February 1829-27 February 1829, AOT CSO
1/331/7578, pp 132-44; Memorandum for a journal of the proceedings of a
party under my charge in pursuit of the Aborigines, 27 February 1829-13
February 1830, AOT CSO 1/331/7578, pp 79-92
Robertson, Journal of the proceedings, 5-8 March 1829, p 130
? Hobart Town Courier, 7 March 1829, p 1
Launceston YX
We B.
j. Horr
Supposed siteation
of a large Lake
)
$
xcu
i t
——]
NDS M
A new map of Van Diemen's Land by Jam
es Tyrer, from. Views in Australia or New South Wales and
Van Diemen's Land, by J. Lycett, London 1825 (National Library of Australia)
ee
1,
^,
5
yo Vasa
M sini S
7
ee Le
Above: June Park, Van Diemen’s Land’, 1825, by Augustus Earle (Rex Nan Kivell Collection, Nation-
Library of Australia). Despite claims by orthodox historians that fences impeding Aboriginal access Were a mg,
cause of the outbreak of violence at the time, this property, like many of the period, was completely ben r
fences.
Below: In the 1820s, many of the land grants in the settled districts were not occupied iy lace
were simply partly-cleared, unfenced stock runs containing a stock hut, like that illustrated below. ot
the Macquarie River, near what later became the central midlands town of Ross, belonged to William Ton
Stocker. It was sketched by Thomas Scott in 1821. The sketchbook is annotated: ‘One of the original st;
huts of the colony built of mud and thatched with grass of the most rude description, the Natives having bum;
former one about a year before. No other hut within 6 miles.’ (Mitchell Library, State Library of New So,
Wales)
Vr: HISTORICAL SCHOLARSHIP AND INVENTION OF MASSACRE STORIES 155
cormoborited press. report was false, for the old man was captured
completely on his own,
When we approached within thirty yards of the Fire a dog barked and we
saw. a black man dart off into the scrub and instantly gave chase ... we
succeeded in catching him — We then went to see where his Fire was,
but could see nothing to indicate that more than one had been there —
he is an old man he had no spears and only one old dog. ^"
For all of 1829 and 1830, he was their sole captive.
For the most part, the journals portray a company with all the
expertise of a platoon led by Sergeant Ernie Bilko. They got lost so
often they suspected their Aboriginal guides, Black Tom and the
captured chief Umarrah, were deliberately leading them astray. They
mistimed their marches so badly that several times they ran out of
rations and were forced to exist for days on damper and water. At one
stage, Robertson himself was separated from the rest and was lost so
long in the forest that the others gave him up and went home. From
May until December 1829, Robertson's journals contain extended
periods with no entries. This was not because the parües were out
shooting blacks. Instead, his convict troops had become disenchanted
with trekking through the bush and so they willingly accepted an
invitation by Robertson to work for him, unauthorized, on his
property ‘Woodburn’ near Richmond.”
By September 1829, the two main leaders of the roving parties,
Robertson and Jorgenson, were at loggerheads. Each wrote reports
ridiculing the other's knowledge of the Aborigines’ whereabouts.
They accused one another of doing nothing and of writing exagger-
ated reports about their pursuit of the natives." There was a good
deal of truth in this. In June 1829, the Aborigines attacked the huts of
several settlers in the Pitt Water district. At Carlton, they killed four
settlers and wounded a fifth. These events all took place within the
district for which Robertson was responsible. Some settlers set out,
unsuccessfully, in pursuit of the culprits but none of Robertson’s
three roving parties were among them. At the time, Robertson’s
journal recorded that he was on patrol in the unsettled areas, some-
where between the Eastern Marshes and Brushy Plains.” He later
? Robertson, Journal of the proceedings, 13 February 1829, p 126
7 Robertson to Burnett, 18 January 1831, AOT CSO 1/331/7578, pp 154—
7; Robertson to Gordon, 20 February 1830, AOT CSO 1/331/7578 pp
197—202; Gordon to Parramore, 20 February 1830, AOT CSO 1/331/7578,
pp 203-4
72 Jorgenson to Anstey, 7 September 1829, AOT CSO, 1/331/7578, pp
146-52. See also Plomley, Jorgen Jorgenson, pp 25-7
7 Robertson, Memorandum for a journal, 24 May 1829, p 81
156 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
excused himself for not visiting Carlton or the other back settlement,
‘no parties had
: : : tine! at the fma
been raised in the Richmond district’ at the time.” It was not surpris.
ing, then, that other settlers came to regard his efforts with disdain
and saw him more interested in pursuing his own interests than in
pursuing the natives, James Hobbs complained:
of Pitt Water where the murders occurred, because
Mr Gilbert Robertson has never exerted himself in pursuit of the Natives:
he has done much mischief in not following them up; he has been more
P Els > NEL]
employed in looking for grants of land than the Natives.
Apart from the original capture of Umarrah and his band, the clos-
est that any of Robertson's parties came to genuine conflict with the
Aborigines was on 14 November 1829 at Green Ponds. After some
Aborigines had attacked a hut at nearby Constitution Hill, the local
police and settlers, together with Robertson and some of his men,
devised a plan to trap them. Robertson and four men sat in a hut,
inviting attack, while the others hid themselves nearby. The natives
duly appeared on a nearby hill but the concealed men Charged too
soon. ‘All the natives escaped,’ Robertson wrote in his journal, ‘and
no one could tell how, though they were in a manner surrounded by
upwards of thirty people each one more anxious than another to
capture or destroy them’.”° l
The only Aborigines reliably recorded killed by the roving parties
were two men shot by John Batman’s group in early September 1829.
Batman reported to his commander, Thomas Anstey, that his party of
three men and two black trackers had followed a group of sixty or
seventy Aborigines on the east side of Ben Lomond. They came upon
their camp and waited until night to rush them. The black camp
contained forty dogs, who detected the intruders and gave the alarm.
‘The natives arose from the ground and were in the act of running
away into a thick scrub when I ordered the men to fire upon them.’
That night, Batman’s men captured a woman and a two-year-old
boy. Next morning, they found an Aboriginal man badly wounded in
the ankle and knee and another man wounded in the body. For
ammunition, Batman’s men had used buckshot, which at a distance
would wound rather than kill. They saw traces of blood on the
ground and were told by their captives they had wounded several
» eei i MR aed for a journal, 14 August 1829, p 82
James Hobbs, evidence to Aborigines Commi > p 82
Parliamentary Papers, Colonies mmittee, 1830, British
Australia, 4, p 223
” Robertson, Memorandum for a journal, 14 November 1829 p 89
pr HUSTORICAL SCHOLARSHIP AND INVENTION OF MASSACRE STORIES 157
ether men and (vo women who escaped." They followed the tracks
at the tribe all the next day but found no one, dead or alive. The
sollen day they headed back to Batman’s farm, taking the two
wounded Aboriginal men, the woman and the child. The wounded
men, however, could not walk. ‘After trying every means in my
power. for some time, found I could not get them on, Batman
reported. '] was obliged therefore to shoot them.’ "^
rwo weeks later, however, during a formal interview with Anstey
and the police magistrate James Simpson, Batman changed his story
about the two deaths. One of the Aborigines had died of his wounds
on the track, he claimed, and the other had struck one of his men,
Thomas York, who then killed him in self-defence.” It is fairly clear
that this revised version was a concoction by Batman to spare himself
the dishonour of having murdered unarmed prisoners in what was
plainly cold blood. In a technical sense, the declaration of martial law
and their commission as officers of the Crown gave Batman and his
men the legal authority to shoot any Aborigines they came across in
the settled districts. However, in a moral sense, this shooting had no
justification at all. It is likely that the low opinion his supervising off-
cers, Thomas Anstey and James Simpson, came to have of him origi-
nated in this incident and that Batman changed his story when he
realized this.
Batman’s reputation among the colonial authorities was diminished
further by the lack of dedication he brought to his task. He eventually
turned out to be as reluctant as the other roving party leaders. He had
been offered the generous incentive of a 2000-acre land grant if he
zealously undertook the role for twelve months.® In the first three
weeks of September 1829 he certainly fulfilled this undertaking. As
well as the rush on the tribe at Ben Lomond, he made a trek to the
east coast where, between Break o'Day Plains and Oyster Bay, he
captured another eleven Aborigines — four women, three boys and
four small children — and brought them back to Campbell Town
jail. However, after the initial enthusiasm of these forays, Anstey
reported that Batman had largely abandoned actions against the Abo-
rigines. Batman blamed the government for the quality of its supplies
7 Batman says the captured natives told him ten men were wounded but
since Tasmanian natives could not count to ten this figure is too precise. For
native numerical ability see the discussion in Chapter Eight, p 262
78 Batman to Anstey, 7 September 1829, AOT CSO 1/320/7578 pp 142-5
? Statement on oath by Batman to Anstey and Simpson, 23 September
1829, AOT CSO 1/330/7578, pp 35-38
9 Batman to Burnett, 8 July 1829, AOT CSO 1/321/7578, pp 88-9
8! Hobart Town Courier, 26 September 1829, p 2; Plomley, Friendly Mission, p
105 n 50
ISN Tut FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
and the legal risk he ran if he shot any Aborigines outside the area,
covered by martial law." Like Robertson, he was soon regarded as
Pursuing his own interests rather than the colony's, and was suspected
of employing the members of his roving party on his own farm ^?
tt was very unlikely that the lack of publicly recorded success of the
roving parties masked a cover-up of their deeds. Given their incom-
petence in the bush and their preference for the comforts of town
life, it is not surprising they had so little to show for their efforts, The
fact that Batman reported his assault at Ben Lomond and his killing of
the wounded men in such a matter-of-fact manner indicates the atti-
tude the roving parties had to their task. It is most unlikely that any of
the roving parties would have killed Aborigines and kept this infor-
mation a secret. In fact, it would have been virtually impossible to
prevent their convict members, who were offered a ticket-of-leave*
for their service, from boasting of such exploits. They had no reason
to conceal their actions and every reason to publicize them. In the
prevailing atmosphere of anxiety among the settlers about Aboriginal
atrocities, stories about their retaliations would have made the men of
the roving parties popular heroes. If any of the roving party leaders
had success stories to report they would have done so. The fact that
they reported so little meant they had little to report.
In other words, the public record of their activities is most likely to
be the accurate one. Instead of Lyndall Ryan’s fictitious total of sixty
Aborigines killed and twenty captured, native casualties at the hands
of the roving parties were two killed, several wounded? and thirteen
captured by Batman, plus six captured by Robertson. This hardly
amounted to what Arthur initialy said would be a campaign of
‘terror’. Of the nineteen Aborigines captured, only three were adult
male warriors. The rest were one old man, six women and nine chil-
dren. This was not a haul to seriously deplete the ranks of the enemy.
82 Batman to Anstey, 7 September 1829, AOT CSO 1/320/7578, pp 144;
Anstey to Burnett, 4 May 1830, AOT CSO 1/320/7578, p 70
83 Plomley, Jorgen Jorgenson, p 29; Robertson to Gordon, 20 February 1830,
AOT CSO 1/331/7578, pp 197—204
** A ticket-of-leave was a certificate granting exemption from compulsory
labour, allowing convicts employment of their choice: A. G. L. Shaw,
Convicts and the Colonies, Faber and Faber, London, 1966, p 73
55 As well as those Batman shot and wounded, a roving party pursued a band
of Aborigines near Blackman’s River in March 1830 and fired upon them.
They found no bodies but blood on the ground indicated some had been
wounded. They also shot dead a dog. Hobart Town Courier, 13 March 1830,
p3
FE; HISTORI AL SCHOLARSHIP AND INVENTION OF MASSACRE STORIES 159
ni SHOOTINGS AT MOULTING LAGOON AND TOOMS LAKE
is only onc claim in Ryan's account of the aftermath to the
There
828 declaration of martial law that bears any relation to
Nov ember l
the tuth. Even in this case, however, her version of events is very
wide of the mark. She says that in January 1829 settlers at Moulting
Lapon lay in wait for the Oyster Bay Aborigines to make their sea-
nal visit, When they appeared, she says, the settlers shot dead ten of
chem and took three prisoners. She cites three newspaper reports and
à letter to the Governor from James Simpson as her sources for this
and related events in the same paragraph." Simpson's letter is about
Aborigines chasing a convict stockman at the Government farm at
Campbell Town, where he was police magistrate, so is not relevant."
Of the three newspapers she cites, none of them mention any conflict
with Aborigines at Moulting Lagoon. So, yet again, R.yan's references
do not confirm the claims she makes in her text.
However, there was a report in one of the newspapers she cites,
the Launceston Advertiser of 9 February 1829, that says a total of twenty
Aborigines were killed and five captured in three separate incidents,
one at Little Swan Port, the second at St Paul’s River, and the third at
the Eastern Marshes. The report of these events came from an
unnamed correspondent at Great Swan Port. It said:
Mr David Rayney shot a black man near Mr Lyne’s on Monday last,
Nine were killed and three taken near St Paul’s River, ten days back, and
about the same time ten were shot and two taken, near the Eastern
Marshes.*®
This report is the only one of Ryan’s sources with any relevance to
her claims about Aboriginal deaths. The “Mr Lyne’ it mentions would
have been William Lyne, a settler at Little Swan Port on the east
coast. In this case, the report was credible. The correspondent gave
the name of the man responsible, the farm where the shooting took
place, and the date. It was unlikely that someone would invent details
as precise as this so close to the event.
The report’s claim about the killing of ten and the capture of two
Aborigines at the Eastern Marshes referred to an action by the 40th
Regiment that took place not in January 1829 but in early December
1828. The same report from the same correspondent was published in
both the Launceston Advertiser and the Colonial Times of Hobart in late
% Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 102, p 113 n 4
*' Simpson to Burnett, 17 February 1829, AOT CSO 1/316/7578, p 223.
Ryan got the date and file of this letter right but wrongly cited it as Simpson
to Arthur.
88 T aunceston Advertiser, 9 February 1829, p 2
160 Trt FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL History
January and carly February," but his stor
| y was several weeks out of
date. A detailed account of this event and
its background had alread,
appeared in the Hobart Town Courier on 13 December 1828. ,
Since October 1828, Aborigines from the Oyster Bay district h
left a trail of violence between the coast and the central midland;
robbing, killing and wounding settlers with impunity. In October
they killed two women and a young girl at Big Lagoon, Oatlands.”
Two weeks later they killed a stock-keeper on the Sandspit River run
of Captain William Glover." They also killed a small boy at Green
Ponds and wounded eight other settlers and stockmen in the district?
This upsurge of violence was one of the main reasons for the declara.
tion of martial law in November 1828. In the first week of Decem.
ber, the same Aborigines committed a series of robberies and murders
in the east of the colony between Oatlands and Fingal. They were
fought off several times, but nonetheless killed three convict stock-
men at the Eastern Marshes and a shepherd at Fingal.” At first, small
groups of armed shepherds and stockmen pursued them, but without
success.
By 6 December, however, the military garrison at Oatlands had
despatched a party of soldiers from the 40th Regiment to try to
apprehend them. By 8 December, five more military parties, another
from the 40th, two from the 57th and two from the 63rd Regiment,
were in the field searching an area from Oatlands to the coast, and
northward. On 9 December, the Hobart Town Courier reported one of
the parties from the 40th Regiment had returned with two captives, a
black woman and her boy. The newspaper said these troops had
encountered the Aborigines at 'the Great Lake near the source of the
Macquarie River’, indicating what is now called Tooms Lake. “Ten
of the natives were killed on the spot and the rest fled.?' Tooms Lake
ad
8° Colonial Times, 30 January 1829, p 3
? Proceedings of an inquest on the bodies of Anne Geary and Alicia Gough,
11 October 1828, AOT CSO 1/316/7578, p 168; Anstey to Burnett, 21
December 1830, AOT CSO 1/316/7578, p 759
?! Gordon to Burnett, 27 October 1828, AOT CSO 1/316/7578, p 181
?^ Hobart Town Courier, 25 October 1828, p 1 and 1 November 1828, p2:
Anstey to Burnett, 21 December 1830, AOT CSO 1/316/7578, p 766;
Plomley, Aboriginal/Settler Clash, pp 72-3
?* Hobart Town Courier, 13 December 1828, p2
?' Hobart Town Courier, 13 December 1828, p 2, carried a series of running
reports on the events at various locations. It identified the site of the soldiers’
assault as ‘near the Great Lake at the source of the Macquarie River’. This
most probably meant what is now known as Tooms Lake, about 35
kilometres east of Oatlands. In the 1820s and 1830s, it was not named on
contemporary maps, hence the use of the generic term ‘the Great Lake’.
Tooms Lake is where the Macquarie River at the time was thought to rise
pon m & DY
Five: HISTORICAL SCHOLARSHIP AND INVENTION OF MASSACRE STORII 161
» S »
won rugged country that rises between the Eastern Marshes and
Oyster Bay. The Oatlands correspondent gave a detailed inventory of
the weapons and stolen goods recovered from this band:
rhe following articles fell into the hands of the party on this occasion: —
29 waddies, 52 spears, 14 blankets, 28 knives, 6 blades of sheep shears, 2
razors, | fowling picce, about two pounds of gunpowder, a quantity of
bullets and shot, about half a pound of tobacco, some pieces of cord of
native manufacture made of kangaroo sinews. Eleven native dogs were
destroyed; one has been brought here alive.”
This incident at Tooms Lake is not an event that appears in any of
the orthodox historians’ catalogue of massacre stories. Had they read
the contemporary newspapers more thoroughly, they would have
found, of all the tales of violence against the Aborigines, this was their
best candidate for a multiple killing by the colonists. The story in the
Hobart Town Courier appears credible. The party of the 40th Regi-
ment comprised nine soldiers, two field constables and one volunteer
guide, which was a sufficient force to kill ten Aborigines. In fact, the
Hobart Town Courier’s coverage of the whole sequence of events in
early December 1828 is convincing. Its stories were written by several
correspondents from different locations and, apart from the report of
the 40th Regiment’s attack itself, they all confirm one another. The
correspondent from Oatlands, who reported the Tooms Lake killings,
clearly had access to both the local military and the police. He pro-
vides insider details such as the number of troops involved, the names
of their commanders, the routes they took and the inventory of the
Aboriginal weapons they eventually captured. Even though he was
not on the spot when the main action took place, there is no good
reason to doubt anything he said."
even though it later became clear that the creek from Tooms Lake to the
Macquarie is a tributary, while the main stream actually rises further north
near Lake Leake. None of this area had been surveyed at the time and
neither the full course of the Macquarie nor Tooms Lake itself appear on
contemporary maps: see map of Van Diemen's Land, by J. Arrowsmith,
London, 15 February 1832. The writer obviously did not mean what was
called Great Lake in the central highlands, since this was not where any of
the regiments were searching and was too far distant to reach in the time
available.
95 Hobart Town Courier, 15 December 1828, p 2
?6 For some reason, Brian Plomley neglects any mention of this incident in
his survey of clashes between Aborigines and settlers before 1831. He lists
the four stockmen killed between 1 and 9 December 1828, and cites the
relevant reports from the Hobart Town Courier, but he omits the killing of the
ten natives at Tooms Lake, which was recorded on the same page of the
newspaper. Moreover, he cites the report by the Great Swan Port
Ss
12 Tur Fann ATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
Teas most probable that the correspondent from €
meat Swan Port's
story about the killing of ten
and the capture of two Aborigines at the
Easter Marshes was referring to the same incident. He got the num.
bers right and the Eastern Marshes was where the troops of the 40th
i “+ ^ 4 . , .
Regiment had begun their search. On the other hand, it is his claim
about the killing of nine Aborigines at St Paul’s River that is dubious.
The information was provided by no other writer in any other news.
paper. Only the correspondent from Great Swan Port reported it and
he only got onto the story of these events some weeks after they
occurred. Unlike the Oatlands correspondent, he appeared to be
relying on local gossip rather than eyewitness reports. The shooting of
nine natives at this time would have been a very newsworthy event,
just like the one at Tooms Lake. There should be some other
supporting evidence somewhere. The only mention of any action at
St Paul's River in all the press stories and archive documents was one
report from a correspondent at Tullochgorum on the Break o'Day
Plains. After the Aborigines had killed the shepherd at William Tal-
bot's property at Fingal, a party of local stockmen went after them.
The correspondent reported:
I went the day following in pursuit of the murdering tribe, and followed
them over the tiers towards the source of the St Paul's, where we saw a
few of them, and then all further pursuit proved fruitless. Had they been
in an open place we should have got up to them, although they had the
start of us by a quarter of a mile, but when we lost sight of them we could
hardly know which way to run.?
Plainly, if this man had killed any of this tribe, or even got off a
shot at them, he would have reported it with some pride. Apart from
this, there is nothing relevant in the official records or in any private
correspondence that has so far surfaced. Moreover, what information
we do have is not supportive. By January 1829, there were still two
government parties searching for Aborigines in the east of the colony.
Gilbert Robertson’s company, discussed earlier, passed east of the St
Paul's River district between 24 and 27 January.” Apart from one old
man and some distant smoke, they found no signs of Aboriginal pres-
ence anywhere. The second was a military troop from the 57th Regi-
correspondent about the killing of nine Aborigines at St Paul’s River, but
leaves out the ten shot at the Eastern Marshes, which, as quoted above, was
included in the same sentence. Plomley obviously did not believe this story,
but has left no indication why. Perhaps he was worried about the possible
confusion mentioned in footnote 94 between ‘the Great Lake’, which is
most probably Tooms Lake, and Great Lake in the central highlands:
Plomley, Aboriginal/Settler Clash, pp 74—6.
” Hobart Town Courier, 13 December 1828, p 2
? Robertson, Journal of the proceedings, 24-27 January 1829, pp 120-1
pur: HISTORICAL se HOLABRSHIP AND INVENTION OF MASSACRE STORIES 163
rent under. Ensign Lockyer, accompanied by civilian guides, This
mop Was one of the six regimental parties that set out in search of
the Aborigines on 7 December. It eventually returned to Oatlands in
avo groups on 10 and 11 January after an expedition up the east
coast, They had gone north from Oatlands, across St Paul's River and
then on to St Patrick's Head but *without perceiving any Native fires,
or the traces of the Natives anywhere in the direction followed'." No
unofficial reports of killings by this party were later leaked to the
press.
Apart from the report by the Great Swan Port correspondent, who
did not know the name of those responsible for the alleged killings at
St Paul’s River, nor even whether they were soldiers or civilians,
there is nothing else to go on. Moreover, there were no corrobora-
tive details reported anywhere about the fate of the three captives
who this correspondent said were taken at St Paul’s River. No one
saw them with Ensign Lockyer’s party when it returned, nor was
there any information about where they were housed or taken after
their supposed capture.
In short, the Great Swan Port correspondent’s report was clearly
based on local rumour rather than any familiarity with the facts. The
most likely explanation is that he heard two stories, both with the
wrong location but with their other details roughly the same, which
had both originated in the one event. He mistakenly thought he was
hearing about two separate incidents.
It is possible, of course, that Ensign Lockyer’s troop, which went
through the district at about the right time, could have killed nine
Aborigines without publicly reporting it. However, there would be
no reason for them to keep their actions quiet, any more than their
comrades from the 40th Regiment did. But unless some as yet un-
earthed document turns up to provide more information, this has to
remain a bare possibility. Moreover, even if this report did eventually
turn out to be true, this would not rescue Lyndall Ryan’s version of
events, which attributes the killings to settlers rather than the military,
and locates the site not at St Paul’s River but at Moulting Lagoon
where no one at the time, not even the correspondent from Great
Swan Port, reported any Aborigines being killed.
9 Hobart Town Courier, 17 January 1829, p 1; Colonial Times, 30 January
1829, p 1; Launceston Advertiser, 9 February 1829, p 3. The report in the
Colonial Times and Launceston Advertiser (same report) said Lockyer was with
the 40th Regiment but the original story of his departure in the Hobart Town
Courier, 13 December 1828, said he was with the 57th.
ot Tut FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL History
THE CREDIBILITY OF NEWSPAPER REPORTS
The citation of these reports raises questions about the use of n
per stories as historical evidence. The orthodox historians of Abor,:
nal Australia have long accepted without question any oon
newspaper that says blacks were killed by whites. Few of these hist :
rians ever treat these reports critically, that is, t} a
i à vey rarely ask whether
there is any supporting evidence or whether there might be some
agenda behind their telling. Historians should not need reminding
that reports in the press are just as fallible as any other kind and can be
subject to influences ranging from the overtly political to the trivial,
For example, soon after it reported the killings at St Paul’s River and
the Eastern Marshes, the Launceston Advertiser was apologising to its
readers for falsely reporting another story about the Aborigines:
€Wspa.
We have to contradict the statement in our last week’s paper, respecting
the blacks being seen near the cataract hills, the report being wholly with-
out foundation, and its having originated from a drunken servant, in the
employ of a gentleman on the opposite side of the river, in order to evade
the punishment for leaving his master’s farm without permission."
In December 1828, a Launceston correspondent of the Hobart
Town Courier gave a similar reason to be sceptical of uncorroborated
reports:
Yesterday a man came running to a house near town (about a mile and a
half off) stating that he had been severely beaten by the black Natives, and
that another man, his companion was killed by them. A party of soldiers
and constables were sent out, and were out all night in search of them,
but it proved altogether a false report. The party found the man (said to
be killed) lying drunk. People bringing such reports ought certainly to be
punished. It does much mischief.!°!
In November 1830, during the Black Line military campaign, a
correspondent from Bothwell wrote to the Hobart Town Courier com-
plaining about an earlier story in the Colonial Times.
To dissipate the fears of persons travelling from Green Ponds to this place,
we shall feel obliged if you will assure the public, that the letter from the
Cross Marsh which appeared in the Colonial Times of the 6th instant is
all twaddle. There are, it is true, some blacks in the rear of the line, and
they are four in number — and no more. These four crept through the
line, then much extended, near Lake Sorell, and they have been seen by
different people in this and the neighbouring district. It is not true that
they chased Mr Brodribb’s shepherd Jor miles.
109 T aunceston Advertiser, 23 F
1 Hobart Town Courier, 20
102 Hobart Town Courier, 13
ebruary 1829, p 2
December 1828, p 2
November 1830, p 2
pst PEIN TOHRICAT M HOrARSIUP AND INVENTION OF MASSACRE STORIES 165
phe history of conflict between Aborigines and colonists has long
een v haracterized by the absence of any sense that press reports need
ether cormoboration from other sources or even a modicum of inter-
nal criticism of their credibility. Instead, if à report adds to the Abo-
ath toll, it fits the dominant orthodoxy and is thereby
rumal de
ivepted, the assumption being that, because it fits the orthodoxy, it
must be true.
This chapter has dwelt so long on the report from the Great Swan
Port correspondent because it provides a useful case study of the
criteria of credibility that historians should apply to newspaper stories.
In some recent public debates over the Aboriginal death toll in Aus-
tralia, I have been accused of demanding a legalistic standard of proof
of killings. Because there were only a small number of coronial
uests into the killing of Aborigines in Australia in the nineteenth
and even fewer trials of those thought responsible, the
al criteria of proof would virtually guarantee any
inq
century,
imposition of leg
death count would be small.
On the contrary, the standard of proof required for the writing of
history is not legalistic but journalistic. That is, for a claim of killing
to be credible it needs either first-hand reports from eyewitnesses,
second-hand reports from those with direct contact to the partici-
pants, OT accounts by those who saw the bodies afterwards. These
reports should be reasonably contemporary with events and provide
specific details like names, dates, places and numbers. The informants
should be credible witnesses. Anyone with an obvious agenda to
mislead should be treated sceptically. In most cases, criteria of this
kind would satisfy normal historical enquiry. In some cases, where
there are contrary Or contradictory accounts of the same event, the
balance of probability of the evidence should decide things. In a small
number of contentious cases, a more exhaustive survey of the forensic
evidence would be needed. But even here, historians do not need
proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
Obviously, though, if journalistic standards are to prevail, historians
need to apply some critical standards to reports in newspapers. They
should not accept stories like the one from the Great Swan Port
correspondent — whose sources were plainly local gossip rather than
first-hand accounts, and who confused two rumours about the one
event as evidence of two separate incidents — at face value.
15 Bob Gould, ‘McGuinness, Windschuttle and Quadrant: The Revisionist
attack on Australian history about British conquest and Aboriginal
resistance’, Gould’s Book Arcade, Newtown, 11 November 2000,
http://members.optushome.com.au/sp ainter/Windschuttleblack.html
\o6 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIG
INAL History
Unfortunately, as this chapter has demonstrated, standards of proor
accuracy and rigour are largely absent from the work of the Current
practitioners of Aboriginal history. In particular, the fact that Lyndal]
Ryan's work is devoid of credibility at so many places is a reflection
not only of her own standards but also of those of the school of his-
toriography of which she has long been an esteemed member. Not
only have none of her colleagues publicly exposed her fabrications,
they have continued to endorse her work.
As noted earlier, Henry Reynolds describes Ryan as a ‘respected
and conscientious’ scholar. Yet it is hard to believe that Reynolds is
so innocent that he has never found any of her citations dubious. In
fact, he has read a number of the primary source documents she
claims to have consulted and has also read some of those discussed in
this chapter, which call her writings into question. Tellingly, in his
own work on Van Diemen’s Land he does not repeat her claim that
the roving parties killed sixty Aborigines and captured twenty.
Indeed, on this particular issue, he largely supports the case made in
this chapter. In two separate passages he writes:
Problems confronting the Europeans were exemplified by the experience
of the roving parties which fruitlessly pursued the Aborigines for many
months.’
The problems of actually ‘coming up with’ an Aboriginal party WEIS
enormous. We know that the military patrols and the roving parties were
rarely able to do so despite months of endeavour. !%
For that matter, no other historian who has examined the primary
sources, before or after Ryan, has supported her unsubstantiated and
falsely referenced death toll for the roving parties. Yet when asked for
an endorsement for the cover of the 1996 edition of Ryan’s book,
R.eynolds chose to overlook all this. He had no hesitation in describ-
ing it as “by far the best and most scholarly work on the Tasmanian
Aborigines in the twentieth century’.
4 Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, pp 70-1
"5 Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 78
CHAPTER SIX
The Black Line and the intentions of the
colonial authorities, 1820-1831
HE Black Line 1s by far the most infamous event in Tasmanian
history. Indeed, it ranks as one of the most infamous in the his-
tory of the British Empire. According to most accounts, this is
because its intentions were so extreme but its outcome so inconse-
quential. It is commonly portrayed as an attempt to eliminate, by
capture Or slaughter, all the Aborigines from Tasmania, but is usually
judged an expensive failure. In October 1830, the government
formed a human chain of soldiers and civilian volunteers who moved
across about half of the island towards the south-east where they
hoped to trap the Aborigines on an isolated peninsula. Most of the
blacks, however, evaded or slipped through the line and only two
were actually captured.
In his book on Western imperialism's destruction of indigenous
peoples, Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold, the Guardian journalist Mark
Cocker compares the Black Line to the expeditions of the Spanish
conquistadors in the Americas. Its two thousand soldiers, settlers and
convicts, Cocker writes, ‘was the largest force ever summoned to
combat Australian Aborigines and equalled the total number of troops
employed by Cortés to subdue Mexico, while Francisco Pizarro had
168 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL I IIs'rOR v
destroyed the Inca with a tenth of Arthur's men’! Henry Reynolds,
who describes the line as an early example of ‘ethnic cleansing? says
an operation on such a scale was mounted because the British felt
Aboriginal hostilities had put the very existence of their colony at
stake. ‘Writing from his camp at Sorell to justify the famous Black
Line,’ Reynolds observes, ‘he [Arthur] argued that such was the inse-
curity of the settlers that he feared “a general achat in the prosper-
ity” and the “eventual extirpation of the Colony a The anthropolo-
gist David Davies in The Last of the Tasmanians claims the Black Line
devastated the Aborigines. Hiding from their pursuers, they were
forced to make terrible choices. ‘The aborigines were killed and
maimed and left to die in the bush. No group could afford to stay
long enough to help a wounded member ... they even had n put e
death their children, in case their cries gave away the wherea outs o
the rest of the party." The Oxford Companion to Australian a,
edited by three of Australia’s leading professors of pa jar
Davison, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre, despises the line s )
climax of the Black War against the Aborigines: The battles culmi-
nated in the Black Line of 1829-30, a human chain stretching across
the south-eastern corner of the island, designed to capture the
remaining Tasmanians. It was a costly failure; only one man pes
boy were caught.? The author of what is widely regarded as ^ le
definitive history of Tasmania, Lloyd Robson, calls it a ‘catastrophic
failure’.°
The notoriety of the Black Line, however, is based largely on the
myths perpetrated about it, not the historical reality. Almost all the
assertions by the above authors are false. The human chain did not
stretch across south-eastern Tasmania for more than a year, as the
dates given by the Oxford Companion imply. The entire operation
took seven weeks. There were not thousands of natives killed, as in
Mexico and Peru. The Aboriginal death toll was three. There were
no wounded Aborigines left by their companions to die and no black
! Mark Cocker, Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe's Conflict with Tribal
Peoples, Jonathan Cape, London, 1998, p 150
? Henry Reynolds, An Indelible Stain? The
History, Viking, Ringwood, 2001, p 76
? Henry Reynolds, Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers an
Unwin, Sydney, 1996, p 29 d d the Land, Allen ny
* David Davies, The Last o the Tasmania
1973, pp 123, 126 d "s Shakespeare Head Press, Sydney,
5 ‘Black War’, Oxford Companion to Australian His
John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre, Oxford Unive
$ Lloyd Robson, A History of Tasmania, Volume
Press, Melbourne, 1983, p 220
Question of Genocide in Australia’s
tory, ed. Graeme Davison
tsity Press, Melb
Ourne, p 7
One, Oxford University” 4
SIX: THE BLACK LINE AND INTENTIONS OF THE COLONIAL AUTHORITIES 169
balies. killed by their parents. David Davies invented these fictions.
Licutenant-Governor Arthur did not believe the Aborigines threat-
ened the existence of the colony. Reynolds altered the words in the
satement he attributes to him. The line was not intended to capture
or eliminate all the remaining Aborigines. Its aim was to drive two
hostile tribes from the settled areas of the midlands and the south-east
into uninhabited country. Five of the other seven tribes were specifi-
cally excluded from its ambit. And it was neither a catastrophic nor
costly failure. Indeed, its principal objective was quickly realized. It so
intimidated the Aborigines from the settled districts that, within a
little over twelve months, they had all surrendered and allowed
themselves to be shipped off to a Bass Strait island outpost.
Since 1828, Lieutenant-Governor Arthur had been searching for a
means to prevent Aborigines from committing violence in the dis-
tricts where the colonists had established farms. As Chapter Five
records, his initial policy was to employ the roving parties and mili-
tary patrols to try to capture natives found in these areas, or to intimi-
date and drive them off. Even though the Aborigines Committee of
1830 declared the patrols ‘worse than useless’ and Arthur himself
confessed they ‘had proved quite unavailing as a general security’,’ he
persevered with the system. In February 1830, Arthur adopted two
new measures. He appointed a committee headed by the new Sydney
Anglican Archdeacon, William Grant Broughton, to chair a commit-
tee to investigate the causes of the hostilities and advise him on pol-
icy. He also tried offering rewards of five pounds per adult and two
pounds per child for Aborigines captured in the settled districts.
The occasional, single captive was subsequently brought in to
Hobart by a settler and lodged in jail. In July, George Anstey cap-
tured four Aborigines who had just plundered one of his father’s huts
in the central midlands, while the settler Humphrey Howells captured
‘some’ hostile natives on the Shannon River.’ But there were never
more than a handful of these arrests ° and they made little impact on
the number of Aboriginal assaults. As the year progressed, the vio-
lence increased dramatically. In July 1830, in the south midlands and
7 Report of the Aborigines Committee 1830, Memorandum by Arthur, 20
November 1830, British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, pp 217,
244
8 N. J. B. Plomley, Jorgen Jorgenson and the Aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land,
Blubber Head Press, Hobart, 1991, p 98
9 When those arrested under this system were transported to Gun Carriage
Island in March 1831, there were only three from jail in Hobart: N. J. B.
Plomley, Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George
Augustus Robinson 1829-1834, Tasmanian Historical Research Association,
Hobart, 1966, p 479
170 "Tris FADICA TION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
Abyssinia, six roving parties were in action but there
assaults by native bands in these districts. In August th
separate assaults, the majority of them in the same two districts ^
Lloyd Robson says that the settlers gave as good as they got in thi
period. He claims that in the immediate prelude to the Black Line
there was an onslaught by the colonists that led to twenty-four Abo-
rigines being killed and thirty-two wounded." This claim is
characteristic of much of Robson’s work in that there is no footno
to indicate his source or any other indication about how he arrived at
these figures. The truth is the Aborigines suffered nothing like these
losses. In all of 1830 up to the time the Black Line started there were
only six incidents that had Aboriginal casualties, which amounted to
two killed on the Shannon River, several others wounded, plus 4
series of skirmishes in the Bothwell district between 22 and 27 August
in which ‘several’ Aborigines were reported killed.’
Until the series of incidents at Bothwell, the response of the colo-
nial government was characterized by a restraint that plainly frustrated
the settlers. Even though his 1828 declaration of martial law in the
settled districts still remained in force, up to mid-August 1830 Arthur
was still mainly concerned to prevent excesses by the convict servants
of the white settlers, which he believed was one of the principal
causes of the problem. He still wanted to show a conciliatory face to
the natives. On 19 August he issued a notice saying:
Were Still te,
Cre were fort,
te
His Excellency earnestly requests that all settlers and others will strictly
enjoin their servants cautiously to abstain from acts of aggression against
these benighted beings, and that they will themselves personally endeay-
our to conciliate them wherever it may be practicable: and whenever the
Aborigines appear without evincing a hostile feeling, that no attempt shall
be made either to capture or restrain them, but, on the contrary, after
being fed and kindly treated, that they shall be suffered to depart when-
ever they desire it.”
The next day Arthur issued another notice warning settlers that his
offer of a reward for captured Aborigines was being misinterpreted.
Rewards were only for Aborigines caught while committing aggres-
sions on the inhabitants of the settled districts, not for settlers Or con-
victs who went out to seize ‘inoffensive Natives of the remote and
° Colonial Times, 16 July 1830, p 3; N. J. B. Plomley,
Clash in Van Diemen’s Land 1803-183 1, Queen Victo
Gallery, Launceston, 1992 pp 90-2
!! Robson, History of Tasmania, Vol 1, p 219
1? 'Table ten, Chapter Ten, has list of deaths; Plomley's survey
idi iiid Clash, pp 83-94, confirms this picture.
overnment Notice, No, 160, 19 iti. ]
Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 233 inis "MD BERE Habitat
The Aboriginal/Settley
ria Museum and Art
xix; THE BI ACK LINE AND INTENTIONS OF THE COLONIAL AUTHORITIES 171
unsettled parts of the territory’, just to claim the money. ‘If, after the
womulgation of this notice, any wanton attack or aggression against
the Natives becomes known to the Government, the offenders will
be immediately brought to justice and punished". At the time, these
notices appeared to reflect both Arthur's own views on the subject
and the pressure he was under from London to conciliate the issue.
However, the colonial reaction to them was more than Arthur had
anticipated. Seven days later, obviously influenced by an adverse
response from settlers, Arthur reversed his position. He had learned,
he said in a third notice, that his two earlier missives had been misun-
derstood, especially by settlers at Oatlands and Bothwell, the districts
that had suffered the greatest violence. ‘It was not intended to relax in
the most strenuous exertions to repel and to drive from the settled
country those Natives who seize every occasion to perpetrate mur-
ders, and to plunder and destroy the property of the inhabitants. ?
The same day, Friday 27 August, Arthur sat for six hours with his
Executive Council. Among the documents before them was a letter
from the jury at the inquest into the killing of the settler James
Hooper on 24 August. Hooper had suffered his third Aboriginal
attack in three years and had finally been clubbed to death at his farm
x Spring Hill, near Oatlands. The jury complained about the con-
ciliatory tone of Arthur's notices of 19 and 20 August. The Executive
Council also considered reports from magistrates in the Oatlands and
Bothwell police districts. By 1830, the Council observed, Aboriginal
attacks were no longer confined to remote huts of stock-keepers and
sawyers: ‘Now they have ventured to carry them into the heart of the
settled districts’. One landowner and magistrate, Thomas Anstey, ‘had
expressed his firm opinion, that the Aborigines are now irreclaimable,
and that the ensuing spring will be the most bloody that we have yet
experienced, unless sufficient military protection should be afforded’.
By the time the meeting finished, Arthur had resolved on a new strat-
egy. He had chosen ‘a decisive issue’ to bring the hostilities of the
Aborigines to an end.’°
14 Government Notice, No. 161, 20 August 1820, British Parliamentary
Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 253-4
15 Government Notice, No. 166, 27 August 1830, British Parliamentary
Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 234
16 Minutes of the Executive Council, 27 August 1830, British Parliamentary |
Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, pp 234-6. Hooper's death is further discussed in
Report of robberies, outrages, murders and other aggressions, by Thomas
Anstey, AOT CSO 1/316/7578, p 770 and Colonial Times, 27 August EU
p 3. Lloyd Robson claims the three issues that finally turned Arthur yd
were the murder of ‘Mary Danville’ (actually Mary Daniels) and her five-
month-old twins at Patrick Wood's property Dennistoun on the Clyde
172 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
© Santa a - * i
On 9 September, Arthur announced a general mobilisation of
Poni fae oom O à
white population of the colony. He called upon every settler ‘c E
Neer.
rection
lunteer
fully to render his assistance’ and to place himself under the qi
of his district police magistrate. They were to comprise a vo
force that would combine with a similar muster of the militar
capture the hostile tribes or permanently expel them from the du
districts." By 22 September the detailed plan of the Black Line "e
been drawn up. A single line of troops, settlers and convicts would x
formed across the midlands. The line would then move towards ii
south and the east driving before it any Aborigines in its path. The
lines would gradually tighten, forcing the Aborigines through East
Bay Neck onto Forestier Peninsula and then through Eaglehawk
Neck onto Tasman Peninsula.
The initial orders under which the force was raised, and the whole
tactical plan for its movement, were aimed at removing or capturing
two Aboriginal tribes, the Big River and Oyster Bay tribes. This was,
Arthur said, because they were ‘as the most sanguinary, being of the
greatest consequence’.'* The intention was to drive them out of the
Hobart, Richmond, New Norfolk, Clyde and Oatlands police dis-
tricts, that is, out of the southern midlands and south-east regions,
Arthur explained his objectives quite clearly. Even though few histo-
rians quote them, his goals were to put the two tribes he was target-
ing onto a closed reserve where they could practice their traditional
way of life but would not be able to harass white settlers:
As a portion of the south-east quarter, containing many thousands of acres
of most unprofitable soil for Europeans, is well suited for the purpose of
savage life, abounding in game, I have entertained strongly the opinion
that it might be practicable to drive the savages into that portion of the
River in June, the robbery of Surveyor William Sharland of muskets on 9
August and the 30 September attack on G. Scott ‘when the enemy even
ventured up the stairs and broke the doors open’, History of Tasmania, Vol 1,
p 218. The assault on Scott took place, however, a month after the Black
Line decision was made. For the Daniels family murders see AOT CSO
1/316/7578, pp 521, 525, 760-1.
17 Government Order No. 9, 9 September 1830, British Parliamentary Papers,
Colonies, Australia, 4, pp 236-8
18 Government Order, No. 11, 22 September 1830, British Parliamentary
Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 238. As part of the tactical planning stage in
September 1830, Arthur sought advice from police magistrates of the
principal districts. Their responses are in AOT CSO 1/323/7578, pp 208-
43. The magistrates confirmed that their aims were defined as: ‘a plan of
operations having for their object the capture of the Oyster Bay and Big
River tribes of Natives’, p 236
vix; THE BLACK LINE AND INTENTIONS OF THE COLONIAL AUTHORITIES 173
territory. and that there they might be retained, as it is connected only by
very narrow neck, which might be guarded.”
n j
Because it didn't have the number of troops needed, the govern-
ment intended to rime e tribes ‘on the north’ for what Arthur
called "after operations .* By 'on the north’? Arthur appears to be
referring, to the Aborigines frequenting both sides of the Tamar and
the Ben Lomond region. He specifically prohibited ‘any wanton
stack” against what he called ‘the inoffensive tribes on the west and
south-west districts of the colony, or against the tribes inhabiting the
adjacent islands’ and said anyone assaulting these Aborigines would be
"vigorously prosecuted'. He was referring here to natives
frequenting the north-west, west and south-west coasts, Robbins
Island and Bruny Island. Arthur made no mention of those in the
north-east, but since there was no white settlement in or near this
area at the time, it was also outside his ambit. On the eve of the line
Arthur did, it is true, extend the operation of martial law, which was
previously confined to the settled districts, to the whole of the island.
But overall, his intentions in 1830 were unambiguous: to move two
of the offending tribes from the midland plains to the Forestier and
Tasman peninsulas now, to remove two others later, and to leave five
of them alone. Rather than extending across the whole of the island,
the Black Line encompassed about one third of it, in the midlands
and south-east.
Despite Henry Reynolds’ use of the term, objectives of this kind
did not amount to ‘ethnic cleansing’. There was no intention to treat
the Aborigines as Bosnians and Kosovars were treated in the 1990s,
and to kill them because of their race or religion. Even those to be
removed from the settled districts were targeted not because of their
race but because of their violence. Other members of the same racial
group deemed to be less hostile were not to be touched. Reynolds
actually acknowledges the fact that Arthur’s intentions were limited
to the tribes of the midlands districts,” yet still wants his readers to
? Arthur to Murray, 20 November 1830, British Parliamentary Papers,
Colonies, Australia, 4, p 231
2 Arthur, Memorandum, Sorell Camp, 20 November 1830, British
Parliamentary Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 244
21 [n a letter to Arthur, 23 October 1830, Major Gray mentions forthcoming
‘proceedings which your Excellency proposes to carry on to the
northwards'. This was written at St Paul's after Gray had visited John
Batman and appears to refer to the Ben Lomond tribe: AOT CSO
1/316/7578, p 701
? Government Notice, No. 166, 27 August 1830, British Parliamentary
Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 234
? Reynolds, An Indelible Stain? p 76
174 The FAnnuc ATION OF ABORIGINAT HISTORY
think of the Black Line as a form of ‘ethnic c]
compare the fate of the Aborig
the Balkans in our own time.
ae $ d
dh cansing' ang thus te
ines to the worst of the atrocitie l
sS ln
THE COURSE AND CONSEQUENCES OF THE BLACK LINE
When assembled, Arthur's force comprised 2200 men, of whom 550
were troops, the rest civilian volunteers. They comprised three diy;
sions, which were divided into smaller corps, all under the command
of military officers. The Lieutenant-Governor himself was com-
mander in the field. The men were to form a line, initially V-shaped
running from St Patrick’s Head on the east coast down the South Esk
River to Campbell Town, then north-west along the Macquarie,
Lake and Meander rivers. They would also start with two flankin
lines, one on the east coast and the other between the lakes of the
central highlands. On 4 October some of the corps made preliminary
movements, leaving Bothwell for the upper reaches of the Shannon
River and Lake Echo. The other corps moved into position further
north, forming the main line of advance.
On 7 October the line started south.” A human chain moved on
foot across both plains and rugged country, like beaters on a hunt.
Men blew bugles, fired muskets and called out their numbers so those
out of sight would know where they were. In the first few days, the
line was 120 miles wide, an average of one man every 100 yards. By
12 October it extended from the head of Oyster Bay west to Lake
Sorell, then turned south down the Clyde River to Hamilton, then
went east to the Jordan River. Behind it, a stationary line from Lake
Sorell to Lake Echo watched for native escapees. The terrain made it
inherently difficult to keep the line always in formation. There were
reports that some detachments found the woods impenetrable and
hills unclimbable and simply walked in single file along the main
roads.” By 24 October the entire force had swept south-east and the
line had contracted to thirty miles wide, from Prosser Bay to Sorell.
It was here, a few miles in front of the line, that the former soldier
Edward Walpole discovered a group of forty to fifty Aborigines
camped for the night. At daybreak he and a small party of troops
rushed the camp. In the ensuing fight, they captured two Aborigines
and shot two others. The rest flew into the thickets and escaped. The
^! The information in this and the following paragraph comes from Arthur,
Memorandum, Sorell Camp, 20 November 1830, British Parliamentary
Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 245; and Hobart Town Courier, 6 November,
1830, p 2
^ Henry Melville, A History of Van Diemen’s Land from the Year 1824 to 1835
Inclusive, ed. George Mackaness, Horwitz-Grahame, Sydney, 1965, p 104 n
Six: THE BLACK LINE AND INTENTIONS OF THE COLONIAL AUTHORITIES 175
hne held its position for the next weck while the escapees made sev-
eral attempts to break through at night. Finally, the corps from Lake
Echo was brought down. This reinforcement allowed 400 men to be
sent in Co scour the country between the line and the isthmus of For-
exter. Peninsula, From 2 to 6 November they cut a swathe through
the forest and thicket. But apart from some abandoned campsites,
they found no trace of the Aborigines. By this time, the volunteers
had been absent from their homes for so long that some began drift-
ing oft? Arthur realized it would be difficult to keep the civilians in
his force together much longer. On 20 November, when he wrote a
long memorandum explaining his objectives and tactics, Arthur said
his troops were still moving forward towards the isthmus, 'in full
hopes of success’. A week later, however, with none of this success
realized, he gave up hope of sighting any more natives, let alone
capturing tribes of them. On 26 November, seven weeks after it had
started out, Arthur ordered the line to disperse.”
The two Aborigines the line did capture said they were from the
Big River and Oyster Bay tribes, who had by this time united. One
of the captives was recognized as a man previously caught spearing
horses at Emu Bay on the north coast; the other was a fifteen-year-
old youth.” Besides the two men shot during Walpole’s rush on their
camp, the only other Aboriginal casualty connected with the line was
one man killed on 18 October by William Gangell during an attack
by eight natives on his farm near Sorell. In this attack — which took
place behind, not in front of the line — Gangell and his young son
were both wounded but they stabbed one of the Aborigines with a
pitchfork. They later found his body nearby.” Apart from this, no
one in the line came across any Aborigines who had been wounded
and left to die by their companions, and no one found the remains of
any babies killed by their parents. David Davies provides no refer-
ences for his claims about such events. There was no contemporary
evidence or even another secondary source that recorded details of
this kind. Davies invented them to dramatize his story. He not only
lifted the title but also whole passages of text, extending over several
26 Hobart Town Courier, 13 November 1830, p 2
27 Government Order No. 13, 26 November 1830; Hobart Town Courier, 27
November 1830, p 2
28 Plomley, Jorgen Jorgenson and the Aborigines, p 110; James Bonwick, The
Last of the Tasmanians or The Black War of Van Diemen’s Land, Sampson Low,
Son, and Marston, London, 1870, p 164
29 A list of articles plundered etc, AOT CSO 1/316/7578, p 676; Gordon to
Arthur, 19 October 1830, AOT CSO 1/316/7578, p 681; Hobart Town
Courier, 20 November 1830, p 2. William Gangell later died from his
wounds.
176 Tur Fanrica NON OF ABORIGINA| Hisrony
pages, from James Bonwick's nineteenth-
Tasmanians, without acknowledgement,
composite of fiction and plagiarism.
Lyndall Ryan claims there were three other Aborigines killed ;.
the midlands during October, partly as a result of the Black Line, She
says a group of twenty Aborigines from the Ben Lomond, Grea;
Swan Port and Stoney Creek clans, led by the Oyster Bay chief Man-
nalargenna, had gone to Blackmans River to fight the Big River tribe
in a dispute over women. On their return to the east coast across the
midlands plain, they avoided the Black Line itself but near the
Launceston Road encountered a military party who shot three of
them dead. In revenge, Ryan says, the Ben Lomond people followed
their assailants and killed two as they slept by a campfire. The source
she footnotes for this story are two letters from Major William Gray
to Arthur, written on 19 and 24 October.”
These letters, however, do not mention the chief Mannalargenna
or any of the events Ryan describes. Instead, they are about a small
group of Aborigines headed by a chief called Limogana who lodged
for a short time at John Batman's house near Ben Lomond. Gray
described how they initially seemed amenable to civilized life but
then left and committed a series of robberies and assaults in the dis-
trict, including the murder of a settler. In another letter on 1
November, Gray told how this band met a group of constables sent
from Campbell Town to apprehend them. In the ensuing fight, two
constables were wounded by spears and two Aborigines, one of
whom was Limogana, were shot dead. This affray took place at Break
o'Day Plains, on the South Esk River, in the north-east of the island,
on 30 October, six days after Arthur’s main procession had reached
Sorell in the south.” So these two deaths cannot be attributed to the
Black Line.
century work ‘The Last Of the
MI » d
His account of the line i
a
? For example, compare Davies, p 130-2, with Bonwick, p 177-80, where
the two texts are almost identical.
*! Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, 2nd edn. Allen and Unwin,
Sydney, 1996, pp 149, 159 n 4. Between 19 October and 1 November
1830, Gray wrote five letters to Arthur about these events. They are located
at AOT CSO 1/316/7578, pp 684—701, 714—7.
?^ As well as Gray's reports, accounts of Limogana's band and its demise are
in Simpson to Arthur, 30 October 1830, AOT CSO 1/316/7578, pp 712-3;
Hobart "Town Courier, 16 October 1830, p 2 and 13 November 1830, p 2;
Robinson, journal, 15 November 1830, in Plomley, Friendly Mission , Pp
276-7; and J. E. Calder, Some Account of the Wars, Extirpation, Habits etc. of
the Native Tribes of Tasmania, Henn and Co, Hobart, 1875, p 102, where his
name is spelt Limaganna.
vix: Due BLACK LINE AND INTENTIONS OF THE COLONIAL AUTHOR TT 177
Even though she fails to cite it, the original source of Ryan's story
et the Launceston Road killings was the journal of George Augustus
Robinson, On |! November 1830 he recorded a disc ium vii five
natives from the north-east coast who he was taking to join his Bass
Strait community, They said that they had recently been to the cen-
tral lakes district where they fought the local natives and killed three
of them, Returning east, as they crossed the Launceston Road, white
soldiers killed three of their own people. In retaliation, while the sol-
diers were asleep, they had killed two of them.? This part of the
story, however, is hard to take seriously and seems merely the brag-
ging of warriors. The killing of two soldiers would have been a major
event, a shock to the colony that would have been certain to attract
the attention of both the government and the newspapers. But there
is no documentary record, either official or in the press, ^ about sol-
diers or Aborigines being killed at this location around this date — in
marked contrast to the exploits of Limogana and his band and the
wounding of two constables at Ben Lomond at the same time, which
attracted six reports to the Lieutenant-Governor, several prominent
newspaper stories, and was discussed by Arthur in a despatch to the
Colonial Secretary in London.? Had the killings that Ryan records
actually taken place, they would probably have received a similar
level of documentation. Moreover, Ryan's assertion that Man-
nalargenna led the group, that they visited Blackmans River, that the
fight was over women, and that it was members of the Ben Lomond
tribe who killed the soldiers, is not information that comes from
Robinson's journal. These are all Ryan's own embellishments to the
story. As well as additions, though, she also makes omissions. Her
version excludes the information that Robinson’s Aborigines said
33 Robinson, journal, 1 November 1830, in Plomley, Friendly Mission, p 263.
Ryan had cited this page for events in her previous paragraphs but not for
her account of the deaths near the Launceston Road. The most charitable
interpretation is that she has mistakenly put the wrong footnote on that
account, but, even so, this would still not rescue the credibility of the story.
34 There are reports summarizing the robberies, assaults and murders
committed by Aborigines between 1824 and 1831 for the Campbell Town,
Oatlands and Norfolk Plains police districts, where these killings could
ossibly have occurred, but there is nothing in them about such events. See
AOT CSO 1/316/7578, pp 758-80, 803-7, 812-4. Nor does Plomley's
survey, Aboriginal /Settler Clash, mention anything of this kind in October
1830. The only soldier ever publicly recorded killed by Aborigines in
Tasmania was a private of the 63rd Regiment speared at Boomer Creek,
Oyster Bay, on 8 September 1830. See Report of the Outrages Committed
by the Aborigines at Great Swan Port, AOT CSO 1/316/7578, p 841.
35 see footnotes 31 and 32, plus Arthur to Murray, 20 November 1830,
British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 230
178 Tt FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
they killed three of the lakes district natives,
Chis is not because
shares the view that the whole story is mere] "e ST
y bravado, |
. à . nstead x
killings of members of their own race at this time would ine ae
trayed the Aborigines as something less than dedicated Moa
absorbed with their war with the white enemy, so Ryan hae
brushed them out. mon
To return to the Black Line, the most credible evidence puts js,
immediate outcome at two Aborigines captured and three killed. ‘Ty,
Oyster Bay and Big River tribes were not driven onto the Tien,
Peninsula. Indeed, it seems that many of them escaped it early in the
piece. On 18 October, one group of volunteers at Lake Echo
followed a party of forty-two Aborigines who had crossed the
Shannon River and were heading north-west, beyond the Crest
Lake, where they lost them.? Behind the line, raids on settlers’ farms
continued. From 4 October to 26 November there were at ledge
forty-two separate attacks on settlers’ huts and homesteads, in which
five settlers were killed and ten wounded." At this time, white
casualties outnumbered black by three to one.
All this would seem to confirm the long-standing judgement that
Arthur’s attempt to make a decisive military move against the Abo-
rigines was not a success. Moreover, since it might have cost up to
35,000 pounds to outfit and feed its regular and volunteer troops, the
exercise appears not just a failure but an expensive fiasco.” This is not
only the opinion of Lloyd Robson and the editors of the Oxford
Companion. It is also shared by Clive Turnbull, who denounces the
‘stupidity’ of the plan, saying: ‘It was not to be supposed that the
natives could be driven into a corner by an ill-assorted band of ama-
teur beaters’; and by Brian Plomley who thought it ‘strange that
Arthur should have got involved in so senseless an undertaking’.
Henry Reynolds also agrees that the line failed in its objectives. In
his most recent work on the subject he writes: ‘Whatever is said
about the Black Line, the fact is that it failed. It did not effect the
removal of the tribes from central Tasmania, nor did it bring an end
°° Hobart Town Courier, 30 October 1830, p 2
?' Plomley, Aboriginal/Settler Clash, pp 94—6
*8 The figure of 35,000 pounds comes from Henry Melville, History of Van
Diemen's Land, p 103, and has been repeated by orthodox historians ever
since. As Melville himself observed, there was no official costing. Melville
probably made it as high as was credible in order to discredit Arthur. Writing
in 1875, J. E. Calder put the figure at 30,000 pounds: The Native Tribes of
Tasmanía, Appendix p ii
ri de mile e Tomas Ai
s : > : P 123; Plomley, Friendly Mission, p 32
ERI . ^ ^—-———— NN
B5 224 ~amo —À— — -
Six: THE BLACK LINE AND INTENTIONS OF THE COLONIAL AUTHORITIES — 19)
tw contlice."” However, in his 1995 book on Tasmania, Fate of a Free
te, Reynolds says the line did make the Aborigines realize they
Por
outnumbered and outgunned. ‘It almost certainly persuaded the
were
survivors of the war to consider a negotiated settlement.’ *! Reynolds
claims they subsequently made a verbal treaty with the Licutenant-
Governor's agent, George Augustus Robinson, to surrender and
move to an island in Bass Strait, in return for ownership of that island
and self-determination, both of which are still owing to their descen-
dants. Chapter Seven discusses the reasons Reynolds adopts this posi-
tion and assesses the credibility of his account of the verbal treaty.
The major dissenter from the orthodox position on the Black Line
is Lyndall Ryan. She says that it achieved its objectives of clearing
Aborigines from the settled districts and of demoralising them to the
extent they allowed themselves to be captured by Robinson and
transported to his island community. Moreover, she disagrees with
Reynolds about the existence of a verbal treaty. She does not believe
the colonial government had the authority to make a treaty of the
kind Reynolds envisages, verbal or otherwise.*”
This is one issue where Ryan is right. The aftermath of the Black
Line demonstrated that it achieved almost all that Arthur hoped. After
the line disbanded at the end of November, there was a sudden lull in
hostilities. There were only four attacks on white settlers, the lowest
monthly tally in three years." The line had succeeded in driving most
of the Aborigines out of the settled districts. Very few of them ever
returned. In the north of the island, where Robinson was trekking
through the bush trying to capture Aborigines for his proposed set-
tlement in Bass Strait, the reputation of the line ensured his success.
On 1 November, while the line was halted in the field between
Prosser Bay and Sorell, Robinson came across a group of seven Abo-
rigines at Anson River, near the north-east coast. He used the threat
of the line to persuade them to go with him. He said he would pro-
tect them from the soldiers:
I then described to them the nature and formation of the line by tracing it
on the ground with a stick, and further informed them that the mighty
enemy who were at that time engaged in capturing their countrymen to
the southward would shortly appear in formidable array in front of their
own territory.“
“ Reynolds, An Indelible Stain? p 76
4 Henry Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, Penguin, Ringwood, 1995, p 51
2 Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, 2nd edition, pp xxviii, 112
5 Plomley, Aboriginal/Settler Clash, p 96
^ Robinson, report to Arthur, February 1831, Friendly Mission, p 438 n 44
INO Tur PAMUCATION OF At MUGINAL HISTORY
1 ` "
On 15 November, Robinson found another six Aborigines waiting
t surrender to him on the north-east coast, opposite Swan Island.
They were five men and a woman, the remainder of the band from
Batman's house who had been in the shooting affray on the South
Esk River on 30 October. They, too, had been intimidated by the
Black Line. Robinson wrote:
Lagyememenener [the woman] informed me that she and the five young
men had seen the soldiers, and had been inside the Line and had run away
again, coming out in the morning. Described the soldiers as extending for
a long way and that they kept firing off muskets. Said plenty of parkuteten-
ner horsemen, plenty of soldiers, plenty of big fires on the hills.“
So, even though they could slip through its ranks with relative
ease, the Black Line still had a profound effect on the Aborigines.
The sight and sound of soldiers, horsemen, muskets and fires extend-
ing to the horizons, all targeted directly at themselves, clearly over-
awed them. They had no way of knowing the line was a costly, one-
off event, unlikely to be repeated. Within twelve months, most of the
Aborigines who had been harassing the settled districts had
capitulated. In August 1831, Robinson captured seven of them at
Noland Bay on the north coast. On 31 December 1831, west of Lake
Echo in the central highlands, he found the last of those from the
settled districts, the remnants of the Big River and Oyster Bay tribes,
a mere twenty-six people. Robinson persuaded them to come into
Hobart and in January 1832 they were shipped off to Bass Strait.
Arthur could finally revoke the martial law that had been in force
since 1828. Although it took another five years to remove all but one
family of blacks still living in the bush, Aboriginal assaults after
November 1830 were only a fraction of their previous level.”
One settler who agreed that the line was a victory rather than 4
defeat, precisely because it ensured the success of Robinson’s con-
ciliatory mission, was Jorgen Jorgenson, the leader of one of the rov-
ing parties. In his manuscript for a proposed history of the conflict he
wrote:
The marvellous facility with which the colony got eventually rid of the
blacks was entirely owing to Sir George Arthur’s levy en masse. The
success afterwards of Mr. G. A. Robinson was solely attributable to the
formation of the Line; it showed the Aborigines our strength and energy.
But for that demonstration Mr. Robinson could not have allured the
Blacks to follow him.
* Robinson, diary, 15 November 1830, Friendly Mission, p 276
* Robinson, diary, 15 November 1830, Friendly Mission, p 277
7 Plomley, Aboriginal/Settler Clash, pp 96-100
** Plomley, Jorgen Jorgenson and the Aborigines, p 99 [his emphasis]
«ix: TUE BLACK LINE AND INTENTIONS OF THE COLONIAL AUTHORITII 181
\ , 8
In short, it was the show of strength of this onc great move
: Ax . across
eye island that finally demonstrated the settlers’ power and their will
iwmess to use it. The Black Line might have had a negligible body
count, but it was anything but a senseless and ignominious failure. It
was the decisive action that ended black violence.
Moreover, this success throws the whole question of Aboriginal
hostilities into a different light. As Chapter Three recorded, between
1823 and 1827 black violence was largely confined to bushranging
activities by the assimilated blacks, Musquito, Black Tom and their
ofsiders. From 1827 until the end of 1830, the robbery and murder
of whites became a more widespread form of behaviour among tribal
Aborigines. While their main motive was to acquire British goods,
the ease with which they found they could do this, and the very few
repercussions they suffered, were obviously factors that prompted
them to continue, in fact, to increase these actions. Arthur's main
response in 1828, which was to appoint the ineffectual roving parties
and to increase military patrols around the settled districts, clearly did
nothing to dissuade the Aborigines from their newly adopted behav-
jour. They discovered that, after raiding a white household, they
could easily elude any parties sent in pursuit of them. Arthur’s reluc-
tance to mount a more determined police and military response to
the growth in Aboriginal assaults, should therefore be seen as part of
the process that led to their increase. Hence, the concern the colonial
authorities felt for the fate of the Aborigines, their reluctance to have
Aboriginal blood on their hands, the leniency they initially adopted —
in short, their humanitarianism — was itself a factor that fostered the
growth of Aboriginal violence. It was not until the formation of the
Black Line that the Aborigines fully confronted the military power of
the colonists. Once they recognized this for what it was, their vio-
lence quickly ended and they gratefully sought refuge with Robinson.
PANIC, HYSTERIA AND PARANOIA?
Henry Reynolds claims Arthur was forced to take such drastic action
as a general mobilisation of the white population because he felt the
survival of the colony itself was at stake. Until the Black Line, the
Aborigines had much the better of the guerilla war, Reynolds argues,
and there was a state of panic among the settlers. This private panic,
he writes, was also reflected in official circles. As noted at the start of
this chapter, Reynolds claims that, while Arthur was supervising the
line from his camp at Sorell, he expressed a fear the Aborigines would
achieve the ‘eventual extirpation of the Colony’.” Sharon Morgan
says the whole colony was in a state of ‘hysteria’ and ‘paranoia’ about
5 Reynolds, Frontier, p 29
IN2. THE FABRICATION Of ABORIGINAI Histor
the blacks. Reynolds and Morgan both quote a settler
public meeting in September 1830 who predicted
come and drive us from this very
at i H,
the Native
Court room and
refuge in the ships’, Morgan repeats Reynolds’s claim that A.
feared the ‘eventual extirpation of the ¢ ‘Olony’ 5?
It is true that a number of observers reported great c
time among the settlers. The Aborigines Committee in March i;
noted that ‘a sentiment of alarm pervades the minds of the ttle.
throughout the Island, and that the total ruin of every establishme,,
but too certainly to be apprehended’ .’ However, PUN
all highly selective and do not e views of t n
thought otherwise. At the same pu pa iue
and Morgan, another speaker, e views s" : Es
mocked the suggestion that the settlers could be driy
i told t
colony. Newspaper editor Robert Lathrop Murray to
[ ompe] Us p
Oncern 4t
ctt
comment, n
€ settlers who
by Reynold,
to mention,
en from the
he meeting:
I differ entirely with Dr Ross, on the sn of the ie h
the natives driving us from this room to the s PE : o
ommit many atrocities, most frequent y byt
ei des me which all savages are distinguished: but
er bis creatures, and never was a larger body s
omer driving us from this room, is of course a joke.
an ,
e feels a; to
ubt that the,
he exercise of
to talk of six
een assembled
i ieutenant-Governor, or anyone else
Moreover, = UTE survival of the colony is untrue.
aene dS Arthur as a man pacing his marquee at Sorell, ex-
d me ee ed by Aboriginal assailants, Reynolds had to actu-
pecting to be T he used. Morgan subsequently repeated Rey-
x s a bara of what he said. What Arthur actually wrote
nolds Meeke that he feared not ‘the extirpation of the Colony
hia E maae of the Aboriginal race’. He said:
" i d forcibly detaining these
2 t nothing but capturing an à à
It was AE end is. or at least their children, should be raised
ae original side barbarism to a more domestic state, could now
ie a long term of rapine and bloodshed, already commenced, a great
? Reynolds, Frontier, p 29; Sharon Morgan, Land Settlement in Early
Tasmania, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1992, p 149. This
Hobart meeting is discussed in detail in Chapter Nine, pp 342-9
5! Report of the Aborigines Committee, 19 March 1830, British Parliamentary
Papers, Colonies, Australia,
4, p 214
* Colonial Times, 24 September 1830,
directed at his newspaper rival, Dr
P 3. Murray’s comments were
Town Gazette and Hobart
ames Ross, the publisher of the Hobart
Town Courier,
MEI iT Pe c—
vuv Dur BLACK LINE AND INTENTIONS OF TE. COLONIAL AUTIHIOILTII 183
daline im the prosperity of the colony, and the eventual extirpation of the
*41
bormunal race itself,
iy other words, Arthur was concerned about the survival not of the
colony but of the Aborigines. Even in the midst of military operations
aeainst them, Arthur was apprehensive about their continued exis-
renee as a race of people and worried that, if the sporadic hostilities
continued at their current rate, retaliation by the settlers would
eventually wipe them out. Arthur's statement shows he had written
otf their current generation as implacable opponents but he hoped
that, somehow in the future, a different set of relations could emerge.
This, in fact, had been Arthur's line all along. There was nothing in
his decision to form the Black Line that differed from the sentiments
he expressed in September 1829 when he wrote to London request-
ing an additional regiment for the colony:
It is not that there is anything actually alarming in our condition, but it is
painful and distressing to the last degree to continue in this state of hostil-
ity without the conviction that the most prudent measures are pursued,
having for their end the protection of the community, with every possible
regard to humanity towards ignorant savages, who appear to be influenced
by the most revengeful feelings."
Why would he think like this? Why did every statement Arthur
made about Aboriginal violence talk about not only his responsibility
to protect the colony but also his duty to have ‘every possible regard
to humanity towards ignorant savages’. Even at the end of his proc-
lamation in October 1830 announcing the Black Line and extending
martial law across the island, Arthur concluded with the same senti-
ment.
But I do, nevertheless, hereby strictly order, enjoin and command, that
the actual use of arms be in no case resorted to, by firing against any of
the Natives or otherwise, if they can by other measures be captured; that
bloodshed be invariably checked as much as possible; and that any tribes
or individuals captured, or voluntarily surrendering themselves up, be
treated with the utmost care and humanity.”
Most orthodox historians think that comments like these are mere
hypocritical cant. They represented the impossible task of reconciling
5 Arthur, Memorandum, Sorell Camp, 20 November 1830, British
Parliamentary Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 244. Morgan has simply quoted
Reynolds’ version of the text from his book, Frontier, without herself
checking the original for authenticity.
4 Arthur to Murray, 12 September 1829, Historical Records of Australia, I,
XV, pp 447-8
55 Proclamation, 1 October 1830, British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies,
Australia, 4, p 243
184 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
Christian morality with the rapacity of imperialism,
however, the language of the colonial authorities w ould h
quite different. There would have been little to inhibit im
describing the Aborigines as subhuman beings who, jf trouble ? fre,
should be shot like animals. To understand w hy Arthur nev bi
expressed any attitude of this kind, and to see why he and every ^
governor of the Australian colonies would have been cade by the
a proposition, we need to see them not through the comic-b, ae
morality of present-day interest-group politics, but as Creatine ie
their own time. They were men born in the late eighteenth =
who inherited a set of attitudes that had already evolved out of thre
centuries of contact between Europeans and the indigenous peopl
of the new worlds. The long history of British imperialism fad ks "
them with an outlook quite different to the one-dimensional Carica.
ture drawn by Reynolds, Morgan and other members of the on.
dox school.
If thi
THE LEGITIMIZATION OF COLONIAL RULE
The British colonies in Australia were founded under the rule of
British law. Their establishment was also in accord with international
law, as it functioned in the late eighteenth century. By this time,
Europe had abandoned the idea that the Catholic Pope had the legal
right to dispose of overseas territory, as he had originally done in the
Americas. Protestant and Catholic Europe agreed that the way for a
state to establish an overseas colony was through one of the following
means: it could purchase or lease the right to establish a settlement
from the indigenous inhabitants; it could persuade these inhabitants to
voluntarily submit themselves to European rule; or it could act unilat-
erally and declare possession by right of first discovery and effective
occupation.
After 1776, when the British lost the right to exile their convicts to
the North American colonies, they first sought alternative sites on the
coast of Africa. They initially proposed to purchase or lease land from
the local inhabitants at the mouth of the Gambia River. They later
considered an establishment at Madagascar ‘by purchase from the
Natives’, plus payment of an annual rent. They also contemplated the
Das Voltas Bay region of south-west Africa after being assured the
indigenous people would make land available for a fee. In 1790,
when another proposal for a settlement on Nootka Sound in north-
west North America was in the air, the British government’s instruc-
tions to the captain of the expedition said:
You are to do your utmost to maintain a friendly intercourse with the
Natives; and if you find any person or number of persons among them
“A nu BLACK LINI AND INTENTIONS OF THE COLONIAL AUTH RI 1
WUTHORITII g5
who appear to have any right of Sovereignty over the Territory whicl
- Ur N I ory which
vou shall tix upon for the Settlement, You are to endeavour to purcl
t i 3 d P rchasc
peir consent to the formation of the Settlement, and a Grant of land fi
p ; and for
chat purpose, by the presents with which you are furnished,
In their eventual decision to occupy New South Wales and V3
Diemen's Land, the British were aware that earlier visits o che sag.
walian coastline by James Cook and other navigators had indiewted
that there were no people there who had the kind of Men
over territory the British needed to conduct negotiations. Wher the
grst colonists arrived in 1788, they found the same problem. The
nomadic hunter-gatherer Aboriginal society did not have a political
or religious framework with which they could deal. There were no
chie&, no alliances, no military forces, no priests and no apparent
permanent inhabitants of the territory. In the face of a galea void
and the absence of any authority from whom to purchase or lease
territory, the British fell back onto the third of the means of legiti-
mising a colony discussed above: the declaration of possession by = ht
of first discovery and effective occupation. In our own time, this ts
been seen by Aboriginal activists and their supporters as an orat act
of dispossession, illegal in any period of history. However, the British
of the late eighteenth century were acting within what Bey saw as
their rights.
The principal fact that legitimized their colonization was that the
land was not cultivated and was thus open to annexation. Nomadic
hunter-gathers did not cultivate the land and hence did not possess it.
In our own time, such a claim is usually regarded as a self-serving
rationalization derived from an ignorance of Aboriginal culture, but at
the time it carried legal conviction. There were many things then that
were withdrawn from commerce because of the difficulty of legally
possessing them. The ambient air was the main one, as it is today, but
most of the water that people used for drinking, washing and navi-
gating was in the same category, as were wild animals. Only when a
wild animal was caught did it become the property of its captor.
Similarly, uncultivated land remained the common property of all
mankind. Mere occupancy did not confer property rights; land had to
be used. The first person to use it, which at the time meant some
kind of agricultural cultivation, became its owner.
This was just as true in Britain as in the New World of the Ameri-
cas. Forests and wilderness were not subject to ownership by anyone.
The Crown held such land within its realm but no one held property
tile over it. The legal point was a variant of the Roman Law argu-
es: Illusions of Australia's Convict
% Cited by Alan Frost, Botany Bay Mirag
1994, p 188
Beginnings, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne,
——R Se uxo
IR6 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
ment known as res nullius — ‘empty things’ remained the common
property of all mankind — but it fitted nicely with the burgeoning
commercial temperament of the English from the 1620s onwards," ft
was in accord with Locke's famous argument in his Second Treatise on
Government that a man only acquired property rights when ‘he hath
mixed his Labour with; and joined to it something that is his own'.*
So when British eyes of the eighteenth century looked on the natives
of Australia, they saw nomads who hunted but who had no agricul-
tural base, and who therefore did not possess the country they inhab-
ited. In contrast, the British colonists took up the land and ‘improved’
it — a term persistently employed by the first settlers. By "improving
the land, the colonists thereby saw themselves as acquiring right of
possession. They were not dispossessing the natives. Instead, colonisa-
tion offered the indigenous people the gift of civilization, bringing
them all the techniques for living developed by the Old World.
A British declaration of sovereignty over a territory meant that all
individuals within it, native and colonist, were subject to English law.
Consequently, the instructions given by the Colonial Secretary in
London to the various colonial governors required them not only to
subject the Aborigines to the rule of law but to guarantee them its
protection as well. As subjects of His Majesty, the Aborigines had to
obey his law or suffer his punishment, but the same was true for any-
one who sought to harm them. The instructions given to the first
colonial officials required them to conciliate the natives but they paid
as much attention to curbing violence by white settlers against them
and punishing any offenders on this score. This was done not out ofa
sense of sympathy or kindliness but because the colonial governments
had a legal foundation to which everyone, those in authority and
those subject to it, were liable. It was this rule of law that made every
British colony in its own eyes, and in truth, a domain of civilization.
This concern with legitimacy went along with a similar concern for
the moral reputation of British colonialism discussed in Chapter Two.
The Spanish 'Black Legend' provided a model of how a colonial
power was not to act. The enlightened Protestantism of the British
would be contrasted with the cruelty and tyranny of Catholic Spain
not only in the New World of the Americas, but wherever the
Union Jack was planted. In Australia, the British treatment of indige-
nous peoples would once more, they expected, demonstrate the
superiority and virtue of their kind of colonialism.
5 Anthony Pagden, Lords of all the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain
and France, 1500-1800, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1995, p 76-7
58 John Locke, ‘Of Property’, Second Treatise of Government, paragraph 27 in
Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett, Mentor, New York, 1965, p
329
* wan ge j
ENERE io SIT MM AEE
Lieutenant- Governor Arthur's proclamation to the Aborigines, 1828. (Mitchell Library, State Library of New
South Wales) These painted boards were placed on trees and in places frequented by the Aborigines. The signs
were a proclamation of the intention to treat all people, black and white, as equals. They were an illustration of
the Evangelical and Enlightenment sentiments of the time.
ie œ
re 93999 Ch NAA,
ISIEWI
í -No: ^mber 1830. Source: British |
ilitary during the Black Line, October-INo: 2m r iid]
Field plan of $^ Cani a orti 4 (lish University Press series, Sh innon). The starting pad
s the Pond V-shaped hoka line near the top of the map. The solid lines indicated stages to be reached i|
was ^
the line moved south.
SIN: TUE BLACK LINE AND INTENTIONS Ol THE COLO;
NIAL AUTHORITIES 187
ATTITUDES OF THE AUTHORITIES IN VAN | JIEMEN’S LAND
Lieutenant-Giovernor George Arthur arrived in Van Di ;
wm May 1824 atter eight. years service as arm y Vi die igna:
superintendent of the small British settlement of b dul e -
Honduras on the eastern seaboard of the ene si ^ii the Day of
was the. dominant power in the Caribbean oni d ii un
British Honduras was a mainland outpost winds e pon bns
ae ee , ; ded by Spanish
Central America. Arthur brought with him all the int y Sp
tions of the virtuous British colonizer and all the Briti
the reputation of Spanish rule in the Americas.
- Arthur had grown up during the Evangelical revival within the
Church of England. The Evangelical faction was prominent i
paigns of social reform at home but they put most of their us
ending the slave trade. They believed that God had made all the a
ples of the world ‘of one blood’ and that all members of the ne see
race, both savage and civilized, were equal in the eyes of God. In
1807 the Evangelicals achieved a major victory with the abolition of
the transportation of slaves. By 1833 they had succeeded in making
the ownership of slaves illegal throughout the British Empire. As
Chapter Nine records in more detail, Evangelicalism was the leading
religious and social movement within the Australian colonies. Arthur
had been appointed to Van Diemen's Land by Ear Bathurst, the
British Secretary of State for the Colonies, a Tory who was sympa-
thetic to William Wilberforce and the Evangelicals.”
Arthur’s appointment was influenced by the reputation he gained
as an administrator prepared to act on these ideals. When he first
arrived in the Caribbean he declared himself ‘a perfect Wilberforce as
to slavery’. He bore out this principle as superintendent of Belize. In
1820 he was engaged in a prolonged dispute with local settlers over
what he saw as their excessive punishment of slaves. The following
year he issued a proclamation freeing those slaves who were descen-
dants of American Indians brought to Belize from the Mosquito
Coast in the 1780s. He threatened to send some of their owners to
England for trial. His action provoked an eight-year legal contest that
eventually preserved the Indians’ freedom. Arthur wrote in 1822 to
Lord Bathurst: ‘If I have exceeded my authority, I rest my excuse on
the great necessity of doing justice to the Indian.'^'
ellectual tradi-
sh antipathy to
5 ‘Henry Bathurst, Third Earl Bathurst’, Australian Dictionary of Biography,
Volume 1, A-H, 1788—1850, p 67
© A. G. L. Shaw, Sir George Arthur, Bart 1784-1854, Melbourne University
Press, Melbourne 1980, p 17
* Shaw, Sir George Arthur, pp 50—3. In A History of Tasmania, Vol I, p 137,
Lloyd Robson gives a confused version of this case, thinking it was
INN Dur Fann ATION OI ABORIGINAL HISTORY
In holding such views, Arthur was in
senoment in London but with the offici;
people to which all his predecessors had been committed. since
tist settlement in Van Diemen's Land. The Instructions the Cok
Office gave David Collins in February 1803 were:
accord not just with , Urre;
i policy towards indigeno
!
tk
N14]
You are to endeavour by ever
y Means in your power to o
course with the natives
, and to conciliate their goodwill
persons under your Government to live in
and if any person shall exercise any
wantonly give the
pen an inter
, enjoining
amity and kindness with tl
acts of violence against tl
m any interruption in the exercise of their several c
pations, you are to cause such offender to be brc
according to the degree of the offence.”
ali
icm
1em, or shal]
)CCu-
ought to punishment
These were familiar words. They were a verbatim copy
instructions given to Governor Arthur Phillip when he was &
the First Fleet.” They were transmitted intact to all subsequent
Governors and Lieutenant-Governors in the Australian colonies for
the next two decades. When William Paterson was appointed to head
the second Van Diemen’s Land settlement at Port Dalrymple in 1804,
his orders contained the same sentence.™ It is worth emphasising that
the instructions not only required colonial officials to seek the good-
will of the natives but they also paid as much attention to curbing
violence against them and punishing any offenders on this score. In
January 1805, Lieutenant-Governor David Collins issued a general
order confirming the legal status of the natives:
of the
orming
He has received it in command from His Majesty to place the Native
Inhabitants of whatever place, he should settle at, in the King’s Peace, and
to afford their Persons and Property the Protection of the British Laws. It
cannot then be doubted that the immediate Inhabitants of this C
equally entitled to the same Protection. Wherever Englishmen
though there should be no regular Courts of Justice est
Place, yet the Laws of England are there equally in force.
olony are
are settled,
ablished in the
connected with Arthur’s conflict with Lieutenant-Colonel Bradley. The
dispute with Bradley, however, had nothing to do with Indians and was
about Bradley’s attempt to usurp the position of senior military commander;
see Shaw pp 45-9.
?' Hobart to Collins, 7 Februa
ry 1803, Historical Records of Australia, LIV. p
12
? Governor Phillip's Second Commission, Historical Records of Australia, |. |
pp 13-14 Mix:
^ Instructions to Lieutenant-Governor Paterson, 1 June 1804, Histor;
> 5 t
Records of Australia, II, T, p 590 d ee
General Orders, Hobart Town, 7 Janua 1805, Histori
Astral Wi, eee January » Historical Records of
Six: THE BLACK LINE AND INTENTIONS OF THE COLONIAL AUTTIC )KITIES 189
Sentiments of the same kind were impressed upon all colonial gov-
emon until self-government in the 1850s. Each of the governors, in
turn, felt it their duty to publicly remind their settlers and convicts
that the. natives enjoyed the protection of the law. In 1810 Collins
declared:
any person whomsoever who shall offer violence to a native, or who shall
in cool blood murder, or cause any of them to be murdered, shall, on
proof being made of the same, be dealt with and proceeded against as if
such. violence had been offered, or murder committed on, a civilized
person.^^
Similarly, in 1813, Collins's successor as Lieutenant-Governor,
Thomas Davey, issued a proclamation about reports that settlers had
stolen Aboriginal children:
Had not the Lieutenant-Governor the most positive and distinct proofs of
such barbarous crimes having been committed, he could not have
believed that a British subject would so ignominiously have stained the
honour of his country and of himself; but the facts are too clear, and it
therefore becomes the indispensable and bounden duty of the Lieutenant-
Governor thus publicly to express his utter indignation and abhorrence
thereof.”
The next Lieutenant-Governor, William Sorell, in 1819 issued a
special general order expressing his determination to penalize anyone
mistreating the natives:
To bring to condign punishment anyone who shall be open to proof of
having destroyed or maltreated any of the native people (not strictly in self
defence) will be the duty and is the determination of the Lieutenant-Gov-
ernor, supported by the Magistracy, and by the assistance of all just and
well-disposed settlers.
Within a month of his arrival in May 1824 to succeed Sorell,
Arthur issued his own proclamation along the same lines:
The Natives of this island being under the protection of the same laws
which protect the settlers, every violation of those laws in the persons or
property of the Natives shall be visited with the same punishment as
though committed on the person or property of any settler. His Honour
the Lieutenant-Governor therefore declares his determination thus pub-
licly, that if after the promulgation of this proclamation, any person or
^ cited by Bonwick, Last of the Tasmanians, p 40; also in Plomley, Friendly
Mission, p 26. See my Chapter Two, notes 69 and 70, for the source.
?' quoted in Report of the Aborigines Committee, 1830, British Parliamentary
Papers, 4, p 208
55 Government and General Orders, 13 March 1819, full text in Plomley,
Friendly Mission, pp 42—3
190. Tht FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL History
persons shall be charged with firing at, killing, or commit
; 5B tir
outrage or aggression on the native people, they shall be 1g any act da
, ` 9 ý i > Prosec -
the same before the Supreme Court.’ Prosecuteg g
To see these comments in their historical context, yy,
y ^" WE Nee
realize that none of the early governors of the Austral d ty
were politicians trying to woo a constituency by striking hae
moral rectitude or of statesmanship. Nor did they need to mollify th.
clergy or any other moral interest group. The colonies were nd
democracies and the governors were not responsible to an electorate
Their masters were in the Colonial Office in London. The Lieuten.
ant-Governors of Van Diemen's Land were primarily administrator
rather than politicians and they had little reason to be over-concerned
about how well their public pronouncements were receiy
ed locally.
When they proclaimed a government order they expecte ;
d it to be
obeyed.
So declarations like those published here involved more than a rit-
ual cutting and pasting from one inaugural speech to the next. The
governors took them seriously enough to make references back to
them later when they made important statements about law and order
in the colonies. For instance, in April 1828, when he established a
series of military posts on the borders of the settled districts to prevent
Aboriginal incursions, Arthur began by reminding the settlers of
David Collins’s 1810 proclamation that promised punishment for
unlawful violence against the natives. For good measure, he also
quoted his own words of May 1824 saying anyone who illegally
offended the Aborigines would be punished as if they had done the
same to a white settler.”
There are some historians who have claimed that such sentiments
were mere hypocrisy, worthy words that lacked substance because no
action was ever taken by the authorities to back them up. Henry
Melville made this assertion in his history in 1835: ‘not one single
individual was ever brought to a Court of Justice, for offences com.
mitted against these harmless creatures'."' Lyndall Ryan repeated it in
1981: ‘No European was ever charged, let alone committed for trial,
for assaulting or killing an Aboriginal."? Sharon Morgan concurred in
1992: “Not one European was ever charged with murdering an Abo-
*? Proclamation, 25 June 1824, British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies, Australia
4, p 191 i
” Arthur, Proclamation, 15 A
Australia, 4, p 194
7 Melville, History of Van Diemen's Land, p 59
? Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 88
pril 1828, British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies,
six; THE BLACK LINE AND INTENTIONS OF THE COLONIAL AUTHORITIES — 191
iewinal, let alone convicted. Despite their confident tone and their
mutual confirmation, these statements are untrue,
As Brian. Plomley pointed out as long ago as 1966, the very first
case before the Supreme Court of Van Diemen's Land in May 1824
was against William Tibbs, a convict charged with the manslaughter
ot an Aborigine. Tibbs was found guilty and sentenced to three years
secondary transportation." In November 1824, another convict was
charged with ‘indescribable brutality’ to some native women and
given twenty-five lashes.” These were both, however, relatively
minor penalties at the time and make it appear that verdicts against
Europeans for assaults on Aborigines were not severely punished. It is
possible this is true but the problem in deciding the issue is that, as
vet, no one has yet completed a full study of charges laid and convic-
tions gained in the period. There was no official publication of the
cases before the early courts but many cases were reported in detail in
the local newspapers, which have largely survived. Until they are
thoroughly reviewed, we will not know how many other offenders
against Aborigines were brought before the courts or how they were
tried and punished." Nonetheless, the sentiments of the colony's legal
officers in the 1820s were unambiguous. The barrister Joseph Gelli-
brand said that when he and the master of the Supreme Court, Joseph
Hone, had each held the position of colonial Attorney-General
between 1824 and 1828, there was no doubt of their intention to
prosecute such charges:
73 Morgan, Land Settlement in Early Tasmania, p 151
^ Plomley, Friendly Mission, p 43, n 42. Plomley claims the sentence was
later reversed and Tibbs was discharged. However, Plomley offers no source
for this claim and the Macquarie University/University of Tasmania project
to recover and record early cases of the Tasmanian superior courts does not
record any reversal or discharge: see the project's website
www.law.mq.edu.au/sctas/html/r v, tibbs | 1824.htm. The dead man in
this case was an assimilated Aborigine named John Jackson.
75 Plomley, Friendly Mission, p 28; Shaw, Sir George Arthur, Bart, p 128
76 As I write, there is a project under way by the Division of Law at
Macquarie University and the School of History and Classics at the
University of Tasmania to record early cases of the Tasmanian superior
courts and publish them on the Internet: Decisions of the Nineteenth
Century Tasmanian Superior Courts at www.law.mq.edu.au/sctas/
Unfortunately, this project too often reproduces the ideology and
methodology of orthodox historians. Compare the commentary of
‘Government Notices Concerning Aborigines’ with the actual notice of 27
February 1830 reproduced on the website. The site also takes seriously a
wild rumour about a massacre of 60 Aborigines reported in Colonial Times 6
July 1827. In reality, the incident concerned produced one wounded
Aborigine (see Fabrication, Vol 1, p 140).
192. THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAI History
At that period, a very strong feeling existed in res
had been committed upon the blacks, and I take upon myself to assen
without fear of contradiction, that if any man who had killed 4 blac
native, had been brought here under such a charge, that the Attorney.
General would have brought him before the Chief Justi i
that the Judge would have directed the jury to find him
pect to the atrocities th
ce for murder, and
guilty.”
As discussed further in Chapter Eight, there were settlers
the chief agent of the Van Diemen’s Land Company, Edward Curr,
who felt bound to bring such charges against their servants. The
whole issue became highly contentious after martial law was declared
in November 1828. The practice of Ryan and Morgan of merely re-
cycling the same inaccurate secondary source does not help resolve it.
` Whatever the extent of their actions, there is no doubt that the
colonial authorities genuinely believed that their responsibility was to
curb any violence that settlers or convicts might commit against the
Aborigines. They thought the colonial situation held considerable
potential for conflict between ordinary settlers and the natives and it
was their responsibility to keep it in check. This was especially so in a
penal colony where many of the convicts were hardened criminals
and many of the free settlers were themselves ex-convicts and impul-
sive men. The authorities’ greatest fear was that Aboriginal violence
would provoke a reaction among the settlers that would get out of
hand. When Arthur's Executive Council discussed the proclamation
of martial law in 1828, the protection of the Aborigines from 4
backlash of this kind was high in its priorities:
: including
Great and well-founded alarm generally prevails, and unless the measure
recommended be adopted, the Council apprehend that the settlers, find-
ing themselves unprotected by the law and the government, will be
driven to take the remedy into their own hands. The case will then
become one of a war of private persons, the duration of which it is
impossible to conjecture, but the end of which will in all probability be
the annihilation of the aboriginal tribes. A war of this kind, confined as it
would be to casual and petty encounters, whatever may be its result, must
necessarily be attended with a great destruction of human life. On the
other hand, if the Government interposes promptly and vigorously
reasonably be hoped that by the combined operation of the tro
ops and
armed settlers, under the guidance of their officers and intelligent magis-
trates, peace and tranquillity may be restored, with comparatively little
effusion of blood.”
, it may
As their messages over the first thr
ee decades emphasized, the gov-
ernors thought the origin of the ho
stilities between black and white
” Colonial Times, 24 September 1830 p3
? Minutes of the Executive Council 31 O iti.
: tob ]
Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 183 Senn raneee iia
NX. Dae BLACK LINE AND INTENTIONS OF THE COLONIAL AUTHORITIES — 19:5
on the island lay with the colonists themselves and that, as a conse
quence, they should go as far as possible to absolve the Aborigines
tom blame. In 1828, Arthur wrote to London: 'I cannot divest
myself of the consideration that all aggression originated with the
white inhabitants, and that therefore much ought to be endured in
return before the blacks are treated as an open and accredited enemy
by the government," In April 1830 he again expressed his view that
the colonizers were primarily responsible:
Dhat the lawless convicts who have, from time to time, absconded,
together with the distant stock-keepers in the interior, and the sealers em-
ployed in remote parts of the coast, have, from the carliest period, acted
with great inhumanity towards the black Natives, particularly in seizing
their women, there can be no doubt, and these outrages have, it is evi-
dent, first excited, what they were naturally calculated to produce in the
minds of savages, the strongest feelings of hatred and revenge.”
At the same time, however, Arthur acknowledged that the policy
of conciliation that he favoured had not worked:
The kindness and humanity which they have always experienced from the
free settlers has not tended to civilize them in any degree, nor has it
induced them to forbear from the most wanton and unprovoked acts of
barbarity, when a fair opportunity presented itself of indulging their dis-
position to maim or destroy the white inhabitants"!
Arthur could see no way clear of this dilemma so he continued
with two apparently contrary policies. On the one hand, he persisted
with the conciliatory approach he had been trying, on and off, since
he took charge of the colony. In 1829 he expanded the rationing
station he had established on Bruny Island and appointed George
Augustus Robinson to manage it. When Robinson proposed a
mission to go to the Aborigines of the south and south-west coasts
and attempt to conciliate them, Arthur agreed to fund it. Robinson
set out on his Friendly Mission in January 1830. Arthur also tried to
persuade the lower orders to adopt a conciliatory approach to the
blacks. Five days before the Black Line began its march, he published
a government notice in the local press announcing a conditional par-
don for John Benfield, a convict shepherd who, while unarmed,
encountered three Aborigines at Whitefoord Hills and, by giving
79 Arthur to Goderich, 10 January 1828, British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies,
Australia, 4, p 176
3? Arthur to Murray, 15 April 1830, British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies,
Australia, 4, p 187
81 Arthur to Murray, 15 April 1830, British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies,
Australia, 4, p 187
194 THE t AURICATION OI ABORIGINAL HISTORY
them bread and blankets,
persuaded then
themselves to the loc
! to voluntarily
al military:
Surrend
icr
His Excellency has directed the circumstances under which it took plac
to be made public, in the hope that it may stimulate other prisoners to ac
with equal humanity and forbearance
to any of these unfortunate people
who may happen to fall in their way."?
At the same time, Arthur persisted with the policy of employing
h little success, since 1828. In Feb.
ruary 1830 he offered rewards for captured Aborigines
the tempo of the roving parties.
As violence grew throughout 1830 and neither of his two policies
seemed to be bringing any tangible result, there was another factor
weighing on Arthur's mind. This was the attitude of his superiors in
the Colonial Office in London. As well as despatches reporting on
conditions in the colony and justifying the actions he had taken,
Arthur was required to forward to the Secretary of State all the proc-
lamations and orders he gave to the colonists. So the public state-
ments he made in the colony were all read in England. In practice,
because it usually took several months for a reply to arrive from Lon-
don to a despatch from Hobart, Arthur had a relatively free. hand.
The Secretary of State was obliged to approve whatever decision he
took and was limited to expressing either enthusiasm or reservation.
Nonetheless, Arthur's own statements about his reluctance to deploy
force against the Aborigines, and his orders to his officers to do so
with as much humanity and as little bloodshed as possible, were all in
accord with political feeling at home in Britain. Invariably, over the
whole period from 1824 until mid-1830, the Secretary of State s
responses were echoes of the sentiments expressed in Arthur’s des-
patches.
This is why his decision to mount the tactic and to undergo the
expense of the Black Line should be seen as a considerable gamble,
Arthur was an army officer turned colonial administrator. His admin-
istrative career extended, chronologically, from British Honduras to
Van Diemen’s Land, then to Upper Canada and Bombay. By 1846,
when Governor of Bombay, he was in line to become Governor-
General of India, but ill health forced his return to England.” He was
the son of a Plymouth tradesman who eventually rose to a knight-
hood and baronetcy. He was an ambitious man
idol’, but until middle age his prospects wer
career always depended on how his actions
torce that he had been trying, wit
and increased
, promotion being my
e never secure and his
were perceived in Lon-
® Government notice, no 193, 2 October 1830, Hobart Town Courier, 16
October 1830, p 1
5 Shaw, Sir George Arthur, pp 267-70
BAIT e << oie
Six: THE BLACK LINE AND INTENTIONS OF THE COLONIAL AUTHORITIES 195
don. So his decision to form the Black Line was taken at great per-
sonal risk. Had it turned into a bloodbath, it is probable Arthur's
reputation would have been destroyed and his career finished. The
best indicator of this is the undisguised apprehension in the response
by the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Sir George Murray, when
he learned of the plan. Although he knew it was already too late to
influence what happened in the field, on 5 November 1830 Murray
wrote to Arthur expressing his deepest concern:
The great decrease which has of late years taken place in the amount of
the Aboriginal population, render it not unreasonable to apprehend that
the whole race of these people may, at no distant period, become extinct.
But with whatever feelings such an event may be looked forward to by
those of the settlers who have been sufferers by the collisions which have
taken place, it is impossible not to contemplate such a result of our occu-
pation of the island as one very difficult to be reconciled with feelings of
humanity, or even with principles of justice and sound policy; and 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 indeli-
ble stain upon the character of the British Government.”
The fact that Arthur shared this view is clear from every thought
he expressed during his career in Van Diemen's Land. The orthodox
school of historians’ assertion that he was administering what Lyndall
Ryan calls ‘a conscious policy of genocide’ or what Lloyd Robson
sarcastically labels ‘an impressive example of extermination’ runs
counter to all the evidence about the intentions of those in authority.
Indeed, it pretends most of this evidence does not exist. While Arthur
was certainly prepared to meet violence with military force, the
extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines was a prospect that left
both him and Murray filled with despair, both for what it would do
to their own reputations as well as to the reputation of their country.
Of all the orthodox historians, only Henry Reynolds has so far
conceded this, and his is a very late concession, coming after twenty
years of praising the counter claims of his colleagues. In August 2001
he published a book whose title, An Indelible Stain?, he took from
Murray’s November 1830 despatch to Arthur. In it, Reynolds
acknowledges: ‘There is no available evidence at all to suggest that it
was the intention of the colonial government to effect the extinction
of the Tasmanians.’*°
84 Shaw, Sir George Arthur, Chapters 1-3, 10; A. G. L. Shaw, ‘Sir George
Arthur’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol I 1788-1850, A-H, pp 32-8
35 Murray to Arthur, 5 November 1830, British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies,
Australia, 4, p 228
% Reynolds, An Indelible Stain? p 85
196 THE FABRICATION OF ADORIGINAI HisrOn y
In short, Arthur did not mount the BI
ack Line to Cxterminate
Abongines but rather to make
a decisive move
violence to an end. He had two ol
under his authority and to save the
ot their own actions.
the
that would bring th,
jectives: to impose law and ode:
Aborigines from the consequence "
At the risk of trying readers’ patience, let me underline once more
What the evidence itself establishes about his intentions. In November
1830, writing from his camp at Sorell, Arthur argued his decision Was
the only way left to preserve the Aborigines from the extinction th.
would otherwise face if the settlers began to seriously retali
assaults and murders:
ate to their
Experience has shown that any attempt to conciliate and reform the
original inhabitants, while totally cut off from all but hostile intercourse
with the white residents, and while living in habits so utterly incompatible
with the interests and customs of civilized man, would be vain and hope-
less; and it was evident that nothing but capturing and forcibly detaining
these unfortunate savages, until they or at least their children, should be
raised from their original rude barbarism to a more domestic state, could
now arrest a long term of rapine and bloodshed, already commenced, à
great decline in the prosperity of the colony, and the eventual extirpation
of the aboriginal race itself."
WAS THE BLACK WAR REALLY A WAR?
If it was not genocide then was it war? Chapters Three. and Four
argued that the British had no good reason to regard Aboriginal hos-
tilities as genuine warfare, nor did they accord the Aborigines the
status of warriors. However, the colonists did not feel the same about
what they were doing themselves. The term Black War, of course,
comes from the settlers’ side of the frontier but was probably coined
long after the violence had ended." But there are other indicators
that confirm the British were clearly waging war. The proclamation
of martial law in November 1828 was a de facto declaration of war.
At the same time, the government established military posts to protect
the settled districts and mounted patrols of both soldiers and civilians
in an effort to keep marauding Aborigines out of them. Those in
London who read the Lieutenant-Governor's despatches regarded
him as engaging in military operations. In September 1831, when the
British Parliament ordered a collection of the papers on the subject to
be printed, it entitled them: “Copies of Correspondence between
9 Arthur, Memorandum, Sorell Camp, 20 November 1830, British
Parliamentary Papers, Colonies, Australi,
a, 4, p 244
"5 The term was used by John West i
n 1851-2 in The History o Tasmani.
286. This is the earliest usage I have observ rey ania, p
ed. The term ‘Black Line’,
however, was widely used in 1830.
SARII i O, 1O TOVO
Six: THE BLACK LINE AND INTENTIONS OF THE COLONIAL AUTHORITIES 197
Lieutenant-Governor Arthur and His Majesty's Secretary of State for
the Colonies, on the Subject of the Military Operations lately carried
on against the Aboriginal Inhabitants of Van Diemen’s Land',
The strongest case that the colonial government was waging war
was the Black Line itself. Arthur chose this as his decisive action to
end the hostilities. The concept of a ‘decisive action’ is one of the
oldest in Western military history. As the American classical scholar
Victor Davis Hanson has argued in his book The Western Way of War
the notion was invented by the ancient Greeks and, ever since, has
been one of the defining features of the military strategy of Europe
and its offspring. The military historian John Keegan calls it ‘the
central act of Western warfare'.? Tired of drawn out, small-scale
conflicts with their enemies to the east, the Greek cities assembled
hoplite troops into a tight formation to challenge their rivals. The
troops were civilian farmers prepared to fight to the death in one
great battle on which they waged all. If they won, their enemy would
be totally defeated and its forces dispersed. The victors could then go
back to their farms to enjoy a long period of peace. For the next two
thousand years, Western military commanders sought out decisive
battles of this kind to bring hostilities to an end. Although hardly on
the scale of other decisive actions, Arthur’s Black Line fits the formula
in several ways. It was a considerable personal gamble and it achieved
all of the strategy’s traditional objectives.
In other words, the British certainly took military action against the
Aborigines, from the declaration of martial law in November 1828
until the dispersal of the Black Line at the end of November 1830,
even though the Aborigines did not wage war themselves. That is,
though one side waged war, there was not a state of warfare between
the two parties.
This might sound paradoxical but, historically, it has been a
common phenomenon. It fits the pattern that John Keegan records in
his history of warfare since the Stone Age. Before 1500 AD, the his-
tory of both Europe and Asia had been affected for a thousand years
by a permanent tension by the haves of the fertile ploughed lands and
the have-nots of soils too thin, cold or dry to be broken for cultiva-
89 British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, pp 173—258. It is worth
observing that the mere publication of these documents is yet one more
argument against the genocide thesis of the orthodox school. What
government that was really engaged in a campaign to exterminate the natives
would publish its most revealing papers about it?
? John Keegan, ‘Introduction’ to Victor Davis Hanson, The Western Way of
War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1989, p
xi
TSX THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL History
non." For most of this time, the horsemen of the Asian Steppes were
engaged in skirmishing and pillaging on the edges of the cultivated
world, while the armies of the European, Chinese and Indian culti
vaton sought to engage them in battles, that is, to make war on them
Only at relatively brief intervals, when the horsemen produced a fèw
great warrion like Genghis Khan and Tamburlaine, who organized
their fellow tribesmen into armies that could fight organized battles of
their own, did they win military victories. When these conditions
were met, there was genuine warfare on both sides.
In Van Diemen's Land, however, there was nothing that resembled
a contest of the latter kind. There were not two military forces con-
fronting one another between 1824 and 1831. A military force
deployed to quell actions that never rose above the level of criminal
behaviour was not engaged in warfare. Hence, even though the Brit-
ish used military tactics and methods themselves, the lack of recipro-
cation by the Aborigines meant the two were not linked by anything
that deserved the title warfare. In short, the Black War is a misnomer
and the orthodox school of Aboriginal history is mistaken. There was
no frontier warfare in Van Diemen's Land.
” John Keegan, A Hist i
Jote ga istory of Warfare, Hutchinson, London, 1993, pp 74-5,
CHAPTER SEVEN
Black Robinson and the origins of
Aboriginal internment, 1829—1847
N 1984, two years after she had submitted the manuscript of her
biography of George Augustus Robinson to her publisher, the
Australian. Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies,
author Vivienne Rae-Ellis was told that the Institute was breaking its
contract to publish the book. This came as quite a shock because the
publisher had contributed financially to the project and had accepted
the manuscript when she originally presented it in 1982. Moreover,
the Institute's imprint, Aboriginal Studies Press, had only recently
brought out a new edition of Rae-Ellis's very successful biography of
the ‘last Tasmanian’, the Aboriginal woman Truganini.! The decision
to reject her biography of Robinson was not made because of its
merits. Indeed, the book soon found a much more prestigious outlet
in the form of Australia’s leading academic publisher, Melbourne
University Press, which produced its own edition in 1988.* Instead,
the broken contract and the six-year delay in publication had much
more to do with politics. The author had the temerity to break with
the orthodox interpretation of her subject.
! Vivienne Rae-Ellis, Trucanini: Queen or Traitor, Aboriginal Studies Press,
Canberra, 1981
* Vivienne Rae-Ellis, Black Robinson: Protector of Aborigines, Melbourne
University Press, Melbourne, 1988
OO ee oe
nx
THE FABR N ATION OF ABORIGINAL History
One indicator of how Rae-Ellis has offended the «
denunciton of her work by Lyndall Ryan
the 1996 edition of her book The Aboriginal 1
the Robinson biography of faili
magnitude of the conflict thar
existed between the settlers and the
À se Aborigines over land ownership,’
Ryan writes, ‘and fails to underst
3 and Robinson's commitment
save” the Aborigines from extermination by
t
f£)
orig the settlers.’ Even
worse, Rae-Ellis did not believe that the present-day community
&
1
Tasmanian Aborigines had legitimate claims to compensation for ife
dispossession of their forebears. According to Ryan, this meant she
was "engaging in the politics of denial' and was an 'apologist for the
past’. [n the same piece, Ryan reserved even more vitriol for Rae-
Ellis's biography of Truganini, which claimed the Aboriginal woman
had betrayed her people in favour of her then lover, Robinson.
Mustering the most acerbic jargon in her repertoire, Ryan labelled
this book a * “captivity narrative” model of colonial discourse’. She
added: “This simplistic model ignores the complexities of the colonial
structures of power as they were played out in race, class and gender
relations in the nineteenth century. Even more astonishing, Ryan
went on, ‘the second edition of the book was published by Aboriginal
Studies Press in Canberra in 1981. In short, for Rae-Ellis’s offence
of not toeing the orthodox line, readers should regard her as 2
reactionary, and publishers should be warned off her work. f
Rae-Ellis’s biography, Black Robinson, affronts almost all of the
received views about her subject, especially that portrayed by Henry
Reynolds in his 1998 book, This Whispering in Our Hearts. The latter
book is a history of those humanitarians and missionanes in Australia
who have taken up the Aboriginal cause and tried to influence Abo-
riginal policy. Reynolds traces the biographies of eight of these
people but Robinson gets the first and most prominent treatment.
Although Reynolds admits in passing that Robinson was a flawed
character who was ineffectual as a native protector, he still salutes him
as ‘the best-known humanitarian in the Australian colonies’, who was
the prophetic negotiator of a treaty with the Tasmanians and a
champion of Aboriginal land rights. Robinson’s remarkable foresight,
Reynolds writes, was eventually implemented in the Australian High
Court's Wik decision about native title in 1996.5
* Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, 2nd edn., Allen and Unwin,
Sydney, 1996, p xxvi.
* Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p xxv
* Henry Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts, All i
1998, pp 47-8, 60 ii ARa aa, Sydney,
NINENC BLACK ROBINSON AND ORIGINS OF ANORIGINAL INTERNMENT — 201
In contrast, Rae-Ellis finds it hard to discover any redeeming fea-
comes m the man at all, She portrays him as ‘a liar and a cheat, a man
af httle honour’,® the first person to proclaim himself a friend of the
Abonatnes but, in reality, the founder of a long tradition ot those
who have made a lot of money out of the Aboriginal predicament
whale watching their charges die before their eyes. Rather than being
a visionary. reformer, the fabrications Robinson concocted about his
success in improving the condition of the Aborigines influenced Brit-
sh colonial policy towards indigenous people for the next one hun-
deed years and beyond, with the most tragic results for those on the
receiving end.
Robinson not only earned a good living out of all this in the colo-
nies but, in fact, became a very rich man, spending his retirement
partly at his mansion at Bath in England and partly, with a new,
voung wife, on a five-year grand tour of the art galleries, opera
houses and hotels of the Continent.” In what follows, this chapter
relies upon Rae-Ellis for the details of Robinson's early lite and his
initial years as a builder in Van Diemen’s Land. However, my analysis
of his principal role as conciliator and captor of Aborigines is based on
my own review of his reports and daily diary, which, to my mind,
portray an even bleaker portrait than that of his biographer.
Robinson was born in 1791 in a slum in the East End of London.
His father, a building worker, died early in his life and, after his
mother's remarriage, he left home, aged eleven, to fend for himself as
3 bricklayer. Like his fictional counterpart, David Copperfield, he was
also fortunate to find a patron. He benefited from the Evangelical
movement’s mission to the poor, in which the Church of England
arranged for wealthy gentlemen to act as financial supporters and
moral guides of young artisans. Robinson’s patron and mentor was
Thomas Northover of Islington, with whom he corresponded for
much of his adult life. In 1814, aged twenty-two, Robinson married
Maria Amelia Evans of Islington and settled in the same locale. By
1823 the couple had produced five children.®
That year, however, any similarity between Robinson and Dick-
ens’s character ended. He was forced to flee England. He was in-
volved in an, as yet, unexplained financial scandal. A letter he later
* Rae-Ellis, Black Robinson, p 82
7 When they married, he was sixty-two, she twenty-four. Robinson was ten
years older than his English father-in-law, the landscape artist James Baker
Pyne. The couple travelled through Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Holland,
Belgium and Spain before taking an apartment in the Champs Elysees in
Paris: Rae-Ellis, Black Robinson, pp 256—7
* Rae-Ellis, Black Robinson, pp 4—7. Robinson corresponded with Northover
until the latter's death in 1846.
NO Tur FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
Wrote to Northover indicate
the Evangelical organis
Whatever it was, it c
d it may have had some c
ation, the Church Missiona
aused Robinso
and children with his brothe
Scotland, From there he
Coast of Nicaragua, How
'onnection With
ry Society, but
n to immediately leave his wife
rin Hoxton, and take a ship to Leith in
booked a passage to Poyais on the Mosquito
fever, just before the vessel sailed, he learned
that emigrants to the settlement there were being swindled, so he
exchanged his ticket for a steerage berth on the Triton, bound for
Australia, He wrote to his wife, urging her to join him. Twelve days
later, however, she had not turned up and so, with no one bidding
him f&rewell, he set sail on the five-month-long voyage to Van Die-
men's Land.”
Arriving in Hobart Town in January 1824, he made a living as a
bricklayer and house builder. After many letters to persuade his wife
and children to join him, they finally arrived in April 1826. As well as
the building trades, in the following three years Robinson was
involved in community work, serving on committees of the Van
Diemen's Land Mechanics Institute, the Wesleyan Missionary Soci-
ety, the British and Foreign Bible Society, the Auxiliary Bible Society
and the Seamen's Friend and Bethel Union Society. These activities
made him an identity in the Evangelical circles of Hobart Town's
established church. °
THE MORTALITY ON BRUNY ISLAND
In November 1828, Lieutenant-Governor Arthur introduced martial
law in an effort to curb Aboriginal violence against colonists in the
settled districts. At the same time, he tried a policy of conciliation
towards those natives who appeared peaceful. A group of about fifty
of them lived part of the year on Bruny Island, south of Hobart. After
the settler William Davis established his property, Murrayfield, on the
island in 1824, they started coming in for handouts.'! In 1828 Arthur
arranged for a military man and some convicts to mount a depot from
which they could be regularly supplied with blankets and rations. The
soldier reported that the experiment was appreciated by the Aborigi-
? Rae-Ellis, Black Robinson, pp 7-8
*® Rae-Ellis, Black Robinson, pp 14-17
"Kathy Duncombe, Excursion: North Bruny Island, Irene Schaffer, Hobart,
1996, p 13. The government-funded Indigenous Land Council recently
purchased the Murrayfield property. However, despite claims b
and journalists (Australian, 5 June 2002, p 11), Murrayfield did
Robinson’s 500-acre original property at Missionary Bay (Lelli Bay), which
= on the sca western side of North Bruny. Murrayfield is on
rumpeter Bay. Robinson's site later bec i
Johnstone and was called Heatherlie. ane yee
y Aborigines
not include
svi BLACK ROBINSON AND ORIGINS OF ABORIGINAL INTERNMENT 203
wo Arthur decided to make it permanent. On 7 March 1829, he
P" sed in the Hobart Town Gazette for:
pivert
A steady person of good character, who can be well recommended, who
wy take an interest in effecting an intercourse with this important race,
send reside on Brune Island taking charge of the provisions supplied for the
we of the natives of that place.
The salary was fifty pounds a year. Rae-Ellis argues that Robinson
was attracted to the position for three reasons. First, he needed the
money to provide for his family of eight. He had not proven an espe-
cully successful builder, there was a slump in the trade at the time,
and he had mounting debts to pay. The year before, he had to resort
ro renting out one of the five rooms of his Elizabeth Street home."
Second, although he had till then shown no interest in the local
Aborigines, his involvement with religious and charitable causes in
Hobart Town made him feel he could be successful in the position.
Third, he was attracted by the opportunity to get away from town
and explore the new land. He applied for the position but queried
whether fifty pounds was enough. Arthur was impressed by Robin-
son’s pledge to instruct the Aborigines in the ‘acts of civilisation’ and
to teach them the Christian religion but told him that, since there
were thirteen other applicants, none of whom had queried the salary,
it would not be increased. The salary was accompanied by a land
grant of 500 acres (202 hectares) to house the person appointed.
Robinson accepted the position as it was and, leaving his family
behind, departed for Bruny Island by whaleboat at the end of the
month.»
Robinson was thirty-eight years old at the time. He had gone pre-
maturely bald and had already adopted the wig of auburn hair that he
wore for the rest of his life. Among the Aborigines on Bruny Island
was a particularly beautiful native girl, about seventeen years of age,
called Truganini. She was only four feet three inches tall (129 cm) but
she made an immediate impression on him. He initially found her
living with a group of convict woodcutters at Birch’s Bay across the
channel. However, she and her female friends then began visiting the
island's seasonal whaling camp, selling themselves for provisions to the
eighty or ninety convicts and free men at Adventure Bay."
7 Rae-Ellis, Black Robinson, p 14
3 N, J. B. Plomley, Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journal and Papers of
George Augustus Robinson 1829-1834, Tasmanian Historical Research
Association, Hobart, 1966, pp 49-58
* Robinson, diary, 3-4 April, 12 August, 1829, Friendly Mission, pp 55, 71—
2. Truganini's height was measured on Flinders Island in 1857 when she was
twenty-five.
3 -
am ac dif-
BAM THE FABRIC ATION OF ABORIGINAL Hist
RY
South-east Van Diemen’s Land, including Bruny Island. Robinson’s original missi
to the Aborigines was on North Bruny at Missionary Bay (Lelli Bay) dose to
Snake Island is depicted here. Detail from map by J. Arowsmith, London.
(Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales)
The whalers passed on to the girls venereal diseases and other Euro-
pean illnesses, including the common cold. Truganini and two o£ hez
girlfriends were seriously ill for a time but recovered. However. ovez
the next six months, twenty-two other Aborigines, about half of
those on the island, died from these diseases. By January 1830, only
one adult male and sixteen women and children survived.
Robinson spent sixteen weeks on the island, handing out rations to
the blacks, supervising the convict labourers who cleared part of his
land grant at Missionary Bay, and overseeing the construction of i
1 Rae-Ellis, Black Robinson, pp 21, 30-1; Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp 76—
SEVEN: BLACK ROBINSON AND ORIGINS OF ABORIGINAL INTERNMENT 205
cottage for himself. During this time, he devised the plan that was to
aaide the rest of his carcer in Australia. The colony was desperate for
‘ solution to. the depredations that Aborigines were increasingly
intlicting on settlers. As 1829 wore on, it was clear that Arthur's
proclamation of martial law and his establishment of roving parties to
drive natives from the settled areas were having little impact. One of
the unsuccessful roving party leaders, Gilbert Robertson, recom-
mended to Arthur in June that year that a policy to remove the Abo-
rivines by conciliation and friendly persuasion might be more effec-
due than a military approach. Robinson learnt of this recommenda-
tion and, in one of his reports to the Lieutenant-Governor, made a
similar suggestion of his own. He proposed to undertake an expedi-
tion across the south and south-west of the colony to make contact
with and conciliate the native tribes in these regions, and to bring
them in to the settlement he was establishing. At the beginning of
June, Robinson wrote to Arthur:
An expedition to all the Aboriginal tribes extending from the Huon River
to Port Davey would, I think, be attended with beneficial results = It is
only by such an undertaking that your Excellency’s humane intentions to
the aborigines can possibly be made known. As many as thought proper
could return with the expedition, and if otherwise disposed they would
know that an asylum was provided for them at Bruné Island whenever
they thought proper to return."®
Robinson also realized that, since none of the colonists spoke any
of the several native languages on the island, this would be a valuable
skill in any approach to conciliation. During his sixteen weeks on
Bruny, he picked up a vocabulary of 150 words from the locals and
from their relatives and friends from the Port Davey tribe who visited
them. He announced to the press that he had begun compiling an
Aboriginal alphabet and dictionary."
He also learnt, as discussed in Chapter Four, that despite displaying
a great deal of affability and good humour during their visits, the Port
Davey Aborigines were themselves responsible for some of the
bloodiest assaults made on settlers that year. But he could see from the
welcome given them by Truganini and her female friends, which the
Port Davey blacks fully reciprocated, that she provided him with a
way to reach into their society and befriend them. When Robinson
made his proposal to undertake his expedition, he informed no one of
the crimes he knew they had committed. He maintained this secrecy
even after December 1829 when he found new evidence that twelve
Port Davey blacks were responsible for a robbery and murder at New
'* quoted by Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp 62-3
7 Rae-Ellis, Black Robinson, p 26
£06 THE FABRICATION Or ABORIGINAL HISTORY
Norfolk." Although he acknowledged they had kill
quesuon, he scoffed at local rumours that men
were responsible for othe
nial secretary:
ed the r
ibers of the E
r assaults on settlers, He wrote to the cr
"These reports are perfectly groundless, and the aurk.
of them deserve to be severely punished.’ His
unlike anyone else with a plan of conciliation, he
land women to persuade the south-west natives to come wit
The last thing he wanted to spoil the approval and funding of }
was moral concern over the probity of dealing with black murd
So, instead of informing the authorities, he kept the info
their atrocities to himself.
same
Strategy was th
had the Bruny b
ration "4
IImmnatjon c
Although Robinson’s mission was approved in June, k
another seven months to get the expedition organized, much of
> Inucn
and the prostitution of the women, he eventually persuade
that the Bruny Island settlement was not viable. Arthur aske
find a more suitable site. Robinson, however, was allowed t
a
chase the Bruny Island property for a token sum. He brought th
c
handful of Aboriginal survivors not required for his expedition inte
town and accommodated them in a building attached to his own
house.
By the end of 1829, the nine months he had worked for the Abo-
rigines had transformed Robinson’s life. He gained a government job.
a regular salary and a more secure position than his precarious occu-
pation as building tradesman had permitted. He later wrote several
letters, mollifying his wife about his long absences, where he argu
the Aboriginal service left him much better off financially than }
would have been otherwise.” As well as his own house in town, h
was in possession of a substantial Bruny Island property, complete
with cottage, which he subsequently leased out at à good rent. The
government paid him another twelve pounds a year for the Aborigi-
nes occupying the building at his home. As leader of the govern-
ment's effort to conciliate the hostile natives, he was no longer an
arüsan of dubious origins but a man of stature in colonial society.
For the Aborigines, however, the same period had been a catastro-
phe. Of the total of more than fifty Bruny Islanders who were there
when Robinson arrived to civilize them,” only seventeen individuals
were left alive.
* see Chapter Four, pp 113-4
? Robinson to Burnett, 23 December 1829, in T i igi
: , 1 asmanian Ab
Robinson’s Reports etc, ML A612 Os
^ Rac-Ellis, Black Robinson, p 23
' The original size of the tribe was unkn i i
families Plomley, C d ans m own but it comprised about twenty
SEVEN: BLACK ROBINSON AND ORIGINS OF ABORIGINAL INTERNMENT 207
THE FIRST EXPEDITION OF THE ‘FRIENDLY MISSION’
Robinson eventually left Hobart on 27 January 1830 with a party
comprising his teenage son Charles, fifteen convicts and thirteen
borigines, including Truganini and her female friends as well as two
ot the guides from Gilbert Robertson’s roving party, Umarrah (Eu-
nurah) and Black Tom.” They travelled by whaleboat and schooner
to Recherche Bay, where Robinson divided his party into two. Nine
convicts and his son took the boats by sea while he and the Aborigi-
nes plus six convicts proceeded to walk across country to Port
Davey." For the next four and a half months, he was out of touch
with colonial society, except for one week at the penal settlement on
Sarah Island in Macquarie Harbour. He became the first white man to
walk not only to Port Davey but also up the whole of the west coast
to Cape Grim. It was a remarkable feat of endurance and willpower.
However, it made very little impact on relations between Aborigi-
nes and colonists. On 16 March 1830, the native women of Robin-
son's party made contact with the twenty-six members of the Port
Davey tribe at Kelly Basin (now Payne Bay).™ For the next three and
a half weeks, Robinson remained in communication with them,
sometimes spending the night at their campfires, at other times being
kept at a distance by the natives who remained wary of his intentions.
Although he assured them of the good wishes of the Lieutenant-Gov-
ernor, he failed to persuade any of them to come with him back to
the colonial settlement. This was the sole contact he made with any
Aborigines on either the south or the west coast between the start of
his expedition in January and his arrival at the Van Diemen's Land
Company's property, Woolnorth, at Cape Grim in mid-June. During
his great journey, he had come across a few Aboriginal campsites and
had seen two west coast groups at a distance, one at Sandy Cape, the
other at Mount Cameron West,? but had succeeded in conciliating
none of them.
While staying as a guest at Woolnorth, he took the opportunity to
explore nearby R.obbins Island. On this visit he met the English seal-
ers and their Aboriginal women who, as discussed in Chapter Eight,
he interviewed about the Cape Grim killings two and a half years
earlier. He also met the native youth Peevay, who was working with
2 A full list of the changing composition of Robinson’s party on his first
expedition is in Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp 240—1 l
23 Robinson did not say so in his diary but from his account it appears he
went by the old Aboriginal trail, which begins at Cockle Creek in
Recherche Bay and is still used by bushwalkers today. o "
24 Robinson, diary, 18 March-9 April 1850, Friendly Mission, pp pr :
25 Robinson, diary, 1 and 12 June 1830, Friendly Mission, pp 166-7, —
208 Tur FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAI HisTORY
the sealers, Peevay gave Robinson a guided tour of t
Which he introduced him to his brother, Pendowte
nginal woman named Narrucker./ The latter two were the firu
genuinely tribal Aborigines that Robinson had met since Port Dave,
All three of them, Peevay, his brother and the woman, agreed to joi
the other Aborigines in IX obinson's party.
On 12 July 1830, Robinson and his entourage arrived
Head on the north coast, the headquarters of the Van Diemen’s Land
Company, where he picked up the first mail he had r
departing Hobart. He learnt, for the first time, of
infant son only two days after he had left home. He
February, as the crisis over Aboriginal violence mou
Governor Arthur had introduced a bounty of five
native adult and two pounds for each child brought Captive by any
colonist into any of the main settlements. Robinson acted immedi-
ately to take advantage of this offer. On 14 July, he Wrote in his diary:
“Having been informed of the proclamation offering reward for the
apprehension of the aborigines, I this day despatched my boat to
Robbins Island in quest of the aborigines there.”? E
While Robinson remained at Circular Head dining with the gen-
tlemen attached to the company, his convict coxswain, Alexander
McKay, went back to fulfil his orders. McKay had no success in
finding any Aborigines at Robbins Island but, on the way back, came
across a group of natives on the coast that included a man he knew
named Nicermenic, who was originally from the Robbins Island tribe
but for some time had been an occasional employee of ne Van Die-
men’s Land Company and a hanger-on at Circular Head. The cox-
swain offered to take him back by boat to that settlement and, with a
gift of trousers and a blanket, persuaded one of the tribal Aborigines,
named Linenerrinneker, to join him.
A week later, Robinson set off again with three convicts and eight
natives, including those who had joined him at Robbins Island and
Circular Head. When he reached Emu Bay, where the Coastal
schooner, the Friendship, had berthed, Robinson put aboard four of
his Aboriginal followers, Pendowtewer, Narrucker, Nicermenic and
Linenerrinneker. They were to be shipped via Launceston, to Hobart,
where Robinson expected to claim twenty pounds for their Capture,??
It is obvious from this little sequence of events that Robinson was
now acting not in any spirit of conciliation but simply as
he island, duri,
wer, and an Abo
at Circular
eceived since
the death of his
also learnt that in
nted, Lieutenant-
pounds for each
a bounty
* Robinson, diary, 1 July 1830, Friendly Mission, P 184, also diary 30 June
1830, p233 n 117
” Robinson, diary, 14 July 1830, Friendly
2 Plomley, Friendly Mission, P 234 n 131
? Robinson, diary, 4 Augus
Mission, p 187
t 1830, Friendly Mission, pp 191-2
SEVEN: BLACK ROBINSON AND ORIGINS OF ABORIGINAL INTERNMENT 209
raged in tricking Aborigines to join him under any pretence
hunter eng f I } 1
i ork. None of those he sent off to Hobart were hostile
tha
natives who | . ,
b lligerence. At the time, the Robbins Island tribe was known to be
NC è
largely peaceable and amenable to the white men's presence. Both
Peevay and Nicermenic had experience as employees of white sealers
and the Van Diemen’s Land Company. The other two had joined
Robinson's party because they were relatives or friends of theirs. Of
the four sent to Hobart, the only one against whom any aspersions
had been cast was Nicermenic, who Robinson later claimed had once
committed ‘outrages upon the Company's people’.” But this seems
unlikely since he returned voluntarily to the Circular Head commu-
nity and, for the few days he was there under Robinson’s tutelage,
was apparently accepted into it without being accused of any previous
offences. By transforming the four unsuspecting members of his
touring party into captives with a bounty on their heads, Robinson
was acting deceitfully, both towards them and to the government
from whom he sought the reward.
However, three of the four never made it beyond Launceston.
When the Friendship arrived there, colonial authorities ordered the
ship to take them back to Circular Head and release them. Only
Nicermenic was forwarded on to Hobart. The reason for this inter-
vention was the government’s refusal to countenance the type of
bounty hunting in which Robinson was engaged. On 20 August, two
weeks after Robinson shipped off his four captives, Arthur issued a
public statement about practices of this kind. In an obvious allusion to
Robinson’s actions, Arthur said he had learned, to his regret, that his
offer of a bounty ‘appears in some recent instances to have been mis-
apprehended’. Rewards were only for Aborigines caught while com-
mitting aggressions on the inhabitants of the settled districts, not for
settlers who went out to seize ‘inoffensive Natives of the remote and
unsettled parts of the territory’, just to claim the money. ^"
When he learnt that his captives had been released, Robinson was
livid. He vented his fury in his diary where he castigated the colonial
government for not doing as he wished:
It is quite evident they know nothing of what they are about. The gov-
ernment have engaged me to enquire into the state of the aboriginal
population of this country, and this I have effected with considerable peril
and privations. I have become acquainted with the habits, manners, E
guage, country and political relationship of each nation and am the only
? quoted by Plomley, Friendly Mission, p 234 n 313
?! Government Notice, No. 161, 20 August 1830, British Parliamentary
Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 233-4
2000 Dur EAnnCATION ot ABORIGINAL HISTORY
person that can Judge of what is best to be done, but w
me those wiseacres at their parlour fireside at Hobart
sooth.,
ithout consulting
l'own know, for
because they have heard it from the lips of those who Never speak
truth and who Know as much of the aborigines of V
an Diemen's Land as
the authonties in London. ®
Uhis was more than Just à case of a bruised ego. Robinson was
growly tntlating his achievements to his own diary. When he wrote
this in September 1830, he had been working in Aboriginal affairs for
only eighteen months. Rather than knowing the habits and manners
ot each nation’ in the colony, the only Aborigines he had conversed
with were those at Bruny Island, the twenty-six at Port Davey and a
handtul at Robbins Island and Circular Head. It is true that he had
questioned closely those he had met and had recorded in his diary
their responses and his observations of them. By this time, he proba-
bly had a more intelligent and anthropological interest in them than
anyone else in the colony. But there were other colonists like the
roving party leader Gilbert Robertson and the chaplain Robert
Knopwood, who had spoken with more Aborigines than had Rob-
inson, and had accommodated them for various periods in their own
households. Both were better acquainted with those, such as the
Oyster Bay tribe, who posed more of a problem for black and white
relations than any that Robinson had come across in his travels.
In the same passage of his diary, Robinson recorded what was to
become the moral justification of his own efforts. Rather than seeking
to earn bounty money by capturing the Robbins Island and Circular
Head Aborigines, he claimed that he was actually saving their lives:
It was the greatest act of humanity to have provided for these poor abo-
rgines. They were but few in number and to send them back was to
subject them to the twofold dangers of being either shot by the sealers or
by a stockkeeper or shepherd of the Company, or slain by some hostile
aborigines.?
In other words, he claimed the colony had become too hostile a
place for these Aborigines. Preserving them meant putting them in
the care of a person like himself, who was both knowledgeable about
them and humanitarian in intent. Even though there was little b
for such a claim — the Aborigines concerned had by then been liv
among and working with sealers and shepherds, unharmed, for some
time — this notion became not only the rationalisation for the rest of
Robinson’s career but also the model for all those who have followed
him ever since.
asis
ing
? Robinson, diary, 5 September 1830, Friend!
y Mission, p 209
? Robinson, diary, 5 September 1830, Frendly Mission, p 209
SEVEN; BLACK ROBINSON AND ORIGINS OF ABORIGINAL INTERNMENT 211
The Aborigines still living in the bush, however, remained un-
are that this was their fate. At this stage, they resisted every attempt
Robinson to meet with them and discuss their future. In mid-
September, he left Emu Bay headed for George Town, the former
capital of the northern colony at the mouth of the Tamar. In the
ensuing two Weeks, he failed to make contact with any tribal natives,
although he did come across one party of eight men he thought were
planning to attack him. However, like most of the other blacks he
had encountered so far on his expedition, when he approached them
they ran off, ignoring his calls for them to stop." When he reached
George Town on 1 October, marking the end of the first major stage
of his expedition, Robinson was disappointed to find there was no
message for him from the government, no applause for his feat in
leading his party more than half-way round the island, and no recog-
nition for his efforts at conciliating the natives:
aw
dy
Went into town to see if there was any letter or instructions for me, but
found not a single letter. Indeed, the people in this place appeared to take
little interest in the affairs of the colony, they knew nothing of me or my
pursuits, and I found not a person that offered me a glass of cold water.”
THE MAKING OF BLACK ROBINSON
Part of the reason for their indifference was that, in Robinson’s
absence, policy towards the Aborigines had changed. Conciliation
had not brought any results and the government was now preparing
to mount the Black Line to sweep through the south-east of the col-
ony. When Robinson made his next stop at Launceston, the local
commandant, Edward Abbott, said ‘he had no instructions for me and
that there was nothing more for me to do'.^ Abbott tried to place the
Aborigines in Robinson's party in jail for their own protection.
However, Robinson learnt that Arthur had just come north to super-
vise the organization of the line. He immediately acquired transport
and went down to the settlement of Ross and put his case to the
Lieutenant-Governor. He claimed there was a large body of up to
700 Aborigines in the uninhabited north-east of the island and offered
to help capture them. Arthur agreed, urging him to bring in the
Aborigines ‘by gentle means’ if possible. Robinson returned to
Launceston with instructions to the commandant to furnish him with
supplies, a boat and convicts to supplement his Aboriginal entou-
rage."
34 Robinson, diary, 20 September 1830, Friendly Mission, pp 215-6
35 Robinson, diary, 1 October 1830, Friendly Mission, p 222
> Robinson, diary, 2 October 1830, Friendly Mission, p 224
37 Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp 242-4, Rae-Ellis, Black Robinson, pp 62-3
212 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
Robinson and his party then walked from Launceston to the
north-eastern tip of the island, while his whaleboat followed them by
sea, On 1 November, they came across a group of Aborigines at An-
son River, just south of Eddystone Point. Instead of 700, there were
only seven of them." Nonetheless, Robinson was overjoyed because,
at last, he was able to persuade them to come with him. As Chapter
Six recorded, he used the threat of the Black Line to persuade this
group. He ‘informed them that the mighty enemy who were at that
time engaged in capturing their countrymen to the southward would
shortly appear in formidable array in front of their own territory’.”
Robinson assured them that if they came with him he would protect
them from the soldiers. These were the first genuine captives he had
taken on his entire eighteen-month expedition. However, he still had
to secure them and to prevent them changing their minds and run-
ning away. So he met his whaleboat on the coast and shipped his
captives and their numerous dogs off to the small outcrop called Swan
Island, about four and a half miles (seven kilometres) off the coast. -
On 15 November, Robinson found another six Aborigines waiting
opposite Swan Island to voluntarily surrender to him. He had not
found this group himself and had done nothing to persuade or nego-
tiate with them. They had heard about both the Black Line and his
own party through native word-of-mouth. They, too, were intimi-
dated enough to seek his protection. He took them by boat to the
island as well.? There they subsisted on a combination of colonial
rations and the mutton birds, geese and penguins nesting on the
island.*!
So began the process by which Robinson came to be celebrated by
the orthodox school of historiography as a great humanitarian. Rather
than conciliation, however, it was more a matter of persuading terri-
fied blacks to get into his boat and landing them on the island, with
the aim of claiming the bounty on their heads as his reward. In the
following weeks, his whaleboat visited several islands in the nearby
Furneaux group, which were inhabited by English sealers and their
Aboriginal mistresses. Using his authority as a government agent, he
managed to get three of these women to accompany him to Swan
** Robinson, diary, 1 November 1830, 2 November 1830, Friendly Mission,
pp 261-2, 264
? Robinson, report to Arthur, February 1831, in Plomley, Friendly Mission,
p 438 n 44
? Robinson, diary, 15 November 1830, Friendly Mission, pp 274—7
*' The island crawled with tiger snakes and rats:
and black snakes; the island is infested with snakes, which feed on birds.
Plenty of rats upon Swan Island, and
; pelicans frequent the island." R obi
diary, 4 November 1830, Friendly Mission, P 267. Tee EORR,
‘Saw several large yellow
SEVEN: BLACK ROBINSON AND ORIGINS OF ABORIGINAL
INTERNMENT 213
North-east Van Diemen's Land and Furneaux Islands. Detail from map by J.
Arrowsmith, London, 1832 (Mitchell Library). Gun Carriage Island is not depicted
on this map but is just off the northern-most point of Cape Barren Island.
Island as well. He later sent the coxswain of his boat, James Parish, to
retrieve more women from the sealers. Parish returned on 11
December with six women. After a visit to Penguin Island (Forsyth
Island), on 19 December, Parish brought back another five.”
On 14 December, Robinson had written to Commandant Abbott
at Launceston that he was holding thirty-three natives on Swan
Island. Even though the colony’s Executive Council and later
historians have accepted this claim as true, it was an exaggeration.
Excluding the seven who belonged to his own party, the evidence of
Robinson’s own diaries shows that by this date he had only landed
Robinson, diary, 11 December 1830, 19 December 1830 Friendly Mission,
pp 290-1, 294-5
© Robinson to Abbott, 14 December 1830, quoted Plomley, Friendly
Mission, p 442, n 75
* Minutes of the Executive Council 23 February 1831, British Parliamentary
Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 252. The council thought the total was 54;
Rae-Ellis, Black Robinson, p 66; Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 150
214. THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
twenty-two Aborigines there: thirteen from Van Diemen’s Land and
nine sealers’ women from the Furneaux islands. Even with the
additional five sealers’ women who arrived on 19 December, the total
number of his captives on Swan Island was only ever twenty-seven.”
Nonetheless, this meagre haul was enough to make Robinson’s fame
and fortune.
When he returned to Hobart in January 1831, his despatches to
Arthur, in which he claimed a great success, had been publicized and
had made him a celebrity. Although it was the threat of the Black
Line that had actually caused this outcome, the fact that this great
military effort had netted only two captives made Robinson’s total,
overstated as it was, look impressive.
In fact, Arthur himself used Robinson’s very modest success to
avoid total public disillusionment and throw at least some positive
light on the great effort that had gone into the Black Line. In his
public notice on 26 November when he announced the disbanding
of the campaign, Arthur admitted that the expedition “had not been
attended with the full success which was anticipated’. However, he
could at least add that he had ‘the satisfaction of announcing on this
occasion that a body of natives have been captured without blood-
shed on the northern coast where there exists every prospect of the
remainder of that tribe being secured’. He went on to declare future
policy would be to deposit all captured Aborigines on an island from
where they could not escape.^ Hence Robinson, the man who eight
weeks earlier had been all but ignored in Launceston when he
emerged from the bush after his apparently futile pilgrimage around
the colony, helped salvage his Lieutenant-Governor’s reputation
among the colonists and restored at least a little credibility to Arthur’s
Aboriginal policy. In return, the government threw its weight behind
him.
He was applauded in the government newspaper, the Hobart Town
Gazette, for having ‘accomplished in a great measure the objectives of
his mission, and that in so doing he has manifested the most daring
intrepidity, persevering zeal, and strenuous exertion'." He was
invited to Government House where he was generously rewarded.
Arthur gave him 2560 acres of land (1036 hectares), the largest grant
permissible, and increased his salary from fifty to two hundred and
fifty pounds a year, back-dated to his original appointment in 1829,
** Plomley compiles a full list of those captured b
tw
December 1830 in Friendly Mission, pp 478-9 See ieee anid d6
‘ Government Order No 13, 26 November 18 ;
Courier, 27 November 1830, um er 1830, published Hobart Town
4” Hobart Town Gazette, 19 February 1831 p41
CUP
SEVEN: BLACK ROBINSON AND ORIGINS OF ABORIGINAL INTER NMENT 215
gratuity of one hundred pounds." Arthur also discussed future
Aboriginal policy with him and accepted his recommendations about
what to do with the Aborigines then on Swan Island. All Robinson's
hopes had therefore been fulfilled. His expedition had made him à
wealthy man and he had become an important adviser to the gov-
emment on Aboriginal policy — all for capturing a mere thirteen
wild blacks and removing fourteen women from the Furneaux sealers.
Robinson was celebrated by the colonial authorities and the
wealthier settlers. Shortly after the artist Benjamin Duterrau arrived in
Hobart in 1832, he began the sketches and etchings of Robinson and
his Aboriginal party that eventuated in Tasmania's most famous oil
painting, The Conciliation (1840).? However, Robinson was anything
but universally acclaimed. Some of the former convict servants on his
expedition began to denigrate his efforts. In particular, Alexander
McKay, when he gained a ticket-of-leave and left Robinson to join
the Van Diemen’s Land Company, became a vocal critic, much to his
former employer’s chagrin. Outside the governing circle, The Con-
ciliator soon earned the name ‘Black Robinson’ and a reputation to
match. Even one of his admirers, the surveyor James Calder, who
later dedicated a book to him, said there were many in the colony
who derided him:
though he was never known to take part in any dishonourable act, still the
current of popular dislike ran so strongly against him, on both sides of the
island, that he was almost universally denounced as an impostor, and no
terms, however vulgar, were too vulgar if only applied to him. The
Government, too, while it affected to applaud him in print, and even to
reward his services, was not a sincere encourager of his, and its petty sub-
ordinates, with many of whom he had necessary transactions, taking their
cue from above, seemed to vie with each other to impede, distress and
ylus a
48 Robinson, diary, 3 February 1831, Friendly Mission, p 317; Arthur to
Murray, 4 April 1831, British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p
251; Hobart Town Gazette, 19 February 1831, p 41. As a point of
comparison, at the time the annual salary of a clergyman, which was then a
position of high social standing, was two hundred pounds a year: N. J. B.
Plomley (ed.), Weep in Silence: A History of the Flinders Island Aboriginal
Settlement, Blubber Head Press, Hobart, 1987, p 721. Later that year, John
Batman valued the land Robinson was granted at ten shillings an acre, a total
worth of 1280 pounds, Robinson, diary, 20 September 1831, Friendly
Mission, p 429.
4 Held by the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart. Stephen
2, argues The
Scheding, The National Picture, Vintage, Sydney, 2002,
Conciliation was itself only a sketch by Duterrau for an even grander work,
The National Picture, which has supposedly been lost since the nineteenth
century.
Hlö THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
annoy him, from no other motives, I believe,
than those that Sprang fr,
^. : K0 E nm
an tllaudable sentiment of jealousy.
THE RATIONALE FOR ABORIGINAL INTERNMEN'T
When he launched the Black Line in 1830, Arthur’s anticipated soy
tion to the Aboriginal problem was to remove them from the settled
districts and confine them to the Tasman Peninsula, where they coul
continue to practise their traditional hunter-gatherer way of life. This
had not always been his preference. He had previously favoured their
integration into colonial society. In May 1829, after Robinson had
written to those settlers who were employing natives in the Hobart
district to advise them to send their employees to the Bruny Island
mission, Arthur had rejected this proposal: ‘I do not see the occasion
for their parting with such natives as they have in their employ; pro-
vided they use them well it is just what I would wish.”*! m
By February 1831, however, Arthur had changed his views. He
had abandoned any hope of Aboriginal assimilation and also given
away the notion of confining them to some part of Van Diemen’s
Land. Instead, he accepted the majority recommendation of his Abo.
rigines Committee to deport those currently on Swan Island to
Robinson’s preferred location, Gun Carriage Island (Vansittart Island)
in the Furneaux group. Any other natives that Robinson would
secure in the future would be shipped to Gun Carriage Island too.
At the time, the Furneaux were uninhabited except for about thirty
sealers and their native wives on various islands. Robinson wanted to
remove them all, men and women, from the vicinity. In March 1831,
Robinson transported all his captives from Swan Island to Gun
Carriage Island. He also shipped there the nine remain
Island blacks who had till then been housed
d
ing Bruny
at his own home in
rounded up from
The new settlement
one Aborigines. By June, however,
SEVEN. BLACK ROBINSON AND ORIGINS OF ABORI INAL INTERN 217
, N ,NMENT Z1
e Enders Island (then. called Great Island), the largest in the
Formeaux, The settlement there was established at The Lagoons on
he south-west coast and received its first consignment of Aborigines
m November 1831. However, this site, too, proved unsuitable so, in
February 1833, it moved again, fifteen miles north to Pea Jacket Paint
renamed Settlement Point), which subsequently became their
permanent Flinders Island home.
Arthur went along with the concept of a sanctuary because he
wanted a solution to Aboriginal hostility, but Robinson’s motive was
to preserve his career in Aboriginal affairs. In particular, he had ear-
marked for himself the position of superintendent of the Aboriginal
settlement. On Flinders Island, he would not simply be the manager
of 3 ration station, as he had been on Bruny, but the commandant of
all the Aborigines of Van Diemen's Land. It is the fact that he wanted
this position, and the kind of views he expressed towards those in his
charge, that has led to his reputation as the great humanitarian. There
is no doubt that Robinson lamented the tragedy that was engulfing
the Aborigines. In November 1830, as he was preparing to load his
second shipment of natives onto the boat for Swan Island, one mem-
ber of his own Aboriginal party learnt that her brother had recently
been killed. Everyone was affected badly by the news, including
Robinson:
This information was the occasion of general lamentation and there was
not one aborigine but wept bitterly. My feelings was overcome. I could
not suppress them: the involuntary lachryme burst forth and I sorrowed
for them. Poor unbefriended and hapless people! I imagined myself an
aborigine. I looked upon them as brethren not, as they have been
maligned, savages. No, they are my brethren by creation.?*
But it is also true that he used their fate largely for his own pur-
poses. He argued often, in both his diary to himself and his despatches
to the government, that he was needed to save the Aborigines from
destruction at the hands of the settlers, especially from the depreda-
tions of the lowest orders of the colony, the convicts and sealers. The
violence that threatened to engulf the Aborigines meant they needed
both a sanctuary and a protector in the form of himself. This was not
only a matter of saving their lives but also of redeeming the colony
itself from its wickedness:
The children have witnessed the massacre of their parents and their rela-
tions carried away into captivity by these merciless invaders, their country
has been taken from them and the kangaroo, their chief subsistence, has
been slaughtered wholesale for the sake of paltry lucre. Can we wonder
then at the hatred they bear to the white inhabitants? This enmity is not
* Robinson, diary, 15 November 1830, Friendly Mission, p 276
x
N A
1 Trt Anni ATION CJ AWORIGIN: I History
the eleet of a Moment,
Like a fire burnin
í pg, undergrour
torth gon
This flame of aboriginal resentment. can
exangunshed by
OU has bu
and ought only r, t.
Brush benevolence, We should fly to their relief
Should make some atonement for the misery we have entailed upe
onginal proprietors of this land." i
We.
n ffe
Robinson's c nsati or i i is r j
ns compensation for adopting this role not only involved
substantial rewards in terms of wealth and career, but also a consider
able enhancement of his ego. He was by no means averse to con
gratulating himself for his compassion. After his first capture of wild
Aborigines at Anson River, he wrote:
As we walked along the fresh natives sang a song. This assemblage of
natives, what would be to some a most appalling sight, was to me truly
delightful. To see fourteen blacks following me a stranger whither they
knew not, no guns, no tying of hands, no shooting of men; and to think
that I was the means of saving the lives of these unprotected natives, that
some of them ere long might be made possessors of the gospel of peace,
and that they should be induced to leave their country and their friends and
go with me through the forest, afforded me much satisfaction.”
Of the transfer to Swan Island, he wrote:
They all seemed filled with joy. The sensation I felt was great. I had the
satisfaction to know that I was their deliverer, and that I had preserved
their lives and had delivered their women from captivity.”
No one should doubt the religious sentiments that Robinson
expressed in the above quotations. But amidst all his talk of atone-
ment, redemption and satisfaction there was one issue upon which his
conscience did not dwell. This was the role of his recently captured
Aborigines in the killing of white settlers. He believed that some of
the thirteen Aborigines he had just taken to Swan Island were
responsible for recent atrocities in the north of the colony. The
members of the group he took on 1 November told him they had
killed two soldiers on the Launceston Road.” One of those he took
on 15 November, a man named Tillarbunner, was a member of 4
group known to be responsible for several robberies and the murder
of a settler in the Ben Lomond district in the previous month.?
In August 1831, while Robinson pursued more natives in the bush,
the Aborigines in his party brought in a group of seven natives at
^ Robinson, diary, 20 August 1830, Friendly Mission, p 202-3
*% Robinson, diary, 1 November 1830, Friendly Mission, p 262
? Robinson, diary, 15 November 1830, Friendly Mission, pp 276-7
58 Robinson, diary, 1 November 1830, Friendly Mission,
gave in Chapter Six, however, this story was probably
although Robinson was not to know this at the time.
5 See the discussion of Major Gray’s letters, notes 31, 32, Chapter Six
p 263. For reasons I
mere bravado,
| 4d-42999— ~ — JE
x mM
Mount. Wellington and Hobart Town from Kangaroo Point by John Glover, 1833 (Tasmanian
Museum and Art Gallery)
The last days of freedom of the Big River tribe? In November 2001, this oil painting came
onto the market. Painted by John Glover, its foreground is set on the eastern side of the
Derwent River, depicting a camp of Aborigines dancing around a fire and frolicking in
the river. The historian Henry Reynolds, a trustee of the Tasmanian Museum and Art
Gallery, said it was ‘a painting of exquisite historical significance’ for the state. Although
Glover did not indicate the precise date of the scene or the identity of the Aborigines,
Reynolds was confident he recognized both. He told the Hobart Mercury: ‘It captures the
last days of freedom of the Big River tribe, who were brought to Hobart by George Au-
gustus Robinson in January 1832 before being shipped to Flinders Island.’ (Mercury, 10
November 2001, p 38)
These comments, made before the auction, helped boost the price the Museum eventu-
ally had to pay to $1.5 million. This was a record price for a Glover and, not having the
budget to fund it, the Museum had to launch a public appeal for donations.
However, Reynolds’s advice about the historical significance of the painting was mis-
taken. The Big River tribe never visited Kangaroo Point (Bellerive) in January 1832.
They came into Hobart from the west and, for the ten days they were in the town, they
remained under Robinson’s surveillance. They were first put onto a boat described by the
Hobart Town Courier as ‘the Swan River packet’, which was moored at the wharf, and they
then camped in Robinson’s Elizabeth Street yard until 17 January when they got aboard
the Tamar for Flinders Island. They never went across the river. While in Hobart, they al-
ways remained on the western side of the Derwent. (For references, see p 222, n 70.)
Anyway, the painting depicts at least forty-seven Aborigines, while there were only
twenty-six members of the Big River tribe captured.
In Whitewash (ed. Robert Manne, Melbourne, 2003, pp 225-9), a curator at the Tas-
manian Museum and Art Gallery, David Hansen, rejects the case made here, accusing this
book of ‘egregious factual errors’. First, he says the credit line on the Mount Wellington
picture is wrong, for it was painted in 1834. However, when the auctioneers Christie's
Australia put it on the market, they dated it as 1833 (Sydney Moming Herald, 16 November
2001). The painting itself is undated. It was sent to London in January 1835 and a date of
either 1833 or 1834 is possible. Second, Hansen says the credit line fails to attribute the
National Gallery of Australia as part-owner. However, when TMAG gave its permission
to reproduce the painting it requested acknowledgement of itself only. It failed to mention
-
ion is equally egregious. But these are trivia] mar
^, SO Its OWN omission is eqt " anting is a historica] depiction
any joint owner, so sl Y the Mount Mrelingien A sre was no evidence the E
The real. issue ds wheel sd tribe, Hansen concedes L3 January, but concludes ,
last days of the Big Ad the river between 7 T Robinson had just Spent a
captives ever went ne This is hardly n $ rhlands before he eventu
remain an open ques ie iibe across thie centra pe haul of his career, He was hardly
three months gau he biggest and most ^i M dile painted on the other Side of th.
cheng They i ia ea to go off to have thei P right, however, to say that the pic-
likely to have allowec : M readily escape. Wins ue confection', that rearranges the
Derwent, where they ar lio; construction, â rt m but an elegy for the l'asranj
sani fe tun Honan morh Horae Ai historical Mr eT captives to pose for h
topography and was in j that, Glover did b ce they went there, (ii) the numeri
oes people. But n (i) the absence of evi en idiots powerful reasons to k
at Kangaroo Point. ad and those depicted, (iii) retation of the ahistorical Natur
disparity oe (iv) Hansen’s own interp
them in Hobar s
of th.
ing,
his “Mug
D
u
C gs
prd
=
an
im
cal
cep
€ of
ing i days of freedom,
; ting its last
i iver tribe celebra
i he Big River
isi rtrait of the
ainti this is not a po
the painting,
] he l er, fi m T
na 2 b » John G
í t that were sent from Hobart own to a si 183 Yy
wes en : T Gre t Is over ro his
book (Mı tchell Librar y» State Library of New South Wales
1 0
trays the last
. ious page, that po Flinders
; ainting on the previo hipped to Fli
His unromantic drawing, rhe Bis River tribe before Mea a name ‘Mon-
j i s 1 i ys
n. Sean Diemen bi E indicated the chief of tn e E. the: ineptos p
s land). Glover in ing depicts eig nd 17 Januz
t Isla : his drawing dep between 7 a
Island (Grea liatter). Thi have been done s ; noval.
; , Montpe A . It must S their ren
Es to Hobart i nm where its subjects camped SVANE
Mor. lace in Elizabe i
1832 at his p
SEVEN: BLACK ROBINSON AND ORIGINS OP ABORIGINAL INTERNMENT 219
Noland Bay on the north coast. Robinson had been tracking this
band for about five days. He had found an abandoned hut they had
built and in it were the remains of a Common Prayer Book, which
he identified as having been stolen during a series of recent attacks on
white settlers on the East Arm of the Tamar River.” These attacks
had been particularly bloody affairs. In her husband's absence, Mrs
Cunningham, the wife of a settler, and her child had been speared, in
the mother's case fatally. A month later, the same band had speared to
death a male settler named Fitzgerald in the same vicinity. A pursuit
party had been organized but was unsuccessful. Arthur gave instruc-
tions that Robinson was to be informed so that he might go after the
killers.°' Robinson was well aware of these events, and had recorded
them in his diary at the time, right down to the details of how Mrs
Cunningham was murdered:
They came to the cottage and threw some spears at the woman when she
was in the yard, two of which stuck in her. She run and screamed. The
black run after her, pulled her down by the hair and jabbed a spear into
her body several times. She died of her wounds.9?
However, when he came face to face with the six men and one
woman responsible for this, Robinson saw them not as murderers but
as potential recruits to swell the numbers of his Flinders Island
community. They were the first natives he had taken in nine months
and they helped boost his then flagging reputation as Aboriginal
captor, a consideration far more important to him than the question
of justice for the dead white woman. They were from the Stoney
Creek or Port Dalrymple band and among them was Umarrah,
Robinson's former guide during the west coast stage of his expedi-
tion, who had since gone bush again. Robinson knew they were
guilty of the earlier atrocities:
These are the people that murdered the people on the banks of the Tamar
and who have committed the outrages on the inland settlement. This is a
well known fact and as further proof Kubmanner, who belonged to them,
was identified by Fitzgerald [one of the murdered settlers] by having a
fractured jaw.??
They still had Mrs Cunningham's dog, which they had stolen the
day of her murder.^' During the two weeks this group remained with
him before he deposited them on Waterhouse Island, off the north
9 Robinson, diary, 22 August 1831, Friendly Mission, p 410
61 Plomley, Friendly Mission, p 455, n 155
62 Robinson, diary, 14 April 1831, Friendly Mission, p 541
Robinson, diary, 30 August 1831, Friendly Mission, p 416
64 Robinson, diary, 8 September 1830, Friendly Mission, p 422
AN DE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
voat, Robinson learnt that it was actually Umarrah who had pursued
Mrs C umninphan, dragged her down by her hair and stabbed her to
death, Yet he concealed this from the colonial authorities. On 11
October, when he wrote a report to the Colonial Secretary about his
captives, he referred to this man as ‘a very ferocious character’, giving
him his tribal name of Moulteherlargener, but not hinting that the
same person had long been well known to the colonial authorities,
not only as one of his own trusted natives but also as former guide to
the roving party of Gilbert Robertson. Robinson continued the same
deception of mentioning Umarrah only by his tribal name in his
reports until 1832.9 Brian Plomley, who discusses these developments
in footnotes to Robinson's diary, comments: ‘Presumably Robinson
did this so as to avoid interference from the Government if they
should realise that the man who murdered Mrs Cunningham was
with his party.’
Those who still see Robinson as a ‘great humanitarian’ would no
doubt argue that we have to judge his behaviour in context. For a
start, there were others in colonial authority who adopted a similar
line. After 1828, the Attorney-General, Algernon Montagu, on a
number of occasions chose not to prosecute Aborigines whom local
coroners and constables had accused of murdering whites. Instead,
once the Bass Strait settlement had been established, he recommended
Aboriginal suspects of this kind be shipped there. The Attorney-
General took decisions of this kind even in cases such as the murders
of Captain Thomas and James Parker in September 1831 when the
culprits identified by the coroner were held in custody." However,
the reason for this was not due to any non-legal conciliatory policy
but because all the evidence against them had come from native
witnesses and it was not possible in the Van Diemen’s Land courts to
use their testimony. Cases of this kind would have failed in court
under the prevailing rules of evidence.
Secondly, Robinson’s supporters might argue we need to recognize
that, rather than apprehending individual wrongdoers, his objective
was to end all Aboriginal hostilities and so he was right to look to the
longer-term outcome. If he arrested all those individuals he knew
were guilty of murder and handed them over to the constabulary, he
would have lost the trust of the natives in general and thus thwarted
the whole objective of a conciliatory rather than a military solution.
^? Plomley, Friendly Mission, p 585, n95. ‘Umarrah’ was not the man’s tribal
name. ‘Umarrah’ was a corruption of ‘Hugh Murray’, a settler in whose
household he once lived.
Plomley, Friendly Mission, p 577, n 6
€ Robinson, diary, 3 October 1831, Friend] Mission, p 431; Pl
Friendly Mission, p 476, n 280 y » P 431; Plomley,
SEVEN: BLACK ROBINSON AND ORIGINS OF ABORIGINAL INTERNMENT 221
He was compelled to take an amoral view of individual killings in
order to ensure the success of his greater goal.
The problem with this argument is that it only works one way. For
Robinson was anything but amoral when it came to the killing of
Aborigines by white settlers. As recorded above, he denounced them
" the most rhetorical prose at his command. These comments were
by no means confined to his private journals. They filled his des-
patches to the colonial authorities. Ever since his decision in 1829 to
keep quiet about the atrocities committed by the Port Davey band,
he had concealed the names of native murderers, yet over the same
period he had publicized the names of those whites he believed had
done the same. His diaries contained many stories about their wanton
cruelty and blasé murders of both male and female Aborigines. The
extent and credibility of these reports are examined in the following
chapter, but here it is worth recording that he had a remarkable dou-
ble standard about the killing of human beings: the murder of blacks
by whites was to be publicized and condemned but the murder of
whites by blacks was to be concealed for his own purposes. Rather
than humanitarianism, a universal sentiment, this was a clear case of
racially biased, selective morality.
The reason is not hard to fathom. Robinson’s objective all along
had been to round up Aborigines so that he could be employed in the
position of their guardian or protector. But ever since his days on
Bruny Island when he conceived this ambition, he had personal
knowledge of Aborigines who were guilty of the murder of his fellow
settlers. So he persuaded himself that, collectively, the Aborigines
were the victims of a far greater injustice. Otherwise, he would have
been morally obliged to turn a number of them in. By magnifying the
degree of violence done to the Aborigines by the colonists, he salved
his own conscience at the time and created a reputation for himself as
a great humanitarian for all those who have subsequently followed his
example.
FEAR, FORCE AND CAPTURE AT GUNPOINT
Between 1831 and 1834, Robinson continued to undertake expedi-
tions into the bush to capture bands of Aborigines. Umarrah accom-
panied him on these missions until he died from dysentery at
Launceston in March 1832.5 On 31 December 1831 Robinson had
his biggest success when he met the remnants of the Big River and
6 Robinson, diary, 24 March 1832, Friendly Mission, p 594. Lloyd Robson
wrongly records Umarrah's death and funeral taking place at The Lagoons
on Flinders Island: A History of Tasmania, Volume One, Oxford University
Press, Melbourne, 1983, p 245
>>>
222 THE FAnnk ATION OF ABORIGINAL History
Oyster Bay tribes west of Lake Echo in the central highlands. Th
two tribes had banded together but now amounted to only twene
SN. persons, Robinson promised them the Lieutenant-Govery i»
would feed and house them and protect them from soldiers
wanted to shoot them. They followed him back to Hobart. In 4
theatrical display to impress the town, on 7 January 1832 he walked
the tribe and its one hundred dogs down Elizabeth Street and aroun:
to Gove
wh
rnment House where they were welcomed to the strains of 3
brass band." They camped at Robinson’s house near the corner of
Elizabeth and Warwick Streets where, James Calder recalled.
‘thousands of us saw them all a few days afterwards'." Ten days later
they were led aboard the Tamar and shipped off to Bass Strait.
Arthur's Aborigines Committee awarded Robinson a bonus of one
hundred pounds for bringing in this group, plus an advance of three
hundred pounds on his next expedition to bring in all the west coast
natives, a mission that would net him one thousand pounds when
completed. On conclusion of this exercise, he was to be appointed
superintendent of the Aboriginal establishment at Flinders Island.” I;
took him three expeditions from April 1832 to December 1834 in the
north-west and around Macquarie Harbour before he declared the
project finished. In this period he rounded up a variety of wild and
tame blacks and shipped them off to Flinders Island. By this time he
had abandoned any pretence at conciliation and, when it was
required, his men surrounded Aboriginal bands and captured them at
gunpoint.
Henry Reynolds, however, wants to deny this. ‘The Friendly
Mission itself was not accompanied by force,’ he states in Fate of a Free
People. The sole evidence he provides for this assertion is a lecture
Robinson himself gave in Sydney in 1838 where he said: ‘he made
no use of compulsion, it was done with their own free consent’.”2 It is
true that this is what the colonial authorities believed was Robinson’s
method. In 1831, Arthur explained it to London as follows:
Mr Robinson will undertake another mission to the hostile tribes upon
the plan he has so successfully adopted, viz. approaching them unarmed in
company with a few friendly natives, explaining to them in their own
language the amicable intentions of the Government, and offering food
and clothing, and protection from injury, on condition of their being
” Hobart Town Courier, 14 January 1832, p 2
” Calder, Native Tribes of Tasmania, p 62. Hobart Town Courie
1832, p 2, has a full description of the procession into Ho
is reproduced by Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp 573-4.
” Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp 588-9
? Henry Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, Penguin, Ringwood, 1995. p 133
r, 14 January
bart, part of which
SEVEN: BLACK ROBINSON AND ORIGINS OF ABORIGINAL INTERNMENT 223
peaceful and inoffensive, or of their going to the Aboriginal Establish-
ment,”
Reynolds, however, should have been better informed than this.
Robinson's own diaries tell quite a different story. In May 1833, at
Low Rocky Point south of Macquarie Harbour, Robinson found a
group of wild Aborigines who, he said *were unwilling to go with me
to the settlement":
I told the natives we must proceed. The strangers looked dejected and
was preparing to run away. One man was sharpening his spear. I now
ordered the two white men and my sons to uncover their fusees [mus-
kets], and to file off on each side. The friendly natives did the same with
their spears, so that the strangers was in our centre. The wild aborigines
now gave up all further thought of going away.”
In June 1833, Robinson was bringing in a group of captives when
one man walked some distance ahead of the main party. Robinson
wrote:
Some of my people said he would go away. I was not apprehensive of his
doing so, but deemed it prudent to send after him as an example to the
rest to let them know they were not at liberty to do as they chose. Man-
nalargena and a white man and another I sent, and when he saw them
coming he stopped. When we came to him he refused to get up or
accompany us. I told the white man to uncover his fusee, for I could not
be trifled. My son Charles then persuaded him and they got him along.”
He engaged in a similar display of force in July 1833 when one
man from a group of captives absconded. Robinson described his
own response:
I now determined to adopt every precaution to prevent the rest from
following this man’s example. I ordered the white men to uncover their
fusees, and my son who had a pistol without a cock also exhibited it, and
I ordered my natives to keep close to the natives. The white men each
had to look after the black men.”
Robinson deposited the captives he took from the Pieman River
and Point Hibbs areas on the west coast at the penal station at Mac-
quarie Harbour where they were to be held before being shipped to
Bass Strait. While they waited in the convict prison, within a space of
only eleven days, nine of the eleven Pieman River natives and five of
73 Arthur to Murray, 4 April 1831, British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies,
Australia, 4, p 251
74 Robinson, diary, 21 May 1833, Friendly Mission, pp 725-6. A fusee was a
light musket or firelock.
75 Robinson, diary, 18 June 1833, Friendly Mission, p 743
7% Robinson, diary, 13 July 1833, Friendly Mission, p 754
AMN THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
the sixteen from Point Hibbs died from infectious disease,” Wher,
the brig Tamar arrived for its next native cargo, its captain brought
the news that thirteen of those on Flinders Island, some of them
recently taken from the west coast, had also died from disease,”
Overall, these three expeditions captured about thirty Aborigines j;,
1832, sixty-six in 1833 (of whom sixteen died before they left the
West coast) and twenty in 1834. In one final expedition in the second
half of 1834, Robinson’s son, George Junior, captured another cight
Aborigines on 28 December at Western Bluff in the north-west,”
This was the last group to be taken by the ‘Friendly Mission’,
Together with the thirteen he captured in November 1830, the four
(out of seven) he eventually landed on Waterhouse Island in
September 1831 and the twenty-six from Big River in January 1832,
the total number of tribal Aborigines Robinson actually removed
from Van Diemen’s Land during his career was 151. Only one native
family of six eluded him and remained in the bush until 1842 before
surrendering.
The figures provided here for captives in the 1830s are my calcula-
tions from Robinson’s diaries. Some of the captives, about sixteen
who I have accredited to Robinson, were actually taken by Anthony
Cottrell in 1833 in expeditions under Robinson’s authority but in
which he was not present. One cannot give absolutely precise figures
for those captured in this period because some died from disease and
some absconded in the time between their initial capture and their
delivery to the Bass Strait settlements. However, this does not excuse
Lyndall Ryan’s claim that Robinson actually captured a total of 300
Aborigines.® This is yet another example of how unreliable her work
is on the statistics of these events. Neither the evidence of the diaries
nor a comparison with the lists of those who arrived at Flinders Island
justifies a total anywhere near this high. In Appendix 3 of her book,
where Ryan provides a list of names of those at Flinders Island, she
could only come up with 143 Aborigines, and they included a num-
ber of former town blacks, Orphan School children and sealers
women. In his history of the Flinders Island settlement, Weep in
Silence, Brian Plomley lists 105 Aborigines that Robinson captured
and sent to Flinders Island between March 1832 and January 1836.
” Robinson, diary, 25 July-4 August, 11 A 1 , 0.
770-6, 780 y gust, ugust 1833, Friendly Mission, pp
78 Robinson diary, 27 Au ji issi
; 5 gust 1833, Friendly M.
” Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp 925-6 dinde di
® Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 183
SEVEN: BLACK ROBINSON AND ORIGINS OF ABORIGINAT INTRILNM )
ENT 225
x accords fairly closely with my tally of
ds though there are some dics nd Wer Die i so Bouse)
Anyway, Robinson's rewards for these efforts were subi antal. 4
colony accepted him at his own estimate as the man Seen oe
Aboriginal hostilities. The press campaigned to raise id SERRE
scription for him. As a result, Jorgen Jorgenson recorded a i x ee 1
«tten contributed gifts, in both land and money, worth ei hae x
and pounds." Even if, like many of Jorgenson's stories this wa E F
exaggeration, even half that amount would have been a hu ve Qu 2
the ame. As well as his salary, the government paid Robins us
seven hundred pounds owed under its contract and added a i Mon
of two hundred pounds a year for life. His sons who had Ar a-
nied him at different times were also rewarded. George Junior zm
granted one thousand acres (400 hectares) of land, and his teenage son
Charles 500 acres." Robinson spent most of the period from August
1834 to September 1835 at home in Hobart, on full pay, supervising
the construction of his new, ten-room mansion.
In February 1831, when he had promoted himself as the man with
the solution to the colony's Aboriginal problem, Robinson told the
Executive Council that he thought there were about seven hundred
wild blacks still in Van Diemen's Land. He said that on his previous
expedition around the island he had gained the confidence of most of
the hostile chiefs and could bring them in to captivity within a time-
frame of three years.** Only the last part of this assurance was true.
There was nothing like seven hundred left in the bush and, at the
time, he had actually made contact with only a handful of Aboriginal
bands.
In the event, his additional three years work brought the gross total
deposited at Flinders Island in the 1830s to about two hundred. It is
hard to be more precise since a roll call of inmates was not kept in the
early days.” While, as indicated above, some 151 of them had been
3! Plomley, Weep In Silence, Appendix I: D, pp 876-7. Plomley's list includes
some but not all of those who died at Hunter Island in 1832 and Macquarie
Harbour in 1833 before they could be shipped to Flinders Island. I have
excluded these dead from my count but I do include some other unnamed
surviving captives, even though the diaries do not make it clear whether
they ever arrived at the Bass Strait settlement.
2 cited by James Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians or The Black War of
Van Diemen's Land, Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, London, 1870, p 239
& Rae-Ellis, Black Robinson, p 103
5! Minutes of the Executive Council, 23 February 1831, British Parliamentary
, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 252
nandant’s re September 1836, cited by Rae-Ellis, Black
he!
© THE PADRI ATION OF ABORIGINAL History
captured either by Robinson or members of his Party, most of the „,
were tame blacks, previously employed on white farms
households, hangers-on around the main towns subs
handouts, including those who lived at Robinson’s }
while he was away on his first expedition, a number of sealer
women, plus the Aboriginal members of Robinson’s own ‘Friend
Mission’, Some were Aboriginal children brought up in coloni,
households or at the Boys’ Orphan School in Hobart, There we
about fifty Aborigines in these latter categories. Even if this figure x
not absolutely precise, it is still clear that the size of the Aborigin
population at the time, and thus the scale of the Aboriginal problem
for the colonists, had always been significantly smaller than the
inflated picture portrayed by Robinson.
isting or vibe
)ouse jn He
yar
Were
THE ZEST FOR LIFE ON FLINDERS ISLAND
When members of the orthodox school of historians have examined
the settlement that was finally established on Flinders Island to house
the Tasmanian Aborigines, most have come to the same conclusion.
They have described it as a terrible place where the blacks lost the
will to live. Called Wybalenna (‘black men’s houses’) and located at
Settlement Point on the west coast of the island, the community was
quickly consumed by tragedy. Between 1831 and 1847, some 132
Aborigines died there, mostly from common cold, influenza, pneu-
monia and tuberculosis. Their demise has given their historians an
Opportunity to display their literary skills. Drawing on a figure of
speech from the sixteenth century, Lyndall Ryan described Wy-
balenna as ‘the “charnel house” that had incarcerated them since
1833’.% Other authors have adopted a more familiar metaphor from
the twentieth century. Clive Turnbull called it a ‘concentration camp’
where the Aborigines ‘ceased to breed, and pined away’, dying from
‘deficiency diseases [and] broken hearts’. It was on a par, Turnbull
said, with Norfolk Island, Devil's Island and Alcatraz. 87 Robert
Hughes used the same metaphor. Flinders Island was ‘a benign con-
centration camp’ where ‘little by little, they wasted away and their
ghosts drifted out over the water’. Cassandra Pybus wrote about its
* Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 203
*” Clive Turnbull, "Tasmania: The Ultimate Solution’
55 Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: A Hj
i 1 : Story of the T; ; ;
to Australia 1787-1868, Collins Harvill, eh 1997, 2423 ^ laudo
SEVEN: BLACK ROBINSON AND ORIGINS OF ABORIGINAL INTERNMENT 227
Commandant Robinson being ‘trapped amid the despair and disint
gration of a people whose plight was the result of bis edoa The
American anthropologist. Jared Diamond, has claimed the sninated
were starved to death: 'the jail diet caused malnutrition, which com-
bined with illness to make the natives die’.”? In 1987, when Brian
Plomley published his history of the Flinders Island dommuhi he
entitled it Weep in Silence. n
During the life of the settlement, about two hundred Aborigines
were deposited there. The total population was never as high mm
however, because of the death rate. Since deaths outpaced new AT
vals and the small number of births, the population in the 1830s
usually hovered between 120 and 140 Aborigines. By the time it
closed in 1847, the numbers had declined quite drastically. Lyndall
Ryan describes the scene as the remainder were shipped back to Van
Diemen's Land to a new asylum south of Hobart:
Only forty seven made that journey to Oyster Cove — fifteen men,
twenty two women and ten children. Their average age was forty two.
Most suffered from chronic chest complaints, four had become enor-
mously fat, one was blind, another was senile, while another suffered from
acute arthritis. ... There was not one expression of sorrow or regret as
they packed themselves, their dogs, and their few possessions into the ship
on that blustery day in October. They thought they were returning to
their own country and escaping the deaths that had made their lives at
Wybalenna so miserable.”!
So it must have come as quite a shock to these authors in 1995
when they opened the pages of the new book by their leading light,
Henry Reynolds, to find he completely disagreed with them about
Wybalenna. Not only that, but here he was, in Fate of a Free People,
criticising them in stinging terms for their politics and their attitude:
The Tasmanians have not been well served by historians and other writers
who have pitied them, but who at the same time have patronized and
belittled them.”
Reynolds argued that, rather than being a depressed and dying
community, the Aborigines at Flinders Island were marked by their
‘dynamism’. Other historians, he accused, ‘overlook the adaptability
and resourcefulness of the community, the continuing zest for life,
the political passion’.*? The only other author to have given Wy-
balenna such an upbeat report card was George Augustus Robinson
89 Cassandra Pybus, Community of Thieves, Minerva, Melbourne, 1991, p 135
? Jared Diamond, ‘In Black and White’, Natural History, 10, 1988, p 10
?! Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 203
92 Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 189
? Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 189
228 Ta FABRIC ATION OF ADORIGINAI Hisrony
himself who in 1837 wrote
a long report that d
Success he had achieved in lifti
ng the Tasmanians uy
hzation, This report brought Robinson fame
the British Empire and be
escribed the gr.
? tO à state of Cry;
and recognition all oye,
came probably the single most influens,
document on Aboriginal policy ever written.
Since then, howeye,
there has also been a school of Robinson criticism, beginning with 4
heavily sarcastic review of Wybalenna’s achievements in James Bon
Wick's 1870 book, The Last of the Tasmanians. In the twentieth cen
tury, this critique largely prevailed and, among authors who have dis-
cussed the issue, Robinson’s self-assessment has long been regarded 4.
suspect. In particular, Vivienne Rae-Ellis’s 1988 biography did 4 lot
to discredit the 1837 report. Was Reynolds, then, attempting to
restore Robinson’s reputation?
In part, he was. Earlier authors had emphasized that the various
commandants of the settlement, both before and after Robinson’s
tenure in the position from 1835-9, had both cheated and neglected
the Aborigines. Clive Turnbull claimed those in charge pilfered and
sold off Aboriginal rations while imposing a mind-dulling religious
regime. ‘The monotony was occasionally telieved, he wrote, when,
in religious anger at their moral offences, the “catechist flogged the
girls.” In contrast, Reynolds argues that, on most measures of colo-
nial welfare, the Aborigines on Flinders Island were well provided for.
He also finds that, rather than being bored out of their minds, their
psychological condition was admirable.
Dismissing those who claimed the island was a place where the
authorities attempted de facto genocide, Reynolds points out that
Lieutenant-Governor Arthur’s policy was that the exiled Aborigines
were to be well fed and cared for. Quoting letters to both the Colo-
nial Office in London and to the commandants of the island, Rey-
nolds says that Arthur made it clear he was ‘willing to make almost
any prudent sacrifice that may tend to compensate for the injuries
inflicted on them’. Arthur had ‘no wish more sincerely at heart than
that every care should be afforded those unfortunate people’. If there
was any hold-up in their supplies, he told Robinson to contact him
directly since the Aborigines ‘were not to want for anything'.?5 By
1836, when it became apparent that the Aborigines were not repro-
ducing themselves and that the present generation might well be the
last, the colonial authorities ‘became gravely concerned ab
fate’. Reynolds writes: ‘No one wanted that burden on t
science or their career, particularly not in a period of
humanitarianism.! At a meeting with Robinson that yea
Out their
heir con.
ascendant
r, Arthur
?' Turnbull, "Tasmania: The Ultimate Solutio
n’, pp 230-1
^ Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 175
—— a ires
SEVEN: BLACK ROBINSON AND ORIGINS OF ABORIGINAL INTERNMENT 229
‘beed and entreated him’ to 'use every endeavour to prevent the
race from becoming extinct’.””
Reynolds said Arthur's sentiments were matched by his actions. ‘It
seems, Reynolds writes, ‘that the Aborigines were better provided
for than Tasmania's other welfare recipients.’ While the colony’s
orphans cost the government 7d per day, infirm and destitute paupers
Sd, convicts 10d, and paupers in hospital 1s, the Aborigines on Flin-
ders received a total of between 1s 3d and 1s 5d a day worth of wel-
fare.” In 1837, there were no fewer than seventy convicts employed
to provide for the island's 140 Aborigines. The convicts were
engaged in trades such as baker, shoemaker, brickmaker, bricklayer,
carpenter, pitsawyer, butcher, plasterer, gardener and ploughman.
The huts to accommodate the Aborigines were of good quality and
made of brick, with glass windows and brass door handles. In 1852,
the historian John West said the quality of their domestic appliances
and furnishings were better than that available to an English cottager
or an Irish peasant. Reynolds summarized their condition:
It seems likely that Wybalenna was by far the best equipped, most heavily
funded and lavishly staffed of all colonial institutions for Aborigines,
although given the dire poverty of some of the missions, that may not be
saying much. Robinson believed that the settlement should have the best
of everything. In a letter to the Commissariat Office in 1833 dealing with
the purchase of four bullocks, he remarked that it was *obvious that the
Bullocks selected for the Aboriginal establishment should be the very best
that can be procured' .*
The main reason for the dismal reputation of Flinders Island was its
death rate. The diseases its inhabitants contracted have often been
attributed to the Flinders Island climate, which most orthodox histo-
rans routinely describe as wet, cold and windswept. In his nine-
teenth-century history, James Bonwick suggested this was specifically
why the site was chosen. He described the scene as he imagined it
must have appeared to the first Aborigines who disembarked from the
Charlotte onto the island:
The winds were violent and cold; the rain and sleet were penetrating and
miserable. With their health suffering from chills, rheumatism and con-
sumption diminished their numbers, and thus added force to their fore-
bodings that they were taken there fo die.”
% Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 188
” Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 175
% Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 176
9 Bonwick, Last of the Tasmanians, p 247 (his emphasis)
hA Tee Fawn ATION OF ABORIGINAL History
In the twenneth century, Clive Turnbull repeated th
banum. ^" This is yet one more example of |
compunction about sacrificing truth for d
wirck, the chilly scene described here pu
15 pas
Passa.
10w these author, |
Nay
rama. According to R
ts - At
rportedly took plac
January 1832, which, both he and Turnbull should have nor 77
ji d S ave realizes
would have been a warm midsummer's day. In fact, Bonwick haa.
Wrong date, but correcting it still does not d l
Ae restore the h
wintry setting he concocted. The removal actually took place E :
November 1831."' Anyone who cares to check with the Australis.
Bureau of Meteorology will find that the temperature that day Won
probably have reached a pleasant 18.5 degrees Celsius (65 F). ies
November begins the island’s five months of drier Weather, it proba.
bly wasn’t raining at the time either. The truth is that Flinders Islang
enjoys a temperate, maritime climate, much like that of a sou
Mediterranean port. The Aboriginal settlement was much w
and drier than most of Van Diemen’s Land itself. Being on the coas
at sea level, Wybalenna escaped the very cold winters that affected the
central midlands and highlands of the main colony. In summer, the
island's average maximum temperature is 21.5 degrees Celsius (70.7
E) in winter, the average minimum is 6.5 degrees Celsius (43.7 F,
noticeably warmer than Hobart’s 4.9 degrees Celsius (40.8 F). Its
rainfall of 759 mm per year is the same as that of Launceston and only
two-thirds that of Sydney or Brisbane." Flinders Island tourism
authorities today boast they get more sunny days per year than
Queensland’s Gold Coast.'? Compared to the Tasmanian West coast,
where the Roaring Forties relentlessly unload 2500 mm of rain per
year, the natives from those parts must have found the weather on
Flinders Island like a balmy holiday resort. .
Reynolds completely rejects the case put by Bonwick, Turnbull
and their ilk. He does not accept the island was chosen to exacerbate
the natives’ illnesses and argues that, while the Flinders Island death
toll was high, it was not unusually so among indigenous people on
their initial exposure to European diseases. In fact, he shows it was
actually slightly less than the mortality rates of other Aboriginal
missions in South Australia and Queensland later in the century.
Reynolds comments:
mmn
*
them
armer
Appalling as the loss of life at Wybalenna was, it was not atypical of the
situation during the first generation of Aboriginal reserves and missions,
The big difference was that on mainland Australia there were much larger
Turnbull, Black War, p 145
"" Plomley, Weep in Silence, p 37
'? www.bom.gov.au/climate/ averages/tables/cw_099005. shtml
m www.focusonflinders.com.au
SEVEN: BLACK ROBINSON AND ORIGINS OF ABORIGINAL INTEIRNMENT
populations from which to draw new members to maintain their num
bens. 19
Phe deaths on Flinders Island, Reynolds argues, cannot be attrib
uted to medical neglect. There was a surgeon resident at the settle-
ment the entire time 1t was maintained. Although medical practice at
the time had no answer to the Aborigines’ susceptibility to disease,
there Was a clear intention by the authorities to prevent their deaths,
had that been possible. ‘The inmates had more ready access to a doc-
tor than almost anyone else in rural Tasmania,’ Reynolds notes, ‘and
certainly more than the poor of Hobart and Launceston.’ ^
The Aborigines were treated far better than the white convicts at
the settlement. Officials entertained senior Aborigines in their houses,
Reynolds writes, but never entertained convicts. The punitive regime
to which any convict insubordinatiog was subjected never extended
to the Aborigines. The movements of the convicts were strictly con-
trolled but the Aborigines came and went at will. The convicts did
almost all the work at the settlement, employed for ten hours a day,
six days a week. The Aborigines did very little and performed only
those tasks, such as hunting, which they enjoyed. The Aborigines also
received more provisions and clothing than the convicts. Figures for
1838 showed they were given twenty pounds worth of these goods
per head, compared to fifteen pounds per head for convicts.'*°
These differences were reflected in the Aborigines’ sense of self-
importance. They regarded themselves as superior to the convicts and
thought the administrators were there simply to provide for them.
When Henry Nickolls, the Commandant from 1834—5, tried to
develop a work ethic among the natives by introducing them to gar-
dening, he found ‘they evinced a determined hostility to anything
like work’. Nickolls said the blacks were convinced that: ‘King will
keep them, white men work, not they.’ He was forced to offer extra
rations in return for any labour he wanted them to perform but this
did not always work. In 1840, the Aborigines even refused to help
put out some bushfires that threatened the settlement.
Reynolds uses these and other examples to argue that the Aborigi-
nes believed that both the settlement and the island belonged to
them. This extended to the white people’s stores, which the natives
regarded as their own. They did not like to see the convicts get any-
thing from the stores because they felt they were theirs, as part of a
debt the government owed them for having taken their country."
1% Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 186
5 Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 187
1% Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, pp 180-3
*? Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, pp 160—2
232. THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
With attitudes like this, Reynolds argues the Flinders Island
. . Sz ail . Miti
ment was alive with the Aborigines! sense of their political ri
al riy]
their place in the world.
THE NON-EXISTENCE OF AN ABORIGINAL TREATY
The Aborigines defended their ancient homelands with bushcraf
guerilla tactics, but realized there was only one solution — a treaty ,,
anteeing peace in return for recompense and a limited exile. ¢
je 6
Ty
Robinson’s ‘Friendly Mission’ was successful because the Aborigines p.
this clear political objective. Not prisoners on Flinders Island but ‘ "
people’, the negotiators kept their promises though the colonial govez
ment did not.
— Henry Reynolds, Fate of a Free People’
Part of Reynolds’s aim in restoring the reputation of Wybalenna js to
restore that of Robinson as well. If the Flinders Island settlement
really had been the equivalent of a genocidal, twentieth-century con-
centration camp, then, as its head from 1835 to 1839, Robinson
would have been an antipodean precursor of the commandant of
Auschwitz. This would have obviously disqualified him from the
roles Reynolds wanted him to play elsewhere in his narratives. Rey-
nolds wants us to take Robinson seriously, both as a great humanitar-
ian and, especially, as a spokesman for Aboriginal dispossession and
land rights. So he defends his reputation and that of his institution.
The objectives of Fate of a Free People, though, are less to rehabili-
tate Robinson than to make a case for Aboriginal land rights in Tas-
mania. Reynolds argues that, to persuade the tribal Aborigines to
follow him to Bass Strait, Robinson made a verbal treaty with them.
This treaty has never been honoured, he says, but our own genera-
tion should make the effort to do so by ceding land rights to the
descendants of the original inhabitants. The problem, he acknowl-
edges, is that no version of this treaty was ever written down. Of
necessity, he says, it was made verbally since that was in accord with
Aboriginal tribal customs:
Had the Tasmanians demanded something on paper they would almost
certainly have been given it. But their own diplomacy was conducted
entirely by word of mouth; their agreements were verbal ones which
were nevertheless binding.
"5 cover blurb of the 19 : b
H eid, e 1995 Penguin Books edition of Fate of a Free People.
109 Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 199
SEVEN: BLACK RODINSON AND ORIGINS Ol ABORIGINAL INTEBNMENIT
Reynolds admits no text of any such treaty has sur
Kern. He can find nothing in Robinson's diaries, letters or reports
that acknowledges he made such a treaty, None of the discussions
with the Aborigines that Robinson recorded in his diaries at the point
of capture ever mentioned a treaty. In the thousands of pages of
Robinson's voluminous papers, there is no discussion of anything
resembling a treaty he might have made. Nonetheless, Reynolds
asserts that there must have been a treaty of some kind or else the
Aborigines would not have abandoned their guerilla war to follow
Robinson.
The sole document Reynolds produces in support of his argument
is a petition to Queen Victoria written in 1847. It complained about
the management of the former commandant on Flinders Island, Dr
Henry Jeanneret, and was written a few months before the settlement
was closed down and relocated to Oyster Cove. In its preamble, the
petition mentions ‘an agreement which we have not lost from our
minds’, which was made between the Aborigines, Robinson and
Arthur. It says the Aborigines were not taken prisoners but ‘freely
gave up our country to Colonel Arthur' as part of the agreement.
Unfortunately for Reynolds’s case, the petition did not specify what
the agreement actually said. Nonetheless, he is in no doubt this sole
phrase represents Aboriginal memory of the verbal treaty made
between Robinson, acting as Arthur’s agent, and those tribal Aborigi-
nes who agreed to give up their hostilities and follow him.
Reynolds admits there has been a long dispute over whether the
1847 petition was written by the remaining Aborigines or by some of
the whites who sympathized with their plight. While Brian Plomley
believed the instigator of the petition was the catechist Robert Clark,
and that parts of it could not have been produced by the blacks, "^
Reynolds argues that its principal author was Walter George Arthur,
the most articulate of the Flinders Island Aborigines. Even if this were
true, however, it would not support Reynolds’s case. Walter George
Arthur was not a tribal Aborigine who might have made such an
agreement. He had been brought up among whites. He grew up
among the lower classes of Launceston and spent part of his child-
hood at the Boys Orphan School at Hobart where he learnt to read
and write. As a youth, he was for a time a protégé of Lady Jane
Franklin, the wife of the governor who succeeded Arthur.!!! He was
not captured in the bush and was never party to, nor could have had
any direct knowledge of, any agreement Robinson might have used
to entice tribal Aborigines to follow him. When the first Aborigines
ved in any
!? Plomley, Weep in Silence, pp 148—9
1 Robson, History of Tasmania, Vol I, p 533
234 THE FABRICATION Or ABORIGINAL History
were being captured by Robinson and Sent to Bass St
C» Strait,
George Arthur was an eleven-year-old child living in [.
When most of the remaining tribal Aborigines were being a ;
from the wild, he was a thirteen and fourteen-year-old still i fd
School in Hobart. In short, if Walter € Pha
'COrge Arthur Wrote
aces SO much of the weig
: O
petition upon which Reynolds pl 3
argument is irrelevant.
In his more general case for a treaty, Reynolds claims the Ab,
nes regarded Robinson as the ostensible agent of tl
"The Aborigines had every reason to believe that
the government and that his promises would b
argues that Lieutenant-Governor Arthur was
towards a treaty and, in the 1830s, wrote several
nial Office in London urging such a policy. ‘On the first Occupation
of Tasmania,’ Reynolds quotes Arthur as writing, it was ʻa great
oversight that a treaty was not, at that time, made with the natives
and such compensation given to the chiefs as they would have
deemed a fair equivalent for what they surrendered.”! Even though
this policy was never formally fulfilled, Reynolds nonetheless argues
that the Crown entered into a fiduciary relationship with the Tasma-
nians and owed them care and protection. This extended to the gov-
ernment preserving ‘native title’ on their behalf. Reynolds is not sure
whether this native title was preserved in the main colony or wa;
transferred to Flinders Island, but it must have been one or the other.
He writes:
ht of}
elo,
ne governme,,
Robinson spoke fo,
€ honoured. He
himself predispose
letters to the Colo.
There is abundant evidence that both Governor Arthur and George
Robinson offered inducements to the Aborigines to accept the offer of
conciliation, and that these included protection from violence and provi-
sion of food, clothing and shelter. And there was more to the offer than
that. Either the government did promise, at the very least, regular retum
visits to ancient homelands, in which case native title wasn't extinguished.
Or the Aboriginal interest was extinguished, in which case Flinders Island
and the smaller islands of the group associated with Wybalenna were set
aside as a reserve, as a new homeland, by way of compensation.
None of this, however, is anything but political wishful thinking. It
is completely unsupported by the historical record. As argued
throughout this chapter, the evidence we have about Robinson's
methods of ‘conciliation’ fails to support such a scenario. Robinson
did not conciliate the natives. His methods were either deception
(such as tricking the natives from Robbins Island and Circular Head
to get aboard the ship for Launceston), fear (threatening his first east
"? Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 196
"3 Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 122
SEVEN: BLACK ROBINSON AND ORIGINS OF ABORIGINAL INTERI IMENT 235
coast captives that soldiers from the Black Line were coming to shoot
them; relentlessly pursuing the remnants of the Big River tribe who
knew he had the might of the colony behind him), or force (lining up
Aborigines between armed men and ordering them to follow him, as
he did on the west coast in 1833),
As for Arthur’s views about the advisability of a treaty, Reynolds’s
version of what he actually said on the matter is deceptively selective.
Reynolds says Arthur did consider a treaty in Van Diemen’s Land and
cites an 1831 document to show this. According to Reynolds, Arthur
reluctantly took Robinson’s advice that the Aborigines, on their part,
would not conform to it and he doubted that the white colonial ‘riff-
raff would either. ‘Arthur’s problem,’ Reynolds claims, *was not
whether a treaty was appropriate, but whether either side would
conform to it." However, Reynolds omits to give his readers the
full text of these comments, which provide a quite different perspec-
tive. They were contained in a despatch sent on 4 April 1831 to the
Colonial Secretary in London, Sir George Murray, in which Arthur
said:
With reference to the experience we have already had of the instability of
these savages, and attaching much importance to Mr R obinson's opinion,
that the chiefs have but little influence over their tribes, and that he does
not think they could deter them from the commission of fresh atrocities,
or that any dependence could be placed in the observance of any treaty,
even if they could be induced to enter into it, I rather incline to coincide
with the other members of the [Executive] Council, that they should be
drawn by every mild excitement to resort to the Aboriginal Establishment
at Gun Carriage Island.!'?
In other words, the concept of an Aboriginal sanctuary in Bass
Strait was supported by the government not as part of a treaty but in
lieu of one. Arthur did not consider the Aborigines as a body of
people who preserved any sovereignty and with whom an agreement
could be made. He did not believe there was any political coherence
among the Aboriginal people at all: 'the chiefs have but little influ-
ence over their tribes. Hence there was no possibility of either
making a treaty with the Aborigines or of expecting any of them to
be bound by it. This letter shows Arthur clearly rejecting the prospect
of a treaty. Moreover, the fact that Robinson himself had been party
to the discussion on this subject means he would have been under no
illusion that he had the authority to offer a verbal treaty to the Abo-
rigines. And the idea that he might have done so against his Lieuten-
14 Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 156
MS Arthur to Murray, 4 April 1831, British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies,
Australia, 4, p 251
2360 THE FABRICATION Ol ABORIGINAT Histon
ant-Governor's wishes is a fantasy for which there is pe
any kind. * €Videg.
Nor was there any idea among the colonial
shipping of the Aborigines to Flinders Island wa only a 2
move. In fact, the documents of the colonial Executive nai igs |
cifically ruled this out. The only reason contemplated for any of t
natives to return to Van Diemen's Land was to help recruit lim.
their fellows to their new, permanent home. In Feb
they decided upon the Bass Strait option, the me
Tuary 1831, y
tive Council spelt out what they expected to hap
authoritje
wher
mbers of the Bren,
pen: i l
Mr Robinson is of opinion that if the Natives were placed on an island s
Basses Strait they would not feel themselves imprisoned here, or pine
away in consequence of the restraint, nor would they wish to return to
the main land, or regret their inability to hunt and roam about in the
manner they had previously done on this island. They would be enabled
to fish, dance, sing, and throw spears, and amuse themselves in their usual
way, and he feels confident they would accompany him to the Main and
again return to the island, and endeavour to induce others to accompany
them to the establishment.!!6
In short, neither of Reynolds’s options for Aboriginal land rights,
on either the main island of Tasmania or on Flinders Island, is at all
credible. This has not, however, prevented Fate of a Free People from
being a very influential book. By March 2001, it had convinced the
Labor government of Tasmanian Premier Jim Bacon to introduce the
Aboriginal Lands Bill to hand about 51,000 hectares of land (126,000
acres), or about one per cent of the state, to groups representing
Aborigines. The Bill, however, failed to pass the state's upper house.
In September that year, the Tasmanian Aboriginal Legal Service
announced that, as a result of the Bill's rejection, it would launch
action in the Supreme Court to gain land to the equivalent of half the
state. The Aboriginal Legal Service's spokesman, Ricky Maynard, said
the claim was based on a treaty made in 1831 bet
ween Aborigines
and the colonial government. The Hobart Mercury reported:
Aborigines by George A ; an employee of G
Arthur, during the so-called Black Wars. Mid SES
OVEN BLACK ILOBINSON AND ORIGINS OF ABORIGINAL INTERNMENT 237
We have pone through George Augustus Robinson’s journals and Gov-
t Arthur's letters the evidence is clear,’ Mr Maynard said.
te sand the country! referred to was roughly half the size of Tasmania.
\bongines relocated, but the Crown did not fulfil its promise.
X
We are tired of being conned,’ Mr Maynard said,”
The only people being conned, however, are those who take these
ssertions. seriously. There is nothing in either Robinson’s diary or
Arthur's letters to support such claims. They are simply a repetition of
the fanciful interpretation of Robinson’s and Arthur’s motives made
in Bare of a Free People. This is an interpretation that Reynolds himself,
despite producing a 250-page book on the subject, could not support
with one piece of tangible evidence. As shown here, Arthur’s letter of
4 April 1831, written at the same time as the policy for the removal
of the Aborigines to Bass Strait was finalized, specifically denies both
the existence of, and the intention to make, any kind of treaty with
the Tasmanian Aborigines.
FLINDERS ISLAND AND ABORIGINAL POLICY
The report was so permeated with the mellifluous language of the
Christian philanthropist and so full of the optimistic visions of the precoc-
ity of intellect and moral capacity of Mr Robinson’s charges, that Lord
Glenelg was caught by the prevalent glamour and, believing he had dis-
covered another Las Casas, accepted the writer’s assurance that humanity,
religion, and justice demanded that the experiment which had been so
successful in his hands should be extended to the numerous tribes on the
main continent.
— Henry Gyles Turner, A History of the Colony of Victoria, 190415
The Flinders Island settlement has an important place in the history of
race relations in Australia not because of land rights but for its impact
on subsequent policy about Aboriginal welfare. Its concept of
physically separating Aboriginal people from British colonists, in
order to ‘civilize’ them, provided a model that was followed by both
colonial and state governments for the next one hundred and fifty
years. Indeed, in some remote parts of Australia, it is still practised
today. In 1895, when he wrote the Queensland report that later
became the model for Aboriginal reserves throughout Australia,
Archibald Meston began with a virtual hymn of praise to ‘one brave
?7 Anne Barbeliuk, ‘Aborigines set to claim half the state’, Mercury, Hobart,
7 September 2001
=# Henry Gyles Turner, A History of the Colony of Victoria, Vol I, Longmans
Green and Co, London, 1904, pp 223-4
238 THE FABRICATION OE ABORIGINAL I Iisron y
man’, George Augustus Robinson,
established at Flinders Island and P
1970, when the historian Charles ]
*owley looked bac
history of Aboriginal policy,
he compared Ro
with the then most infamous Aborig
“There is a direct line of tradition,’
Carriage Island to Palm Island.’!2”
Flinders Island gave birth to the official
ratism. It was designed to replace the origi
route to assimilation, which, in Van Diemen’s Land, had begun in ide
first two decades of colonisation when small groups of Aborigines
drifted into the main centres at Hobart, Launceston and Circular
Head to survive off handouts and casual employment. Instead, Abo-
rigines were to be subject to a government plan. All of them, even
those like Walter George Arthur who were more articulate and better
educated than some of the colonists themselves, became subject to
this program of government amelioration, whether they agreed or
not. The objectives of the policy were to gradually wean the Abo-
rigines from a hunter-gather lifestyle to agricultural pursuits. They
were to be taught literacy, numeracy and the Christian religion and,
although isolated from civilized society, they were nonetheless ex.
pected to become civilized themselves. This was all to be accom-
plished among an assortment of quite different Aboriginal people,
brought together from several different locations, speaking different
languages, representing tribes that were often traditional enemies.
In Van Diemen’s Land, the rationale for the separation of the two
races was to prevent violence. In Robinson s mind, the main point
was less to save whites from the Aborigines and more to preserve the
blacks from the murderous intentions of the whites, especially those
of the colonial lower orders. This became the principal validation of
his own efforts at rounding them up. In December 1835, as he
watched the natives from the former Big River tribe reaping corn at
Wybalenna, Robinson ruminated that, despite the rate at which they
were succumbing to disease, the experiment had been more than
worth it:
On the long
[e]
Crimen,
Queensland
‘from
binson’s
inal reserve in
Rowley wrote,
xp
Gun
policy of Aboriginal sepa-
nal unplanned, laissez-faire
When I reflected that but a few years since those men were the cause of
so much terror in the settled districts and were now so peaceable
employed, I see great cause for thankfulness that I have been the hon-
'" Archibald Meston, Queensland Aboriginals: Proposed System for their
Improvement and Preservation, Brisbane, Government Printer, 1895, pp 5-8
'? C, D. Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society: Aboriginal Policy and
Practice — Volume I, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1970, p
46
TEE
P-
WOW
SEVEN: BLACK ROBINSON AND ORIGINS OE ABORIGINAI INTERNMENT 239
oured instrument in removing them from the main territory. The sad
mortality Which has happened among them since their removal is a cause
tor regret but after all it is the will of providence, and better they died
here where they are kindly treated than shot at and inhumanly destroyed
by the depraved portion of the white community."
More than anything else, this notion that Aborigines, surrounded
by à sea of white violence, could only be safe in an isolated sanctuary,
has been Robinson’s principal legacy to race relations in this country.
At the time, he persuaded his Lieutenant-Governor to have much the
same opinion. Although Arthur, unlike Robinson, still saw the Abo-
rigines as responsible for the consequences of their own actions, he
reasoned that, even if they did ‘pine away’ in Bass Strait:
it is better that they should meet with their death in that way, whilst
every act of kindness is manifested towards them, than that they should
fall a sacrifice to the inevitable consequences of their continued acts of
outrage upon the white inhabitants.!?
How then, should history assess this experiment? Does the relent-
less procession of deaths vindicate the traditional view that Flinders
was an isle of despair, or is Reynolds right to claim that, for most of
its existence, it was a vital community, where the Aborigines were
well supplied with provisions and eager to pursue their political
rights?
Vivienne Rae-Ellis’s biography of Robinson takes the opposite
view to Reynolds. She argues that the living conditions at Wybalenna
were appalling and that the attempts to civilize the natives were a
failure. She says that very little of what Robinson wrote about the
settlement can be trusted:
From the moment Robinson took up his appointment on Flinders Island
his official reports, correspondence and private journal entries became
deliberately misleading if not downright dishonest. Within weeks he
demonstrated clearly the sly manipulation of the system that enabled him
not only to survive but to conquer a situation that would have defeated an
honest man. His journal entries offered ‘proof, should he be called upon
later to provide it, of exemplary activity on the island. But that activity
was a figment of his imagination.
However, Rae-Ellis also admits that the Lieutenant-Governor
himself did not rely entirely upon Robinson’s own assessments. In
March 1836, five months after Robinson has taken up his post as
head of the settlement, Arthur commissioned Major Thomas Ryan,
12 Robinson, diary, 7 December 1835, Weep in Silence, pp 314—5
12 Arthur to Murray, 4 April 1831, British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies,
Australía, 4, p 251
13 Rae-Ellis, Black Robinson, p 113
240 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
Commandant of Launceston, to visit Wybalenna during Robinson’,
absence and report to him on its condition. Ryan spent nine days on
the island, observing living conditions and attending church service;
and school classes. His report was generally favourable. He thought
the Aborigines enjoyed church services, especially hymn singing, that
they had gained some religious sensibility, and that they were atten-
tive in class and anxious to learn their letters.
Rae-Ellis dismisses Ryan's observations, claiming he had been
‘hoodwinked’ by an elaborate charade organized by Robinson and his
chief supporter on the island, the catechist Robert Clark. The Abo-
rigines had been bribed with plum pudding to attend church and
Ryan had only heard a few passages recited by rote that the Aborigi-
nes had been taught to perform before visitors. Moreover, Ryan had
met Robinson previously at Launceston, had been impressed by him,
and was predisposed to view his administration favourably.’
However, on Rae-Ellis’s own evidence, it is hard to believe Ryan
was duped about their living conditions. The natives’ wattle and daub
housing that had been erected three years earlier was in a state of dis-
integration, Ryan said, with rain pouring in through holes in the
roofs. He was also critical of Robinson’s failure to issue enough blan-
kets to the Aborigines and rectified this himself by opening the stores
and dispensing one hundred new blankets. He accused the authorities
of not supplying enough fresh food to the Aborigines, and of re-
stricting too much of their diet to salt provisions. He listened to com-
plaints by the resident surgeon, James Allen, and, as a result, later se-
cured permission to erect a small hospital and employ a nurse. He also
recommended an independent inspection of the settlement be made
twice a year to keep the commandant and his staff on their toes.”
Clearly, this was not the approach of someone easily hoodwinked.
Arthur responded to Ryan’s report, and to a compatible report
from Robinson on the same issues, by immediately approving a sub-
stantial funding boost for the settlement. He approved the recon-
struction of the buildings, plus construction of a number of new ones,
and provided seventeen additional convict artisans to do the job. He
also approved an augmented supply of fresh meat. Three hundred
additional sheep and ten cows were sent to the island. 1”
Rae-Ellis chastises Robinson for not acting immediately to con-
struct the new buildings. He was only stirred into action towards the
end of 1837, she writes, when he heard that the Lieutenant-Governor
who succeeded Arthur, Sir John Franklin, wanted to pay a visit to the
Rae-Ellis, Black Robinson, pp 115—7
13 Rae-Ellis, Black Robinson, pp 116-9
'% Rae-Ellis, Black Robinson, p 119
B^ UA (VAM ERA vil d Wk V en
SEVEN: BLACK ROBINSON AND ORIGINS OF ABORIGINAL INTERNMENT 241
settlement, Nonetheless, by January 1838, when Sir John and his
wife Lady Jane Franklin made their visit, new brick buildings had
been constructed and were occupied by the Aborigines, new houses
had been built for the officers, and new stores and new quarters pro-
vided for the convicts. The vice-regal visit was brief but highly
successful. The new Lieutenant-Governor and his wife were housed
overnight in Robinson's own quarters, they met the Aborigines and
saw a performance of native dances. The next day they were enter-
tained at a dinner for eighteen, where all the food was provided from
island sources. The vegetables, they were told, had been cultivated by
the natives themselves on the gardens adjacent to their housing. The
only thing Franklin was unhappy about was the quality of the water
supply. As a result he approved funding and ordered the construction
of a series of rainwater tanks.’
It is clear from Rae-Ellis’s own evidence that the traditional por-
trait of the Flinders Island settlement as a run-down, neglected shanty
town cannot be sustained. Henry Reynolds is right to say it was well
resourced and well provisioned and that the two Lieutenant-Gover-
nors who presided over Robinson’s tenure as commandant were pre-
pared, if anything, to over-endow it. After Franklin’s visit in 1838, the
settlement had a ratio of sixty-five whites to eighty-six blacks. Only
nine of the whites were soldiers employed to keep order among the
convicts. The other fifty-six were there to provide services, especially
food, clothing, housing and health care, to the Aborigines.'” In terms
of physical resources, the truth would seem to be that, in the early
years, the critics were right to point to its physical deficiencies but,
from 1836 onwards, the colonial government went out of its way to
create a well-funded, model community.
Robinson spent early 1837 writing his annual report on the pre-
ceding year’s activities at the settlement. Answering a series of ques-
tions given him by Arthur, Robinson gave his usual verbosity free
rein and produced 109 ledger-sized pages describing every detail of
the island’s administration and of the educational attainments, health
and employment of the Aborigines. He sent the report to Sir John
Franklin in Hobart where it confirmed all the impressions he and his
wife had gained on their visit. Franklin was so impressed by what he
read that he immediately forwarded it to London." Before long,
17 Rae-Ellis, Black Robinson, p 138
1% R ae-Ellis, Black Robinson, pp 141-2
'? Rae-Ellis, Black Robinson, p 135
' The report, entitled ‘Periodical Report’ and dated 24 June 1837 is held
by the Mitchell Library, Sydney, in the manuscripts collection at A7044, pp
218-327. A summary is in Plomley, Weep in Silence, pp 698—700. Franklin’s
despatch of 3 August 1837 is in Weep in Silence, pp 700-1
2 pn
THe FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
Robinson became famous throughout the British Empire. ‘Robin-
son's report was an overwhelming success,’ Rac-Ellis remarks. ‘Ever
. ‘Every
official who read it was filled with admiration for the man who had
in so little time, succeeded in civilising and Christianising a people
recently brought in from the wilds.’'*! In Britain, the Aborigines Pro-
tection Society, an Evangelical association formed in the wake of the
successful campaign to abolish slavery in the Empire, took up Rob-
inson's argument that, by isolating native peoples in protectorates,
they could be preserved from white violence and civilized at the same
time. The British Colonial Secretary, Lord Glenelg, was persuaded by
his claims as well. In an era of Evangelical humanitarianism, the idea
that there was a way to successfully accommodate the indigenous
peoples of the newly expanding British Empire was eagerly seized
upon. Glenelg replied to Sir John Franklin:
I have perused this document with much interest. The statement which it
contains appears to me not only to reflect just credit on Mr Robinson but
to be calculated to be highly useful in suggesting plans for the civilization
and improvement of the natives in those parts adjacent to British settle-
ments.!?
Neither Glenelg nor the Evangelical reformers questioned the
veracity of Robinson’s account. After all, the viceroy of Van Die-
men's Land and his wife had seen the program in action for them-
selves. In August 1837, acting on advice from both Arthur and
Franklin, Glenelg sent instructions to his Treasury to establish a post
of Chief Protector of Aborigines, to locate the first protectorate at
Port Phillip (Melbourne) in southern New South Wales, and to offer
the job to Robinson at a salary of five hundred pounds a year"
Yet Robinson’s claims to have civilized and Christianized the Tas-
manian Aborigines were largely fraudulent. This is Vivienne Rae-
Ellis's conclusion and, on the evidence of Robinson’s private diaries,
which reveal there were enormous discrepancies between what he
reported officially and what he thought himself, one can only agree.
Rae-Ellis might have wrongly condemned the physical conditions on
Flinders Island but, on the Aborigines’ lack of progress towards
civilization, her case is compelling.
One of the centrepieces of Robinson’s 1837 report was his claim to
have introduced a market system to the Aborigines. They were given
13! Rae-Ellis, Black Robinson, p 123
- Glenelg to Franklin, 8 January 1838, Historical Records of Victoria, Volume
2a, The Aborigines of Port Phillip 1835-1839, (ed. Michael Cannon) Victorian
Government Printing Office, Melbourne, 1982, p 36
1? Stephen to Spearman, 30 August 1837, Historical Records of Victoria, Vol
2a, pp 28-9 `
sio i sias uenia DATE T
ANE ERE
piii rend tdt dd cse aea n iaen eibi baby read eq tr
buy Mai GU
"N As è
Ty Yas
ve 9 N b
ft OW e.
NY
bw
=N
Qe
e uS EY
A EE w
ws "A
Vo
"NS
>"
eg
"N
e
v
-
SEVEN: BLACK ROBINSON AND ORIGINS OF ABORIGINAL INTERNMENT 243
ther food. but they had to buy everything else with moncy they
earned either from work at the settlement or from hunting. Accord-
mg to the report, the men were employed at tasks such as shepherd-
ing, road making, tailoring and even police and office work; the
women gathered thatch, processed food such as mutton birds, knitted
garments and sewed dresses. All of these activities earned wages,
which Robinson duly recorded as well." He produced a ledger that
recorded every transaction made by the Aborigines on market day,
including their purchases of items as small as soap, clay pipes, tobacco
and items of clothing. The officers on the island, however, knew the
ledger was an elaborate deception. The storekeeper, Loftus Dickin-
son, refused to sign the market accounts for fear of incriminating
himself and threatened to resign if Robinson forced him to.” The
surgeon, James Allen, was auditor for the first year but became so
upset by the deceit that by April 1838 he too refused to sign the
books. By this time, he and the other officers, including the store-
keeper, were refusing on principle to even attend the market," leav-
ing Robinson and his sole supporter, the catechist Robert Clark, to
prepare the accounts between them.
The education of the Aborigines was another area in which Rob-
inson established a detailed system of documentation to record their
progress. Both afternoon and night classes were conducted and, ini-
tially, other officers were required to assist in examining the abilities
of the mainly adult students. Robinson’s reports recorded details such
as the following examination results from March 1837:
Cleopatra: Perfect in the alphabet; repeats the Lord’s Prayer.
Queen Adelaide: Imperfect in her letters
Daphne: Repeated the Lord’s Prayer; perfect in her letters; attempts to
read in lessons she has been taught ...
Lucy: A peaceable, industrious woman, a good wife; not so apt as some
others; attends school regularly ...
Bessy: Repeats the Lord’s Prayer; perfect in her letters, perfect in numerals
to ten; attempted to read ... ?
By June 1837, however, Dickinson was refusing to participate in
these examinations too and so the task reverted again to Clark and
some of the Aborigines themselves."? By September that year the
'* Robinson, Periodical report, 24 June 1837, Weep in Silence, pp 698-9
'® Robinson, diary, 27 July 1837, Weep in Silence, p 466
'* Robinson, diary, 17 April 1838, Weep in Silence, p 552
1” examples are from Plomley, Weep in Silence, p 685
'* Robinson, diary, 19 June 1837, Weep in Silence, p 452
244 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
new surgeon, Dr Matthew Walsh, also refused to endore the
examination results: ‘upon his honour he would not for that would
be an interminable thing’. Walsh immediately became a trenchant
critic of the education standards of the Aborigines. ‘The doctor’
Robinson recorded, ‘on several occasions found fault with the subject
and manner of instruction.’ Walsh said a child of five would know a
much as the women who had attended classes at Wybalenna for the
previous five years.”
While his official reports said one thing, with forty-four pages of
encouraging examination results presented in his celebrated 1837 re-
port, Robinson admitted privately that his efforts to educate the
Aborigines were a failure. He could not compel attendance at classes.
His diary records some of the natives absenting themselves for weeks
at a time, either while hunting or simply socialising with other Abo-
rigines at their favourite spots around the island. By August 1837,
Robinson had given up any attempt to make them literate: ‘reading
being considered by me superfluous'.'^ In 1838, the newly appointed
clergyman, Thomas Dove, was surprised to find the Aborigines did
not speak English and instead communicated in a patois of native
dialect and sealers’ jargon. While there is independent evidence
from Dove that some of the natives could read words of one syllable
and could recognize the letters of the alphabet, the only really liter-
ate Aborigines at the settlement were the two who had come from
the Boys Orphan School in Hobart, and perhaps two others who had
also grown up among whites.'?
ILOBINSON'S FABRICATIONS EXPOSED
In February 1839, Robinson left Flinders Island to take up his new
position as Chief Protector at Port Phillip. He left his son, George
Junior, as acting commandant until the government appointed a re-
placement. Robinson departed in the middle of a new influenza epi-
demic that rapidly claimed another eight Aboriginal lives.
The personal relationships among the English officers on this iso-
lated outpost had long been wracked by personal enmity and private
feuds and, with Robinson gone, the catechist Robert Clark wrote to
the Lieutenant-Governor to blame his enemy, the surgeon Matthew
Walsh, for the influenza deaths. Four weeks after Robinson’s depar-
1» Robinson, diary,
14N "ED
!? Robinson, diary, ih e um
1 August 1837, Weep in Silence, p 467
' Dove to Robinson 10J
i son, 10 July 1838, Weep in Si
' Two statements by Thomas Dove V MAE UNA
Plomley, Weep in Silence, p 724 iii Diii i
? Plomley, Weep in Silence, p 990
imr
manna a D Va i à a attin
nll Aa eniin UD Un eMe ni RAM Mn
[neis an pte d bi. bam Mer
Nei Nash hs AP INE en
Nevin: BLACK RONINSON AND ORIGINS OF ABORIGINAL INTERICNMENT IAS
eure, Nr John Franklin appointed a board of inquiry ostensibly to in
veste the influenza outbreak. but also to report on the general
oemlition. of the Aborigines and the administration of the settlement.
The three-man board, comprising the colonial surgeon Dr Robert
Over, the assistant surgeon William Seccombe, and the Launceston
wt otticer Matthew Friend, travelled to Flinders Island and on 25
Manh 1839 conducted their inquiry.
The board confirmed what Robinson had so far confessed only in
his diaries. There was no evidence the Aborigines had made any pro-
gres towards civilization or been educated in any way. On this issue,
the inquiry was scathing: “The schools do not appear to have been
productive of any lasting benefit, When Clark presented twenty
Aborigines who he claimed had made ‘scholastic improvement’, the
board was not impressed. It reported their 'acquirements was con-
&ned to an imperfect knowledge of the English alphabet and a few
monosyllabic words’ and one of them had learnt these at the Orphan
school.'** Most Aborigines could not speak English. At a divine ser-
vice attended by the board members, Clark addressed them in a ‘bro-
ken dialect’ and one Aboriginal man, ‘with great apparent animation’,
stood on a pew and addressed the board in his ‘native tongue’.'”
The Aborigines had made no progress in religious knowledge.
Even George Junior admitted ‘he did not believe that any of the
Aborigines, male or female, have any correct knowledge of religion
or that their conduct is in any degree influenced by religious
motives’. The surgeon Walsh agreed.
The board also declared it ‘was disappointed to find that as little
progress had been made in physical training as in their religious and
scholastic attainments.''^ Sir John Franklin still remembered the din-
ner he had been served during his visit to the settlement in January
1838 and made a particular request to the board to investigate the
native gardens, whose vegetables, he had been told, were cultivated
solely by the Aborigines. The inquiry discovered the story was a
sham:
The Board found that it was not known by the name of the Native but
was designated the Government Garden, that it has always been worked by
a Convict Gardener assisted by other Convicts, and that with the excep-
tion of a little occasional Weeding, the Aborigines have never performed
'^ Report of a Board of Enquiry, Flinders Island, 25 March 1839, in G. A.
Robinson, Correspondence and Other Papers, Jan—April 1839, ML A7071,
A 7072, CY Reel 553, p 10
Report of a Board of Enquiry, Flinders Island, 25 March 1839, p 11
Report of a Board of Enquiry, Flinders Island, 25 March 1839, p 12
“7 Report of a Board of Enquiry, Flinders Island, 25 March 1839, p 12
246 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
any labour in it whatever. The Convict labourer was removed some T
E n N Hi
ago and the Garden is now neglected and unproductive.“
Robinson's claims that the Aborigines had earned wages by making
roads and cutting grass for thatching were also dismissed by the board.
"Even this sort of occasional jobbing seemed to have ceased for a long
time back, and the amount of the labour referred to is less than tri-
fling when spread over a period of years." The inquiry also uncov-
ered a fraud in the management of the store. Rations were issued to
every Aborigine on the island each day. However, more than half of
the Aborigines were absent hunting for weeks together at a time
when they did not receive their allocation. The board said that, on
average, one quarter of the natives were continually absent from the
settlement. The provisions that were nominally issued to them were
not to be found and there was no record of where they had gone.
Their investigation was hindered by the fact that Robinson Senior
had taken all of the settlement's records with him when he left for
Port Phillip. Nonetheless, the board recommended that the catechist
Robert Clark, who doubled as storekeeper, should be dismissed for
incompetency. Since no public works, including the rainwater tanks
that the Lieutenant-Governor had funded the year before, had been
constructed, it recommended that Robinson Juniors position as
superintendent of works be abolished immediately.’ For the time
being, though, the latter was to remain as acting commandant until
his replacement arrived in April.
When the board members first arrived at the island, its officers told
them the natives were unhappy and that they wanted to get away
from a place where there was ‘too much sickness’. The inquiry began,
however, by rejecting this claim because it found the Aborigines
‘appeared without exception happy and contented and their general
demeanour belied these expressions of discontent’.'*' Nonetheless, by
the end of the report, the board came to admit that the future was
bleak and that Flinders Island was not a long-term solution of any
kind. ‘The preservation of these people as a race,’ it stated, ‘appears to
be altogether hopeless.’!
Despite its damning contents, the inquiry's findings were never
released. Sir John Franklin sent a copy to Robinson in Port Phillip
asking for a response. Robinson denied all wrongdoing and blamed
MB Dn. .
ne Report of a Board of Enquiry, Flinders Island, 25 March 1839, p 13
Report of a Board of Enquiry,
Flinders Island, 25 March 1839, pp 13-14
150 p, á ,
és Report of a Board of Enquiry, Flinders Island, 25 March 1839 pp 20-2
5-7, 31
51m.
" pcd a se of Enquiry, Flinders Island, 25 March 1839, p 8
port of a Board of Enquiry, Flinders Island, 25 March 1839, p 25
ua HAMM HH
74 dnd d hu Aptent PPP
SEVEN: BLACK ROBINSON AND ORIGINS OF ABORIGINAL INTERNMENT 247
Clark, Dove and Walsh for any failings. He told Franklin that he had
enough. documentary evidence to vindicate himself, including testi-
monials from former officers, while the board of inquiry had drawn
is conclusions. from mere hearsay.? Faced with this determined
stance, and embarrassed about his own earlier endorsement of all that
Robinson had done, Franklin decided not to prosecute the matter
further. He also decided not to inform London. He filed away the
board of inquiry's report and did nothing to unseat Robinson from
his position as Protector of Aborigines at Port Phillip. The fact that
Robinson's record on Flinders Island, on which so much later policy
came to be based, was a falsified piece of fiction, was never made
public.
In effect, the board of inquiry's report overturned all the claims
that had been received so well by the Colonial Office in England. It
showed that the experiment of providing a sanctuary for the natives
was a failure in its own terms. It had done nothing to modernize,
Europeanize or civilize the Aborigines. The only ones who showed
any adaptation to British ways were those who had been introduced
to colonial culture as children.
Separating the natives from the settlers did not even preserve them
from the ravages of the respiratory diseases to which few ever built up
3 resistance. The mere visit of a supply ship to their island sanctuary,
as occurred in February 1839, could unleash a new bout of influenza
that carried off a substantial proportion of the population in just a few
days. Flinders Island was not a concentration camp, it is true, but its
death rate was comparable to one.
Ironically, in terms of the survival of the indigenous blood line, it
was the laissez-faire approach, not the government program, that ac-
tually succeeded. Most of those Tasmanians who today identify
themselves as Aborigines claim some descent from women who had
children by the sealers of Bass Strait. The relationships between these
indigenous women and their seafaring men were denounced at the
time, and have been reprimanded by historians ever since, as de-
praved and violent affairs that were an affront to correct thinking
everywhere.’ Yet these women and their offspring were the survi-
vors. For some reason, they escaped the onslaught of European dis-
eases and produced enough children to perpetuate a line of descen-
dants. For the remainder of the nineteenth-century, and well into the
twentieth-century, they constituted a closely-knit community on the
153 Rae-Ellis, Black Robinson, pp 173-5
154 Anne McMahon, “Tasmanian Aboriginal Women as Slaves’, Tasmanian
Historical Research Association Papers and Proceedings, 23, 2, June 1976, pp 44-9
240 IHE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL History
Furneaux Islands, identifying themselves as a unic
known as 'straitsmen' or ‘islanders’ .!55
In contrast, the other Aborigines who remaii
government on Flinders Island until 1847, de
with all the largesse and good intentions of th
produced no surviving offspring at all.
lue group of People
ned supported by the
spite being
bestowed
€ colonial 4
uthorities
M Whether this community preserved Aboriginal culture and Aboriginal
2m however, is another matter, which is discussed in the Epilogue, pp
pn—n———————— r e n
CHAPTER EIGHT
Cape Grim and the credibility of The
Conciliator, 1828—1834
Indeed all reliable evidence of which there is plenty extant, shows that
what they suffered from the whites has been most grieviously exaggerated,
and by no one so much, but in general statements only, as by Mr Robin-
son himself: for he gives not the smallest proof of it, except in the instance
of the sealers, and hardly once names the bushrangers. But he adduces
abundant examples of murders by the blacks — the ‘poor helpless, for-
lom, oppressed blacks,’ as he calls the one race, and the ‘merciless white’
the other — expressions he so often uses, without the least proof of their
applicability to either race, that one sickens of their repetition.
— James Calder, The Native Tribes of Tasmania (1875)!
I? Tasmania today, what really happened at Cape Grim in 1828 is
still a topic of deeply felt contention. On the one side are those
academic historians and Aboriginal activists who believe that four
convict stockmen employed by the Van Diemen's Land Company
shot dead thirty Aborigines at the site and threw their bodies from the
cliff sardonically named Mount Victory. They are also highly critical
of the company and its chief agent, Edward Curr, who they believe
knew about but covered up the crime of his assigned servants. One
JE. Calder, Some Account of the Wars, Extirpation, Habits, &c, of the Native
Inbes of Tasmania, Henn and Co, Hobart, 1875, p 25
yg
250 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
thesis written in the Department of History at the Unive
: par rsity of Tas
mania accused Curr of being ‘representative o
| SEE ot f the most. extreme
settler opinion’, The incident occurred because of Curr’s ‘open advo-
cacy of extermination’? Although the thesis remains unpublished,
Lloyd Robson drew heavily on it for his account of relations be
Aborigines and settlers in the. 1820s in Volume One of his award-
winning History of ‘Tasmania.’ With this kind of academic support, the
descendants of the ‘Tasmanian Aborigines in recent years have laid
claim to land at Cape Grim as a site of “Aboriginal genocide.
On the other side are the current managers of the company itself,
Which is still in existence after 175 years, plus a group of local histori-
ans who are highly sceptical of the story, Cassandra Pybus records that
when she approached the company managers to research her 1991
book, Community of Thieves, they denied there was any massacre at all.
The company said the incident not only did not happen in the way
the orthodox historians claim, but could not have happened that
way.” Some local authors who have published their own versions of
the story also take the company's side.^ Pybus says that most locals are
still defensive about claims there was a massacre. "That kind of talk
does not go down well in the heritage-conscious north-west, where
Edward Curr is the hero of a dedicated band of local historians. They
are proud of his pioneer tenacity and they will take his word any
day."
To try to unravel these competing claims, let us look at all the evi-
dence that has so far come to light about the incident.
Cape Grim did not enter Australian historical consciousness until
1966. Until then, none of the nineteenth- or twentieth-century
books on either Tasmanian history generally, or relations between
tween
? Bronwyn Desailly, The Mechanics of Genocide: Colonial Policies and
Attitudes towards the Tasmanian Aborigines 1824—1836, Master of Arts
thesis, University of Tasmania, 1977, pp 187—8
? Lloyd Robson, History of Tasmania, Volume One, Oxford University Press,
Melbourne, 1983, pp 210-20
* Tasmanian Aboriginal Land Council, Land Rights in ‘Tasmania, Tasmanian
Aboriginal Centre, Hobart, 1986, cited by Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal
Tasmanians, 2nd edn., Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1996, pp 275, 284, 295-6
* Cassandra Pybus, Community of Thieves, Minerva, Melbourne, 1991, pp 89-
90
" Kerry Pink and Annette Ebdon, Beyond the Ramparts; A Bicentennial History
of Circular Head, Tasmania, Mercury-Walch, Hobart, 1988; Kerry Pink, ‘The
Woolnorth "Massacre", Circular Head History Journal, 2, 4, November 1986;
Pauline Buckby, Around Circular Head, Denbar Publishers, Stanley, 1984; K.
R. von Stieglitz, A Short History of Circular Head and its Pioneers, Circular
Head Historical Society, Smithton, 1952
"Pybus, Community of Thieves, p 90
Cee Grim, 2001. Above: Suicide Bay is at right, below what G. A. Robinson called the ‘rapid declivity’ (a
icone cliff above a steep basalt slope). Mount Victory is in the centre. The rocks where Robinson allegedly
Sand human bones two-and-a-half years later are those at the base of this 200 feet (65 metres) high cliff facing
=z ro sea. At left is the first of the Doughboys islands. In the far distance at right is Trefoil Island. Robinson
2xmed Aborigines were captured on the rocks at the waterline, escorted to the top of Mount Victory where they
vex shot and their bodies thrown off the cliff. Below: Mount Victory at left and the first of the Doughboys at
schi. Robinson described the land on top of Mount Victory as ‘grassy hills’, which it remains today. (Photos
Keith Windschuttle)
Top: Mount Victory and the Doughboys. Middle: Looking down onto Suicide Bay from the top of the `r
dedivity’. Bottom: Suicide Bay at sea level. The only access by land to Suicide Bay is down the sl
Jar right of the bottom picture, about 200 yards from Mount Victory. Henry Reynolds claims four stockmen :
the top of the “rapid declivity’ fired down on the Aborigines on the rocks below. With single shot muskets, the
purportedly killed thirty of them. (Photos Jeff Jennings)
Ope at tx
EtGb Ub: CAPE GRIM AND THE CREDIBILITY OF THE CONCILIATOR 251
colonists and Aborigines in particular, had mentioned it. It is not dis-
cussed by any of the following authors: Henry Melville in A History of
Van Diemen's Land (1835), John West in The History of Tasmania
(1852), James Bonwick in The Last of the Tasmanians (1870), James
Calder in The Native Tribes of Tasmania (1875), James Fenton in A
History of Tasmania (1884), H. Ling Roth in The Aborigines of Tasma-
nia (1899), James Backhouse Walker in Early Tasmania (1914), or
Clive Turnbull in Black War (1948). Even Jorgen Jorgenson, the con-
vict explorer and adventurer who visited the site both before and after
the event occurred, failed to discuss it in the memoirs he wrote a dec-
ade later about the conflict between settlers and Aborigines.” This
omission was not due to any coyness on Jorgenson’s part about vio-
lence towards Aborigines, because his memoirs are peppered with any
incidents of this kind he could recall. He had obviously never heard
of it. The incident, then, is a relatively recent discovery.
It took place on the north-western corner of the island on the
property named Woolnorth, on which Cape Grim is located.’ This
property was owned by the Van Diemen’s Land Company, which
had been formed in London in 1825 under a Royal Charter and
given the right to select 250,000 acres of previously unsettled land in
the north of Tasmania to produce fine wool for British woollen mills.
In 1958 the Tasmanian historian A. L. Meston, who had been re-
searching the company since the 1930s, published a monograph on its
activities from its founding up to 1842. He included a section on the
company’s relations with the Aborigines where he wrote that its early
development was marked by a series of incidents between the com-
pany’s convict servants and the local Aborigines. Meston was the first
historian to note the event at Cape Grim when he discussed a des-
patch by Edward Curr to his directors in London, written on 28
February 1828. Curr recorded a number of assaults by the local
natives on company stockmen at Woolnorth. In the first attack at the
beginning of August 1827, one of his convict servants, Thomas John,
had been wounded in the thigh. There were two versions of how
many Aborigines were killed in this initial incident. One convict,
Charles Chamberlain, later said ‘several’ died; a group of native
women said it was only one, a tribal chief.'?
* N. J. B. Plomley (ed.) Jorgen Jorgenson and the Aborigines of Van Diemen’s
Land, Blubber Head Press, Hobart, 1991
* The cape was named for the appearance of its black basalt cliffs by George
Bass and Matthew Flinders during their 1798-9 circumnavigation of
Tasmania.
” Robinson, diary, 14 June 1830, 21 June 1830, in N. J. B. Plomley (ed.),
Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus
AES Nes qa fi
252 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HisrOn y
à pae I. —
HUNT ER’ ISL A-N DS
Ore. n irt 17
mane ^v. proint. a |
NFER T Wolkwe 1
Maw, y back J. A wguito Sound
North-west Tasmania, including some of the land grants made to the Van Diemen’s
Land Company. Detail from map by, J. Arrowsmith, London, 1832 (Mitchell
Library, State Library of New South Wales)
In another assault by the natives on 31 December 1827, they drove
118 ewes into the sea and killed them. This was followed by a third
Aboriginal attack, which Meston described as a ‘battle’. At the time of
this third conflict there were four convict stockmen living in a hut at
Cape Grim where they were agisting sheep. Curr had not himself
been at Woolnorth during any of these events. He said in his des-
patch of 28 February 1828 that members of the company supply ship
Fanny had informed him of the third assault:
The shepherds fell in with a strong party of natives who after a long fight
left six of their number dead on the field including their chief besides sev-
eral severely wounded. I have no doubt that this will have the effect of
intimidating them, and oblige them to keep aloof. "'
Robinson 1829-1834, Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Hobart, 1966,
pp 175, 181
! Curr to directors, Despatch no 11, 28 February 1828, AOT VDL
Company papers 5/1, p 4
Eau: CAPE GRIM AND THE CREDIBILITY OF THE CONCILIATOR 253
Meston went on to discuss other reports by Curr the following
year in which company men were attacked, speared and left for dead
but who escaped with their lives. He thus recorded the killing of six
Aborigines at Cape Grim as but one incident in a series of violent
clashes between blacks and whites that left casualties on both sides."
In 1966, Brian Plomley published the first edition of his transcripts
of the diaries written by George Augustus Robinson during his
‘Friendly Mission’ to the Tasmanian Aborigines between 1829 and
1834. This huge 1000-page tome, for which the editor and his assis-
tants painstakingly transcribed Robinson’s barely decipherable hand-
writing, was a monumental effort that changed perspectives on the
‘Black War’ in Tasmania. For the first time, thanks to Robinson’s
diary entries, historians could gain some idea of the Aborigines’ side
of the story. They also got a radically different account of the third
clash at Woolnorth in February 1828. Rather than six Aborigines
killed, Robinson put the total at thirty. Moreover, they were not
killed in the act of assaulting the Van Diemen’s Land Company em-
ployees. Instead, they were themselves the victims of a surprise attack
by white stockmen. Some of those killed were women. It was not a
battle but a bloodbath. The incident soon became known as the Cape
Grim Massacre, one of the worst in Australian history.
Since then, Robinson’s account of this incident has been repro-
duced several times in books by the orthodox school of Tasmanian
history. It is not easy, however, to discover from these secondary
sources precisely what happened. Most agree with Meston that there
were three incidents in a chain of events. In the first, the local Abo-
rigines had come to collect muttonbirds from nearby islands. They
found four shepherds, their hut and a flock of sheep, which the Van
Diemen’s Land Company had established at the location. The shep-
herds tried to entice some of the native women into their hut. Their
menfolk objected and, in the resulting skirmish, a shepherd was
speared and a native shot. In retaliation, some weeks later the Abo-
rigines drove a mob of breeding sheep into the sea where they then
speared and clubbed them to death.
In the third incident, historians of the orthodox school differ about
what actually occurred, as well as where and when it took place.
Lloyd Robson says it occurred ‘south of Cape Grim’ at a place called
Mount Victory near the islands called the Doughboys. Stockmen of
the Van Diemen’s Land Company ‘took by surprise a whole tribe,
which had come for a supply of mutton birds at the Doughboys,
" A. L, Meston, The Van Diemen’s Land Company 1825-1842, Queen
Victoria Museum, Launceston, 1958, pp 51—2
H Plomley, Friendly Mission
254 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
massacred thirty of them, then threw them off a cliff 200 feet high."'*
Henry Reynolds, however, says the Aborigines were killed at the
bottom of the cliff, not at the top. ‘Four shepherds trapped a group of
men, women and children at the edge of the sea and were able to fire
down on them from above'.'^ D. J. Mulvaney agrees the Aborigines
were at the bottom of the cliff but so too, he says, were the stock-
men. He claims the four shepherds rushed in with guns firing at the
blacks as they sat around their fire.'^ Lyndall Ryan, however, largely
concurs with Robson’s account that they died at the top of the cliff,
saying 'four shepherds took the Pennemukeer people by surprise
while muttonbirding, massacred thirty, and flung them over that same
sixty-metre-high cliff, now called Victory Hill?” The entry in the
Oxford Companion to Australian History says that ‘at least thirty’ Abo-
rigines were killed in 1827 but gives a different name to the location.
"The victims were pushed by shepherds from a steep rocky cliff, later
named Suicide Cove, where they fell and perished.'? Brian Plomley
agrees the death toll was thirty but gives two different dates for the
incident: January 1828 and February 1828." Cassandra Pybus says that
thirty were killed in 1827 and ‘their bodies were thrown over the
cliffs onto the rocks’. She says the massacre site was later strangely
renamed Suicide Cove.” E
Part of the reason for this conflicting information is because most
of these historians are themselves relying on secondary accounts and
have not checked the original sources. Lloyd Robson, for example,
did not even bother to consult a map. The Doughboys are not to the
south of Cape Grim but are directly adjacent to it. Mount Victory is a
hill whose sea cliffs form part of the cape itself. The Oxford Compan-
ion’s version of events is obviously borrowed directly from Cassandra
Pybus's earlier account because it reproduces the name she wrongly
gave for the site, Suicide Cove (actually Suicide Bay), mistakenly
presuming that this was the name of the cliff. The Oxford Companion
also follows Pybus in wrongly dating the incident in 1827.
1 j 225
14 Robson, History of Tasmania, Vol I, p m
15 Henry Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, Penguin, Ringwood, 1995, p 80
1 D, J. Mulvaney, Encounters in Place: Outsiders and Aboriginal Australians
1 606— 1985, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1989, p 50
" Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, pp 135-7 .
1# Graeme Davison, John Hirst, Stuart Macintyre (eds.) Oxford Companion to
Australian History, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1998, p 109
” N, J. B. Plomley, The Aboriginal/Settler Clash in Van Diemen’s Land 1803—
1831, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston, 1992, pp 16,
28
? Pybus, Community of Thieves, p 88-9
as tain NY oe EE EE
EIGHT: CAPE GRIM AND THE CREDIBILITY OF THE CONCILIATOR 255
Moreover, it is hard to believe that any of the academic historians
who have written about it with such confidence have ever bothered
to visit the site. An inspection would have saved them from several
descriptive blunders. The anthropologist D. J. Mulvaney is the only
author to reproduce a photograph but his account still contains a
number of errors. He does not mention there are two cliffs at the site,
one facing west to the sea, the other facing south to Suicide Bay.
Robinson described them both quite accurately:
On the one side was a perpendicular cliff of not less than two hundred
feet in altitude and the base washed with the sea; the other side was a
rapid declivity-?!
Robinson claimed the bodies were thrown over the cliff facing the
sea. The photograph in Mulvaney's book is of the other side, the
‘rapid declivity’ to Suicide Bay, which is where he thinks the bodies
were thrown from.”
Other confusions derive from Robinson’s diaries themselves,
which give different versions of what is supposed to have occurred.
Most of the orthodox historians who use Robinson as their informant
do not tell their readers how he came by the information. They treat
him as a primary source and do not reveal that he was not a contem-
porary to the event but someone who picked up his information from
three different sources some two and a half years later.
After Curr’s despatch of 28 February, in which he reported six
Aborigines had been killed ‘after a long fight’, the next document to
discuss the incident was written in November 1829 by Alexander
Goldie, the Van Diemen’s Land Company’s agricultural superinten-
dent. Goldie had written to Lieutenant-Governor Arthur a long in-
dictment of Curr in which he said that, since the Woolnorth property
had been established, there had been several engagements with Abo-
rigines and ‘there have been a great many natives shot by the Com-
pany’s servants’. He went on to describe one incident at which he
was not present himself but which clearly referred to the killings at
Cape Gnm:
On one occasion a good many were shot (I never heard exactly the num-
ber) and although Mr Curr knew it yet he never that I am aware took any
notice of it although in the Commission of the Peace [a magistrate], and
at that time there was no proclamation against the natives, nor were they
2! Robinson, diary, 24 June 1830, Friendly Mission, p 183
^ Mulvaney, Encounters in Place, includes its photograph on p 51. Mulvaney
makes other errors in his description of the site. He thinks a large cave
Robinson described is at the bottom of the declivity in his photograph,
whereas it is actually on the other, southern side of Suicide Bay (see middle
photograph of plate). For other mistakes by Mulvaney see footnote 30.
256 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
(the natives) at the time they were attacked at all
tlocks, although a short while before they had
number of sheep.”
disturbing the Company
destroyed a considerable
The acrimony between Goldie and Curr had arisen over an inci-
dent at the company’s property at Emu Bay in August 1829, in which
Richard Sweetling, a seventeen-year-old convict under Goldie’s
supervision, had killed an Aboriginal woman. As the magistrate for
the region as well as chief executive of the company, Curr had
informed Goldie he would have to charge him as an accessory to
murder. Goldie had written to Arthur in an attempt to exonerate
himself, as well as to have an independent magistrate decide on the
matter. His strategy was to inform Arthur that Curr should not pre-
side on the issue because he was himself implicated in other killings of
Aborigines by his men.” ERN
Arthur responded by making a number of inquiries of the two par-
ties. Before Robinson departed on his expedition, Arthur also asked
him to obtain all possible details about what had happened at Cape
Grim.” Hence, when Robinson and his party of Aborigines and con-
vict servants stopped over at Woolnorth station in June 1830, he
egarded his inquiries as being of an official nature. Even though
fbi on didn't make his assignment immediately known, Arthur's
i e led him to closely question the company's servants.
i^ binson arrived on 14 June and two days later he walked around
im e with the station overseer, Joseph Fossey. They went to
the property which they call Mount Victory from a rencontre they
had + ends natives’. Fossey told him that when the Aborigines were
shot, the Woolnorth workforce comprised only four shepherds:
Chamberlain, William Gunshannon, John Weavis and Rich-
a Peres all convicts working as assigned servants. That night
Robinson interrogated Charles Chamberlain:
H ny natives do you suppose there was killed? — ‘Thirty’. “There
ow ma 4 some difference respecting the numbers.’ — ‘Yes, it was so,
appears ie id and thought at the time the Governor would hear of it and
We was = al t into trouble, but thirty was about the number.’ “What did
we shou : [gem bodies? — ‘We threw them down the rocks where they
you do wit the sheep.’ ‘Was there any more females shot? — ‘No, the
had sees down; they were most of them men.’ ‘How many was
ais your party? — "There was four of us.’ "What had they done to
2 Goldie to Arthur, 18 November 1829, AOT CSO 1/326/7578, p 117
^ A full and reliable discussion of the conflict between Goldie and Curr has
been written by Geoff Lennox, "The Van DEDA s Land Company and the
Tasmanian Aborigines: a reappraisal’, Papin and Proceedings of the Tasmanian
Historical Research Association, December 1990, PP 165-208
^ Arthur to Hay, 20 November 1830, AOT GO 33/7, p 839
EGET: CAPE GRIM AND TEE CREDIBILITY OF THE CONCILIATOR 257
you? — ‘They had some time before that attacked us in a hut and had
speared one man in the thigh, Several blacks was shot on that occasion.
Subsequently thirty sheep had been driven over the rocks. "^
A week later, after a visit to Robbins Island a few miles east of
Woolnorth, Robinson spent two nights at a camp of four sealers
opposite the island. Five Aboriginal women and one male Aborigine
accompanied the sealers. On the second night, while Robinson
waited for his boat to arrive, the sealer’s women ‘made up a fire and
danced and sung until it was time to depart’. During this time, the
women told him about the events at Cape Grim:
The aboriginal females said that the Company’s shepherds had got the
native women into their hut and wanted to take liberties with them, that
the men resented it and speared one man in the thigh; that they then shot
one man dead, supposed the chief; that subsequently some natives killed
some of the Company’s sheep and drove them off the rocks, and some-
time after they took by surprise a whole tribe which had come for a
supply of mutton birds at the Doughboys, massacred thirty of them and
threw them off a cliff two hundred feet in altitude. Since the destruction
of those people the natives call the white people at Cape Grim
NOW.HUM.MOE, devil, and when they hear the report of a gun they say
the NOW.HUM.MOE have shot another tribe of natives.”
Robinson then returned to Woolnorth. Three days later, on 24
June, he once more went to Cape Grim to visit the site of the massa-
cre. This time he went with one of his own party, Alexander McKay,
and a person he identified only as ‘my informant’. This was probably
not Joseph Fossey this time. Given the detail he provided and the fact
that Robinson says he was ‘one of the murderers’, it was most likely
Charles Chamberlain again. They arrived at a point of land opposite
the Doughboys. Robinson later wrote in his diary his most detailed
version of the killings:
On the occasion of the massacre a tribe of natives, consisting principally of
women and children, had come to the islands. Providence had favoured
them with fine weather, for it is only in fine weather that they can get to
the islands as a heavy sea rolls in between them. They swim across, leav-
ing their children at the rocks in the care of the elderly people. They had
prepared their supply of birds, had tied them with grass, had towed them
on shore, and the whole tribe was seated round their fires partaking of
their hard-earned fare, when down rushed the band of fierce barbarians
thirsting for the blood of these unprotected and unoffending people. They
fled, leaving their provision. Some rushed into the sea, others scrambled
round the cliff and what remained the monsters put to death. Those poor
creatures who had sought shelter in the cleft of the rock they forced to
^ Robinson, diary 16 June 1830, Friendly Mission, p 175
7 Robinson, diary 21 June 1830, Friendly Mission, pp 181-2
258 Tur FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
the brink of an awful precipice, massacred them all and threw their bodie:
down the precipice, many of them perhaps but slightly wounded. Whilst I
stood gazing on this bloody cliff, methought I heard the shrieks of the
mothers, the cries of the children and the agony of the husband who saw
his wife, his children torn forever from his fond embrace. I was shewed a
point of rock where an old man who was endeavouring to conceal him-
self, was shot through the head by one of the murderers — who men-
tioned these circumstances as deeds of heroism. I went to the foot of the
cliff where the bodies had been thrown down and saw several human
bones, some of which I brought with me, and a piece of the bloody cliff.
As the tide was flowing I hastened from this Golgotha. Returned past
Mount Victory.”*
Robinson's third source of information about the incident was
Wiliam Gunshannon, another of the four shepherds at Woolnorth,
whom he interviewed on 10 August at the Van Diemen's Land
Company's station in the Hampshire Hills, inland from Emu Bay:
Interrogated Gunchannon [sic] respecting the massacre at Cape Grim.
The indifference of this man was quite astonishing. He acknowledged to
having been one of the four men who massacred the natives. I asked him
how many they killed. He said he could not tell whether any were killed,
but they saw traces of blood afterwards. ‘How long was it after killing the
sheep that the circumstance occurred’ — ‘Six weeks.’ “Were there any
women among them?’ — ‘Yes, there was both men and women.’ Finding
this man was not willing to disclose, I told him that I had full information
on the subject, both from blacks and whites, and it was of little conse-
quence his keeping it back; he might prevaricate but I knew; Chamber-
lain, an accessory, had told me there was thirty kiled. I severely repre-
hended him and assured him I was not certain he would not be cited to
Hobart Town for the murder. He seemed to glory in the act and said he
would shoot them whenever he met them.”
Robinson’s investigation, then, amounted to two visits to the site
and four interviews: two with Chamberlain, one with the sealers’
women, and one with the recalcitrant Gunshannon. The evidence he
found portrayed a reasonably consistent scenario. The incident took
place six weeks after the Aborigines drove the flock of sheep into the
sea, that is, in the second week of February 1828. The Aborigines,
many of them women, had returned from muttonbirding at the
Doughboys. They were sitting on the rocks at the foot of the 'rapid
declivity', now called Suicide Bay, cooking and eating the birds t
had gathered. The stockmen suddenly appeared, brandishing w
ons. Some Aborigines fled into the sea, others around the
cliff face. Some Aborigines were shot in Suicide Bay, Oth
hey
eap-
adjacent
ers were
7 Robinson, diary 24 June 1830, Friendly Mission, p 183
? Robinson, diary 10 August 1830, Friendly Mission, p 196
EIGHT: CAPE GRIM AND THE CREDIBILITY OF THE CONCILIATOR 259
tored up to the top of Mount Victory (not ‘Victory Hill’) and either
Killed or wounded there. Their bodies were thrown over the cliff to
the rocks below. Two and a half years later, Robinson could still find
human bones at the base of the cliff. The death toll was thirty.
LOGISTICAL PROBLEMS OF THE RECEIVED VERSION
This story, when told in print, seems plausible enough. However,
inyone who visits the site will struggle to find it credible. If the Abo-
rigines were sitting on the rocks of the bay opposite the Doughboys,
the stockmen could not have surprised them. The declivity immedi-
ately above them is very steep and is impossible to climb down
manually. The stockmen would have had to come down to the sea-
shore by the only accessible slope, which is about halfway around the
bay." This would have made them visible to the Aborigines below
for at least five minutes. Even this route is quite steep and, for part of
the way, can only be climbed down by grasping tufts of button grass,
which meant the stockmen would have had to shoulder their arms for
part of their descent. In other words, the Aborigines would have seen
them coming and would have had time to escape by swimming to
the other side of the bay or out to sea (those who had been to the
Doughboys were obviously powerful swimmers) or by going around
the rocks at the base of the cliff.
Robinson wrote that those Aborigines ‘who had sought shelter in
the cleft of the rock’ were ‘forced to the brink of an awful precipice’.
He did not indicate where this cleft in the rock was located but an
inspection of the site indicates the only pieces of topography deserv-
ing the name 'cleft are on the sea side of the bay, down near the
water line. However, it is hard to understand how the stockmen
could have got these Aborigines up to the cliff top. The ascent is even
more difficult than the descent. Again, for part of the way, both
hands and feet are needed. The stockmen would have had to shoulder
their arms again, making it very difficult for them to control their
captives. When they reached the top of Mount Victory, they would
have found no natural barriers to confine the Aborigines, apart from
the cliff to the west and the declivity to the south. On the north and
east of Mount Victory, the land is open and gently sloping, described
" D. J. Mulvaney thinks it is possible to descend to the bay from the cliff top
‘along a steep path’ (Encounters in Place, p 50). Anyone who has been there
could have told him there is no path from either the western-facing or
southern-facing cliff top. Both are sheer drops. The path today is still where
Robinson said it was in 1830, ‘about two hundred yards from this cliff, that
is, further around the bay: Robinson, diary 24 June 1830, Friendly Mission, p
143
260 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
by Robinson as ‘grassy hills’! So, once again, many of the Aboriginal
captives would have had the chance to escape. In fact, the whole
story about taking the Aborigines to the top of the cliff to throw
them off simply does not ring true. Why would the stockmen bother
to do this? They would have known that, logistically, it was an im-
possible exercise without most of their captives escaping. If they really
were trying to kill them all, they would have done it where they
allegedly found them, down near the waterline at the edge of the bay.
THE LIMITATIONS OF EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY MUSKETS
The four white captors had four guns between them. They were
single shot, flintlock muskets that took anything from thirty to sixty
seconds to reload. The Aborigines were well aware of the guns’
limitations. Even Henry Reynolds has admitted that by the late
1820s, when they began to be issued to convicts in remote locations
as defence against Aboriginal attack, guns had lost their ‘aura of
magic'. The Aborigines knew that, once they had been fired and
before they could be re-loaded, they had plenty of time to either
attack or flee. Even a child had time during reloading to run beyond
the effective range of these guns of about eighty yards.”
By the early 1820s, the Aborigines realized that, once a gun had
been fired, they had time to attack its owner. The Campbell Town
pastoralist John Leake wrote to his brother in 1824 telling him of the
exploits of Musquito's mob:
They now know a gun will not go off a second time unless charged again
— and will rush in with their spears upon a single man if he has once
fired.”
A police magistrate described one Aboriginal attack in 1825:
One of the hostile Aborigines tribes, headed by Thomas Birch, alias Black
Tom, attacked the hut of Robert Jones in Four Square Gallows, daring
Jones to fire at them, threatening to put his wife into the bloody river.
The man having no other assistance at the time would not fire, for fear
that when his piece was discharged the Blacks would rush upon him, his
wife and his children.”
?! Robinson, diary 16 June 1830, Friendly Mission, p 175
? Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, pp 71—2. See also Donald Featherstone,
Weapons and Equipment of the Victorian Soldier, Blandford Press, Poole, 1978,
—16
nde M. Kemp, ‘John Leake 1780—1865: early settler in Tasmania’, thesis
(1969) held by Archives Office of Tasmania, pp 17-18
^ Thomas Anstey, Report of robberies, outrages, murders and other
aggressions committed by the Aboriginal tribes etc, AOT CSO 1/316/7578,
p 762
EIGHT: CAPE GRIM AND THE CREDIBILITY OF THE CONCILIATOR 261
This is a consideration that applies not only to Cape Grim but also
to any claim about the massacre of large numbers of Aborigines
betore the 1860s when repeating rifles came into widespread use. In
any single engagement, each armed man was only able to fire once on
his opponents before they escaped. ‘Four men,’ Reynolds correctly
observes, ‘would only manage four shots at best.” So the most likely
number of Aborigines killed by gunshot would be about the same as
the number of armed men arrayed against them. This assumes that the
armed men were good shots, which was often not the case since they
were not militarily trained and their muskets were notoriously
inaccurate. ‘Fired in the Australian bush,’ David Denholm has ob-
served about the standard issue musket of the era, ‘even if an Aborig-
ine at 50 yards stood still long enough, Brown Bess might hit him
twice from three shots." Even on the most favourable ground, the
claim that four stockmen could kill thirty Aborigines with single shot
muskets is inherently implausible. Given the extraordinarily difficult
terrain of Suicide Bay, the claim is beyond belief.
THE CREDIBILITY OF THE ABORIGINAL WITNESSES
Yet both Chamberlain and the sealers’ women gave Robinson the
same total of thirty killed. For the orthodox historians’ case, this
amounts to independent corroboration, which is evidence of the
strongest kind. However, as well as logistical problems with the story,
there are also doubts about Robinson’s informants. The historians
who have cited the evidence of the Aboriginal women at the sealers’
camp have usually assumed they were either eyewitnesses to the event
or at least members of the tribe who suffered the massacre. However,
this is not so. In his diary entry of 20 June, the day before he
recorded his discussion with the sealers’ women, Robinson discussed
their backgrounds. Of the six Aboriginal women, he wrote, ‘one
woman was a native of this part and the other five were eastern
women and had been living with white men several years!" If they
were ‘eastern women’ they were originally from the tribes on the
north-east or east coasts of Tasmania, and if they had been with the
sealers for several years, they were no longer tribal Aborigines. So
these five would not have been with the north-western Aboriginal
band at Cape Grim in February 1828. Rather than the six witnesses
claimed by the orthodox school, only one of these women was even
a possible candidate. The others could only have known of the event
* Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 80
* David Denholm, The Colonial Australians, Penguin, Ringwood, 1979, pp
36
" Robinson, diary 20 June 1830, Friendly Mission, p 179
262 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
as hearsay. Even this would not have been reliable, since eastern
Aborigines spoke a quite different language to the west coast tribes.
Cassandra Pybus claims that on the night he heard the story from
these natives, Robinson actually had two informants from the Cape
Grim tribe, the west coast woman plus an Aboriginal male youth,
named Pevay, who, she says, was also from Cape Grim. She writes:
‘they repeated the story of the massacre, explaining that the murder-
ous tension arose over women’.*® These claims, however, are her
own embellishments to the tale. Robinson’s diary entry, quoted
above, records his only informants as the ‘aboriginal females’, and
does not mention Pevay in this context. Anyway, this youth (also
known as Peevay and Tunnerminnerwait), who later became a
permanent member of Robinson’s travelling party, was not one of
the Cape Grim natives but from the quite distinct Robbins Island
tribe, and so would have had no direct knowledge of the encounter
either.? All that Robinson recorded about the sole western woman
was that she was ‘a native of this part’, a phrase which, since it was
recorded at a spot directly opposite Robbins Island, probably meant
she was from that tribe too.
There is another good reason to doubt the story Robinson
recorded from the Aboriginal women. His claim that they told him
thirty Aborigines were killed runs counter to everything else he says
about the ability of Tasmanian Aborigines to count. Their arithmeti-
cal aptitude was one of the ethnographic details Robinson made a
point of recording in his diary. Throughout the island, he found the
highest the Tasmanian natives could count was to four, except on
Robbins Island, where it was to seven." So, instead of the sealers’
women providing a strong case — eyewitness accounts by six people
of a massacre of thirty Aborigines — Robinson’s diary entry of their
allegations turns out to be a suspect piece of evidence itself. Only one
of the women was even a potential witness and, since she herself
could not count to thirty, Robinson was obviously inventing her facts
for her.
THE CREDIBILITY OF THE WHITE WITNESSES
The evidence of the convict Chamberlain was also suspect. As part of
the account of the incident he provided to Lieutenant-Governor
Arthur in May 1831, Edward Curr said he knew of Chamberlain’s
allegations:
^ Pybus, Community of Thieves, p 90
? Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp 983, 987. For the distinction betwe
Robbins Island tribe and the Cape Grim tribe, see
^ Robinson, Friendly Mission, p 445, n 98
en the
pp 178-9, 971, 973. 4
EIGHT: CAPE GRIM AND THE CREDIBILITY OF THE CONCILIATOR 263
Mr Robinson told me that one of the men, Charles Chamberlain by
name, had told him the number killed was thirty. I afterwards asked Mr
Joseph Fossey, the mens superintendent, if he could have said so, and ie
Fossey told me he had, but that it was merely done for the purpose o
playing upon Mr Robinson's credulity and I am confident that was the
case.*!
This statement by Curr obviously has to be read in the light of the
fact that he was an interested party, concerned to play down the inci-
dent. But there are two reasons to give it some credibility. First, as
noted above, when he was interviewed, Chamberlain was not aware
Robinson was investigating the killings on Arthur’s behalf or that
there might be any recriminations for an event that now seemed long
behind him. Robinson only revealed his concern about the killings to
Gunshannon on 10 August. So Chamberlain had no reason to be self-
protective about his role in the affair and nothing to inhibit him from
blowing up the affair to impress the visitor.
Second, Chamberlain was a convict with a serious criminal record
both in England and Tasmania. Aged twenty-two, he had been sen-
tenced in Norfolk in 1825 to fourteen years transportation. He ar-
rived in Hobart in October 1826. In April 1829 he absconded and
was given twenty-five lashes. In October 1832 he was given fifty
lashes for an assault on a middle-aged man with a heavy hand spike.
He was removed from the Van Diemen’s Land Company’s workforce
and taken to Launceston where he was frequently flogged for other
offences. He was sentenced to hard labour in chain gangs and in 1835
had a further seven years added to his sentence for theft.? In other
words, he was a persistent law-breaker and not a witness of reliable
character whose views should be accepted without some corrobora-
tion.
There are two other pieces of testimony about this case that also
deserve questioning. The claim by the agricultural superintendent,
Alexander Goldie, that ‘a good many’ natives were shot was made, as
noted above, as part of his campaign to have Curr relieved of his
Position as magistrate for the north-west region. While Goldie was a
more reliable character than Chamberlain, he was not at Woolnorth
when the Cape Grim killings occurred and did not know exactly
ow many had died nor the circumstances of their deaths.
The second questionable testimony is that of Robinson himself. He
was clearly putting words into the mouths of the Aboriginal women
“ Curr to Colon
23/4, p 306
42
Mira Chamberlain, Chapman (2), AOT CON 31/6; Kerry Pink, ‘The
Cue EUN Massacre", p 18 n 9; see also Geoff Lennox, ‘The Van
temen s Land Company and the Tasmanian Aborigines', p 202 n 25
ial Secretary, 18 May 1831, AOT VDL Company papers
264 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
at the sealers’ camp. However, by far the least credible of his diary
entries are those where he records his own experience of the massacre
site. When he inspected Suicide Bay on 24 June, he wrote: ‘I went to
the foot of the cliff where the bodies had been thrown down and saw
several human bones, some of which I brought with me, and a piece
of the bloody cliff. As the tide was flowing I hastened from this Gol-
gotha.' This visit was two and a half years after the bodies had alleg-
edly been thrown from the cliff. It is this claim, more than any other,
that makes local historians scoff at his version of the story.
As Robinson himself notes, he had to hurry from the rocks when
the tide came in. In fact, the tide submerges these rocks for more than
half the day. This is the west coast of Tasmania, swept by the winds
of the Roaring Forties, which, in bad weather, produce some of the
wildest seas in the world. At high tide, the rocks at the foot of the
cliff at Cape Grim are constantly pounded by heavy seas. Waves of
ten metres high can emerge from the sea during big storms. There is
no conceivable way that human bones, let alone bloodstains, could
have survived on these rocks from February 1828 to June 1830 for
Robinson to collect. As one of those local historians so disparaged by
Cassandra Pybus, the Burnie journalist Kerry Pink, has put it:
Any person familiar with the exposed Cape Grim coastline and Suicide
Bay, lashed by gale-force westerlies and huge seas, must speculate whether
Robinson, two and a half years after the killings, found human bones and
bloodstains on the cliffs. The skeletons of whales stranded on this coastline
disappear within months.“
EDWARD CURR’S VERSIONS OF THE KILLINGS
The version of events that the locals endorse is that provided by
Edward Curr. He wrote four accounts of the killings, but gave two
different tallies of the death toll. The first account was his despatch of
28 February 1828, noted earlier, in which he said six Aborigines were
killed. The second was written on 7 October 1830 to his directors in
London to rebut accusations made by Alexander Goldie when he
resigned from the service of the Van Diemen’s Land Company.
Goldie had attacked Curr's personal and public attitude towards the
Aborigines in an attempt to undermine his position. Curr replied,
justifying his lack of action over the Cape Grim killings. He said that
following the killing of the 118 sheep on 31 December:
The natives afterwards kept quiet until the 10th February when a very
large party were assembled on the Hill at the foot of which the hut stands
There our men saw them and the account they gave me of the transaction
was that they considered the natives were coming to attack them again
aga
*5 Kerry Pink, ‘The Woolnorth "Massacre", p 17
EGT: CAPE GRIM AND THE CREDIBILITY OF THE CONCILIATOR 265
ind they marched out to meet them, and in the fight which ensued they
killed six of the natives one of whom was a woman. This was the manner
in which the story was first related to me: nothing was said about the
natives being a party of people who were returning from the Islands with
birds & fish, nor do I now believe that was the case but I think it probable
they were going there. But suppose that were the real fact and that the
natives were only going to or returning from the Islands with birds & fish,
how was I to establish the fact? Who was there to prove it except the
parties implicated? ... Now I have no doubt whatever that our men were
fully impressed with the idea that the natives were there only for the pur-
pose of surrounding and attacking them, and with that idea it would be
madness for them to wait until the natives shewed their designs by making
it too late for one man to escape. I considered these things at the time for
I had thought of investigating the case, but I saw first that there was a
strong presumption that our men were right, second if wrong it was im-
possible to convict them, and thirdly that the mere enquiry would induce
every man to leave Cape Grim.^
Now, while this is obviously a self-serving justification for inaction,
unworthy of a man who held the position of magistrate, it is also a far
more credible account of what happened than anything provided by
Robinson. Four men with muskets, who met the Aborigines on the
open grassland and comparatively level terrain of Mount Victory (the
hill on which the hut stood), could plausibly shoot six of them. This
version suffers none of the logistical improbabilities of Robinson’s
story about the shootings taking place on the rocks at the waterline of
Suicide Bay. If the stockmen did throw any bodies over the cliff, this
was the most plausible location from which to do it. By approaching
the stockmen’s hut, the Aborigines demonstrated they were not on
some innocent excursion. Had the blacks meant them no harm and
were really at Cape Grim simply to collect muttonbirds, they would
have given the hut a wide berth. Given the conflict the stockmen had
already experienced, plus the vulnerability they must have felt alone
at this remote location, when they saw the party of Aborigines arrive
and found themselves outnumbered, the fact that they shot first rather
than allow themselves to be surrounded and attacked, is a credible
explanation of their motives.
Curr’s third description was given in a letter to Archdeacon
Broughton’s committee of inquiry in 1830. Answering a series of
questions put by the committee on 2 April, Curr wrote:
At Woolnorth, the North West angle of this island, the natives are a very
powerful and fine race of men. In December 1827, the Company had
some sheep there which the Natives attacked, and driving them into the
** Curr to directors, Despatch no. 150, 7 October 1830, AOT VDL
Company papers 5/3, pp 104—5
RJ " =
2606 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
bend of a steep cliff over-hanging the sea, they speared and waddied 11%
A short time after this, some days or perhaps a week or two, they
approached the hut where the men four in number were living, who
being well armed attacked the Natives and shot several of them. The
Natives attacked the men on another occasion that season, but whether
before or after the above occurrence I do not now remember?
Curr's fourth account was written in response to an inquiry made
by Lieutenant-Governor Arthur after he had received information
trom Robinson. In May 1831 Curr had been at Jericho where he met
Arthur who questioned him about the incident. In reply, Curr wrote:
His Excellency having mentioned to me at Jericho on the 14th instant
that Mr G. A. Robinson had officially reported that 30 Aboriginal Natives
had been killed some years since by the Company's people at Woolnorth
and having observed that if the statement were untrue it ought to be
contradicted, I beg to state for his Excellency's information that I believe
it to be untrue. I know the occurrence to which the story refers and I
have no doubt that some Natives were killed on the occasion, my
impression is that the real number was three. All the persons living at
Woolnorth at the time were concerned in the transaction which
precluded information being called for from any disinterested party, but as
the case was represented to me by the men themselves at the time they
had no alternative but to act as they did.*é
Curr then went on to argue that Chamberlain's claim that thirty
were killed was meant to play on Robinson’s credulity, as recorded
above. This letter was written from Launceston on 18 May. It is
possible that, because he was away from his office at Circular Head
on the north coast and did not have the opportunity to check his pre-
vious despatches, Curr did not accurately recollect his earlier figure
that the Cape Grim death toll was six. It is more likely, though, that
he wanted to persuade Arthur that the incident was a much less
bloody affair than Robinson claimed and so deliberately reduced the
death toll. Overall, considering Curr's four statements about the
matter, his initial, unguarded report to his directors that six were
killed is the most credible.
THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN ABORIGINAL CONFLICT
The historian who has previously written the most thorough account
of the Cape Grim killings and their aftermath is Geoff Lennox. a
researcher and adviser to the Tasmanian government's Department of
*^ Curr to Aborigines Committee, 2 April 1830, AOT CSO 1/323/7578 pP
264-5 :
^ Curr to Colonial Secretary, 18 May 1831, AOT VDL Company papers
23/4 p 306 |
—
EIGHT: CAPE GRIM AND THE CREDIBILITY OF THE CONCILIATOR 267
Parks, Wildlife and Heritage. Lennox is a far more reliable historian
chan the academics of the orthodox school. However, he gives the
gure of thirty killed at Cape Grim more credibility than it deserves.
He accepts the evidence of the Aboriginal women at the sealers’ camp
as authentic rather than a concoction by Robinson. This is because he
apparently overlooked what Robinson inadvertently said about their
background, and did not see they could not have been eyewitnesses.
However, Lennox still finds enough doubts about the story to
eventually conclude ‘we do not know precisely how many
Abongines were killed’. Nonetheless, he argues that even if Curr’s
version of events is accepted, and only six were shot, ‘there were
obviously sufficient Aborigines killed to justify the label of
“massacre”.”*’ Lennox hinges this last part of his argument on the fact
that there were women among the Aborigines at Cape Grim. Both
Chamberlain and Gunshannon said native women were in the party
and even Curr said in October 1830 that one woman was killed. ‘The
simple point of this,’ Lennox writes, ‘is that it refutes the idea of an
attack being mounted by the Aborigines: women were not included
in such activities.'4?
This is not, however, true. In fact, the north-west of Tasmania was
the home of one of the island's best-known female warriors, Walyer
the Aboriginal amazon. In our own feminist age she has acquired a
legendary status? but she was a real woman, who eventually ended
up being captured and taken by Robinson to the Bass Strait islands.
In 1830 Robinson had recounted a story he heard from sealers.
Walyer was head of the Emu Bay Aborigines and would stand on a
hill, giving orders to her tribesmen when to attack, abusing the whites
and daring them to come out and be speared.?? She was feared by her
own people and was said to have stabbed a woman who would not
obey her. She was also said to have massacred both whites and other
Aborigines?! It is uncertain how many of her exploits were real or
mythical. At one stage she was a willing concubine to some of the
Bass Strait sealers so the claim that she was one of the ‘heroes of the
? Lennox, "The Van Diemen's Land Company and the Tasmanian
Aborigines’ pp 173-4
* Lennox, ‘The Van Diemen's Land Company and the Tasmanian
Aborigines’, p 172
** Walyer was one of the ‘great initiators and fierce fighters’ among
Aboriginal women: Patsy Cameron and Vicki Matson-Green, 'Pallawah
Women: Their Historical Contribution to our Survival’, Tasmanian Historical
Research Association Papers and Proceedings, 41, 2, June 1994 pp 65-70
* Robinson, diary 21 June 1830, Friendly Mission, p 182 7
* Robinson, diary 5 December, 16 December, 19 December 1830, Friendly
Mission, pp 287, 292, 296-7
268 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL History
resistance’ is something of an exaggeration.” Nonetheless, there is
enough in the stories other Aborigines told about her
compatriots to question the notion th
shrunk from viole
and her
at Aboriginal women always
nce. This idea originated with the evidence before
the 1830 inquiry into Aboriginal affairs when it was used to argue
that the Aborigines at Risdon Cove in 1804, among whom there
were women, were a hunting party rather than a war party? Though
plausible in this case, the point should not be stretched to cover all
Aboriginal women in Tasmanian history.
There were also several cases of the killing of whites at remote huts
and homesteads in which Aboriginal women participated. They were
either sent in first as decoys or watched from nearby while their
menfolk conducted the assault?* In one case in 1831 on the Tamar
River, an Aboriginal woman named Kubmanner goaded members of
her tribe into killing a white woman.? So, even though there were
women among the Aborigines at Cape Grim, and even if their ulti-
mate purpose had been to go to the Doughboys for muttonbirds, this
cannot be taken, of itself, to mean they had only peaceful intentions
towards the stockmen there.
Overall, the explanations that Curr gave in February 1828 and
October 1830 are by far the most credible. The killings at Cape Grim
took place on 10 February 1828. They occurred not on the seashore
of Suicide Bay but on top of the hill called Mount Victory. Curr
called it a ‘long fight’ between his shepherds and the Aborigines that
left six of the latter dead on the field and several wounded. We will
never know for certain exactly what happened or who made the first
move, but the most plausible motive of the stockmen was self-preser-
vation. Given their previous experience of violent conflict with the
natives, they understandably felt threatened when they found them-
selves outnumbered by the approach of a large party. Under the cir-
cumstances, marching out with arms to meet them was a legitimate
tactic. These are not conditions that justify the term ‘massacre’, which
implies malicious intent, general carnage and slaughter of the inno-
52 This phrase is used by Julia Clark in The Aboriginal People of Tasmania,
Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 1983, p 46; for Walyer and
the sealers see Robinson, diary 19 December 1830, 25 December 1830, 30
December 1830, report February 1831, diary 16 June 1832, Friendly Mission,
pp 296-7, 301, 304, 442 n 80, 615 !
* Report of the Aborigines Committee, 19 March 1830, British Parliamentary
Papers, Colonies, Australia, Vol 4, p 209
* for example: Robinson, diary 17 November 1831, 19 Novembe
December 1831, 16 January 1834, Friendly
E Poids; Friendly Mission, p 455 n 155
r1 r 1831, 14
Mission, pp 522, 523-4, 551-2.
Bight: CAPE GRIM AND THE CREDIBILITY OF THE CONCILIATOR 269
cent. Cape Grim cannot seriously be regarded as a massacre site. In
particular, it as unwarranted hyperbole for historians and political
acavists to label a place where six people died as a site of ‘Aboriginal
genocide’.
To put the event into perspective, we might consider how this
incident would have been regarded if the roles had been reversed. If
four isolated Aborigines, who had previously been assaulted and their
stock animals killed, had been confronted on an open field by a much
larger group of armed and hostile whites, and if the blacks had killed
six of them, the orthodox school would either call it justified self-
defence or a victorious battle. They would never contemplate label-
ling it a massacre. Indeed, in universities today, many historians and
their publishers now forbid the use of ‘massacre’ to describe any mass
killing of whites by indigenous people. While whites may still be said
to massacre indigenes, in cases where indigenes kill whites, authors
are now only permitted to say that they made ‘successful raids’ or
scored ‘battle victories'.?
THE UNOFFICIAL SIDE OF THE FRONTIER
The publication in 1966 of Brian Plomley’s edition of Robinson’s
personal diaries was a greatly anticipated event in Tasmanian histori-
ography. Extracts from Robinson’s government reports and letters
had long been published by earlier historians but the diaries held a
more exciting potential. They promised to provide a new perspective
that none of the official records could offer. During the five years he
crossed and re-crossed the colony, Robinson took the opportunity to
interrogate the Aborigines in his own party, and those he met along
the way, about their beliefs, customs and culture and about their ex-
* [n the United States, books produced by university presses are no longer
allowed to apply the term ‘massacre’ to such actions by indigenous peoples.
According to Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing (Indiana University Press, 1996)
by Marilyn Schwartz and the Task Force on Bias-Free Language of the
Association of American University Presses, ‘massacre’ is a ‘highly offensive’
term when it is used 'to refer to a successful American Indian raid or battle
victory against white colonizers and invaders' (pp 53-4). The Guidelines
derive from a 1992 declaration adopted by the Board of Directors of the
Association of American University Presses: ‘Books that are on the cutting
edge of scholarship should also be at the forefront in recognizing how
language encodes prejudice. They should also be agents for change and the
redress of past mistakes.’ Australian university presses are sure to dutifully toe
the line of such cutting-edge advice. This is yet another example of
2uthontarian academic speech codes that seek to redefine political opinions
they oppose as expressions hurtful to some interest group and which
therefore must be censored.
—
i 4
270 THE FABRICATION of ABORIGINAL HISTORY
periences of contact with the white colonists. On his journeys, he also
came across remote outstations where he met stock-keepers and shep-
herds of the convict lower orders, with whom he often conversed.
Robinson wrote up his diary almost every day so he provided as close
to a verbatim record of the opinions of both Aborigines and convict
stockmen as it was possible to get. Since both groups were largely
illiterate, there were very few other documents from the period that
preserved their words intact. In short, Robinson’s diaries promised to
give us a vision of that side of the frontier that would otherwise have
remained hidden from history.
This was all predicated, of course, on the belief that his informants
told Robinson the truth and that he, in turn, reported them faithfully,
As Chapter Seven has argued, however, far from being a disinterested
observer, Robinson was one of the major players in the attempt to
devise and implement colonial policy towards the Aborigines. He was
also one of the major beneficiaries of the policy that eventually did
emerge. At times, his diary entries served as preparatory notes and
draft versions of reports and letters he later wrote to serve his own
purposes. In particular, as Chapter Seven demonstrated, part of Rob-
inson’s strategy was to exaggerate stories about atrocities against the
Aborigines, while at the same time hiding their violence towards the
colonists. So historians who use the diaries as evidence need to take a
critical attitude towards them, reading them for internal consistency
and plausibility and double-checking their factual claims wherever
P not, however, how Lloyd Robson and Lyndall Ryan treat
the diary entries. In their major works on Tasmanian history, both |
authors use them uncritically as direct primary sources. They para- |
phrase Robinson, they sometimes repeat his words verbatim, and
they frequently present condensed versions of his claims without any
other commentary. They almost always treat what Robinson said as
accurate and credible. They do not apply any tests of veracity, such as
whether his claims might be supported or disputed by other docu-
mentary evidence. Whatever he said, they report as the truth. Here is
one example from Ryan:
TE
d
Between June 1827 and September 1830 the North people fell in number
from two hundred to sixty. One stockkeeper shot nineteen people with a
swivel gun charged with nails; another shot a group of iho Het eect
offering them food; another ripped open the stomach of an Aboriginal
while offering him a piece of bread at the end of a knife; others offered
them poisoned flour. A party of soldiers from the 40th Regiment killed
ten at the Western Marshes.
—————ObóáüB
—— "
p
? Ja yan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 139
EIGHT: CAPE GRIM AND THE CREDIBILITY OF THE CONCILIATOR 271
Except for the detail about the numbers of ‘North people’, all this
information. comes from atrocities recorded in Robinson’s diaries
between 8 August and 25 September 1830.% Lloyd Robson repeats
the stories about the swivel gun, the poisoned flour, the ripped-open
stomach and the killings by the 40th Regiment? Let us examine the
claims in this passage.
For a start, there was no such entity in Aboriginal society as ‘the
North people’. This was a category invented in the nineteenth cen-
tury by white observers in an attempt to make sense of the tribal
divisions among the natives." There was never any good evidence
from Aborigines themselves that they were members of such a tribe,
which Ryan claims includes the people of the Tamar and Meander
River districts and the Western Marshes. Apart from casual sightings
by settlers from a distance, there was no census or any other kind of
head count ever taken of Aborigines from this region. There was no
evidence, either from Robinson or anyone else, that their numbers
were ever two hundred or that they declined to sixty. Ryan has made
up these figures. Moreover, in none of his diary entries did Robinson
provide a date for any of the atrocities Ryan cites in this passage, so
not even he says when they supposedly occurred. Ryan’s time-scale
of June 1827—September 1830 is, again, her own invention.
THE SWIVEL GUN MASSACRE
Like the events at Cape Grim, the story about the stock-keeper
killing nineteen Aborigines with a swivel gun loaded with nails is
today part of the international literature on genocide.” It was told to
Robinson by Henry Hellyer, a surveyor employed by the Van
Diemen’s Land Company. The sole reference in the diaries to this
incident was as follows: ‘Informed me of a stockkeeper called Paddy
Heagon at the Retreat who had shot nineteen of the western natives
with a swivel gun charged with nails.” Robinson heard the story
while camped near St Valentine’s Peak, inland from the company’s
Hampshire Hills property. "The Retreat’ was the name of a ten-mile
** Robinson, diary, 8 August 1830, 12 August 1830, 13 September 1830, 25
September 1830, Friendly Mission, pp 196, 197—8, 210, p 219
^ Robson, History of Tasmania, Vol I, pp 226, 229
” ‘Of the tribal organisation of the aborigines practically nothing is known,
and the limits of tribal divisions cannot be laid down with any approach to
certainty’: James Backhouse Walker, ‘Some Notes on the Tribal Divisions of
the Aborigines of Tasmania’, in James Backhouse Walker, Early Tasmania:
Papers read before the Royal Society of Tasmania during the years 1888 to 1899,
Government Printer, Hobart, 1950, pp 267-78, 269
^ Jared Diamond, ‘In Black and White’, Natural History, 10, 1988, ps
“ Robinson, diary, 12 August 1830, Friendly Mission, pp 197-8
272 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
stretch of country between Westbury and the ford on the Western or
Meander River. About three miles from Westbury, the company
rented a large tract of land from the government to graze sheep.”
However, unlike the other conflicts with the Aborigines at the time,
this incident does not figure in any of the Van Diemen's Land
Company records. It is uncertain who Paddy Heagon was. He was
not recorded as an assigned convict or a free employee of the
company.” This alone should have raised some doubts about the tale
in the mind of any historian repeating it. However, the most dubious
detail in the story is that of the swivel gun.
A swivel gun was a small naval cannon, which typically fired a half-
pound ball (0.2 kilograms) or the same weight in small pieces of lead
shot. It was called a swivel gun because it was secured on a mount
that allowed it to be tilted up and down and to the right or left. It
was normally mounted in either the bow or stern of a small ship or
large rowing boat. The obvious question about the story Robinson
claimed he heard was how a stock-keeper like Heagon would have
got hold of one. At the time, most stock-keepers in the colony were
convicts. Their employers armed them only reluctantly and only if
their location was isolated enough to put their lives at risk. While this
meant remote stock-keepers were often given muskets, it would have
been very unlikely for a settler to provide a convict with an expen-
sive, much more cumbersome and less manoeuvrable swivel gun. It
was primarily a naval weapon and, although it was possible to remove
it from a boat and bolt it to a tree stump or other fixed position for
firing, it was not a weapon that anyone would seriously consider for
use in the field.©
6 Hobart Town Almanack for 1830, James Ross, Hobart, 1830, p 53 B
6 In his biographical list of settlers and convicts in 1831, Friendly Mission, pp
1021-47, Brian Plomley could not find any information about anyone
named Heagon or Hagon. Nor, apart from references to the story Robinson
heard, does he appear in the index of any other contemporary work.
6 William Greener, The Science of Gunnery, as Applied to the Use and
Construction of Fire Arms, London, 1846; W. Greener, The Gun and Its
Development, London, 1910 l
& Robinson himself was not ignorant of what a swivel gun was. In his diary
in 1834 he recorded some of the reminiscences of Thomas Reiby of
Paterson's Plains about his days in the ‘Feejee Islands’. During a fight
between sandalwood traders and natives, Reiby recalled, two ship’s captains
fitted out their small boats with ‘swivel guns in their bows loaded with
broken iron’, which they fired on the Fijians: Robinson, diary, 15 January
1434, Friendly Mission, p 835. Knowing it was a maritime weapon, Robinson
could not have been unaware of the incongruity of a swivel gun being
located on an inland sheep run.
—— —
EIGHT: CAPE GRIM AND THE CREDIBILITY OF THE CONCILIATOR 273
e Vie
The central north of Van Diemen’s Land, including Launceston and Westbury.
Detail from map by J. Arrowsmith, London, 1832 (Mitchell Library)
Moreover, it would have been very unusual for a settler or anyone
else outside the military forces to actually procure a swivel gun. The
only private citizen in any of the Australian colonies likely to have
owned one was a whaling captain. It was an old weapon from the
sixteenth century that had become outmoded by the nineteenth cen-
tury until adapted to fire harpoons into whales.” It is, however, hard
to believe that a whaling captain would have given one to a settler or
stock-keeper to fire at Aborigines. In short, nothing about this story
makes any sense. Without further investigation, no historian should
ever have taken it at face value.
RIPPED BELLIES AND POISONED FLOUR
Ryan’s two accounts of a group of Aborigines being killed when
offered food derive from two separate stories told by Robinson, but
Ryan has mixed up the details. According to the diaries, a native
4) > ert v £4
Greener, The Science of Gunnery; Greener, The Gun and Its Development;
Swivel Guns and Swivel Gun Harpoons’, www.whalecraft.net
274 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL History
group was offered bread by a man named Thomas of the Van Die-
men’s Land Company, but they were not shot. Robinson says one
was ‘ripped up’. The other incident in which an Aborigine *was
ripped up his belly’ did not involve any offers of food. A lone stock-
man was attacked in his hut by a group of Aborigines and was de-
fending himself. The first of these incidents is credible. The attacker
was probably Thomas John," a convict employed by the Van Die-
men's Land Company, who had been wounded by Aborigines at
Cape Grim in the first assault in August 1827. Robinson said the in-
formation was given to him by Samuel Reeves, one of the company's
superintendents, while he was visiting its headquarters at Circular
Head. The story has no inconsistencies and there is no good reason to
doubt the informant. The second incident is also plausible.
The assertion that stock-keepers offered Aborigines poisoned flour
is quite a different matter. Like Ryan, Lloyd Robson has no doubt
this occurred. ‘Another method of killing the people of Van Die-
men’s Land,’ Robson writes, ‘was to poison them.’ For both authors,
this claim derives solely from Robinson’s report of a conversation
with another superintendent of the Van Diemen’s Land Company,
George Robson. However, the diary entry does not say quite what
they claim. Here it is in full:
In the course of conversation Mr Robson said that he had proposed to the
shepherds at Surrey Hills to give them some poison to use for the de-
ion of the hyaena [Tasmanian tiger]. The men said that they did not
panoa then but if Mr R would let them have some in the summer
e d find a use for it. He asked them why they should find a use
bd in the summer more than now. They said, Oh, Sir, we will poison
he mative? dogs’. Mr È took it away with him, their object, he said,
being to poison the natives by putting us in their flour &c. No doubt
iniareede have been destroyed in this way.’
In other words, there was no poisoned flour actually offered to the
ives, as Ryan and Robson claim, only a suspicion the poison
natives, d for that purpose. This passage is not only indicative of
might vae ' manipulation of their sources but also of Robinson’s
these mn exaggeration of the violence done to the Aborigines. *No
comp dreds have been destroyed this way,' he speculated on the
doubt hun ya more than one man’s interpretation of what was, at
a eee statement of what his convict shepherds might
ae anything they actually had done.
Robinson, diary, 13 September 1830, Friendly Mission, p 210
m oio ei diary, 25 September 1830, Friendly Mission, p 219
” Plomley, Friendly Mission, p 239 n 165 a
” Robinson, diary, 8 August 1830, Friendly Mission, p 196
EIGHT: CAPE GRIM AND THE CREDIBILITY OF THE CONCILIATOR 275
THE MASSACRES AT THE WESTERN MARSHES
Ryan's claim about the 40th Regiment killing ten Aborigines at the
Western Marshes is based on a series of stories recounted to Robinson
bva man named Punch, an ex-convict stockman he met in Septem-
b 1830 at the run of Captain Malcolm Laing Smith in the Western
Marshes. This region lay between the Western (Meander) River and
the Western Tiers. Its only town at the time was Westbury, founded
in 1828, with Deloraine planned but not yet settled. Punch, who
lived with a half-caste Aboriginal woman by whom he had two chil-
dren, accompanied Robinson for a day and a night, guiding him
through the district and giving him a potted history of Aboriginal-
settler conflict. Robinson regarded him as a valuable informant:
He entertained me with relating his history. He knew of every slaughter
of the natives that had occurred at the Western Marshes since it was first
settled.
The diary records two passages of atrocities in the Western
Marshes, as recalled by Punch. In the first passage, Punch claimed a
man named Lyons and some others once drove ‘a tribe of natives’
into a small lagoon at Middle Plains on the Western Marshes and shot
several. They then drove the rest to the foot of Ritchie’s Sugarloaf
and shot the remainder except for an old man and a woman who
begged for mercy. At the Long Swamp, someone named either
‘Murray or Murphy and two others’ also shot ‘several’ Aborigines.”
However, neither of these incidents figures in the archival record,
and Punch appears to be the sole repository of knowledge about
them. Ryan, Robson and Reynolds all repeat these tales as if there
was no doubt about their reliability.” Indeed, after recounting the
Long Swamp killings, Robson indignantly informs his readers: ‘There
is no evidence that any such monsters were punished." However,
both stories were questionable. In his edition of Robinson’s diaries,
which all three historians use as their source, Brian Plomley says he
could not find anyone named Lyons at the Western Marshes at the
time, nor could he identify either a Murray or a Murphy in the dis-
trict either.” The strongest reason to doubt the first of these two tales
was the number of Aborigines involved. For reasons given in the pre-
vious section about the limitations of the muskets of the day, the idea
^ Robinson, diary, 9 April 1832, Friendly Mission, 6 April 1832, pp 596, 687
n 23, 24
” Robinson, diary, 24 September 1830, Friendly Mission, p 218
™ Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 141; Robson, History of Tasmania, Vol I, p
227, Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 79
' Robson, History of Tasmania, Vol I, p 227
“ Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp 1035, 1038
276 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
that a handful of whites could force a whole ‘tribe’ or band, that js
anything from ten to fifty people, into a lagoon and shoot them 3t
will cannot be taken seriously. It is even harder to believe the
remainder would remain passive enough to be driven to another
location where they could be killed too. The Long Swamp story is
less unbelievable but only because of its almost complete lack of
detail.
The second passage of atrocities told by Punch was much longer.
Both Ryan and Robson repeat its details in their narratives. Robin-
son’s diary recorded:
Numerous massacres have been committed here among the unprotected
natives. Gibson’s stockkeeper, like all other stockkeepers, has massacred
the natives. On one occasion he ripped up a man’s belly with his knife.
He says the blacks came to his hut. He was alone and, not knowing they
was there, he went out and the blacks got between him and his hut
(query: how could the natives approach the hut without the shepherd’s
dog barking?) [This was Robinson’s query.] He could not get back for his
gun. A native threw a spear at him, missed and came towards him. He
took out a long knife he had in a case by his side and ripped up his belly
and ran away. Another native threw a spear at him and missed. He then
run to Stocker’s and at night, seeing their fires, they went out and shot
nine of the natives. Punch said that when the half-caste women lived with
Cubbitt she assisted in killing natives; and that on one occasion a party of
the 40th killed nine or ten — one of the soldiers told Punch never to kill
the poor natives for ever since he has done he has been unhappy. Also
said that Knight, the stockkeeper who was afterwards killed by the natives
near Simpsons Plains, deserved it; it was a judgement upon him, as he
used to kill the natives for sport."
This is quite a series of charges. It recalls the killing of at least
twenty Aborigines and says that, as well as Gibson's stock-keeper, all
the stockmen on the Western Marshes had massacred the natives, in
some cases simply for sport. It says the 40th Regiment was involved
in a major incident and names the stock-keeper Knight of Simpsons
Plains, who was killed in retribution. There is enough detail here to
follow up in the more formal historical records, which is something
that neither Ryan nor Robson bothered to do. In particular, the "n
about the action by the 40th Regiment should have left some docu-
mentary trace.
If you pursue these claims in the archives you find that, apart from
one incident, the killing of William Knight by Aborigines in 1827
there is no record of any of them. Moreover, the most dramatic of all
the above stories above reveals how unreliable a witness Punch on
His tale about how Gibson’s stock-keeper went out with sonics
7 A obinson, diary, 25 September 1830, Friendly Mission, p 219
EIGHT: CAPE GRIM AND THE CREDIBILITY OF THE CONCILIATOR 277
com Stocker's hut, found an Aboriginal campsite at night, and shot
mne of its occupants, is inherently implausible. Anyone who has read
pnmary source accounts of what happened during real attempts to
rush camps at night will find the story unbelievable. Even Henry
Reynolds warns his readers about the difficulties involved:
It was a method attempted many times, but the chances of failure were
high. The frontiersman needed to approach a camp without being heard
cither by the Aborigines or their dogs and get close enough to fire. Dur-
ing night attacks the gunpowder often became damp from the dew and
wouldn't ignite. The best chance of success was with a small party but this
had limited firepower. Four men would only manage four shots at best, at
obscure targets. The chance of reloading in the dark and shooting again
were minimal.’
The one record we do have of a white raid on a black camp in the
Western Marshes confirms Reynolds’s account in almost every detail.
The day after William Knight was killed in June 1827, Corporal John
Shiners of the 40th Regiment led a local police constable and three
stockmen from Gibson’s property to recover the body and pursue the
offenders. An hour before sunset they saw the smoke of the native
camp near Laycock’s Falls and hid nearby in a hollow tree until
between seven and eight o’clock that evening. They crept to within
thirty or forty yards of the camp and then rushed towards the fires.
They could only get off three shots — one of the guns misfired —
before the Aborigines ‘immediately disappeared amongst some scrub
and ferns’. Next morning, they found no bodies but deduced that one
native had been wounded because there was a trail of blood in the
footprints of one man.” Punch’s claim that, under the same condi-
tions, two or three convict stock-keepers could shoot dead nine Abo-
rigines would persuade only the credulous.
Another reason to doubt these atrocities lies in the documentary
record that we do have about conflict between Aborigines and settlers
in the Western Marshes. In the five years from 1827 to 1831, Punch’s
employer, Malcolm Laing Smith, who was the police magistrate for
the region, made a total of seventeen reports about Aborigines in his
jurisdiction. In 1827, he reported that four stockmen, including
Knight, had been killed in separate incidents, but after that there were
no white deaths, Between 1828 and 1831 he reported another thir-
teen incidents, mainly of robbery. In three of these cases stockmen
were assaulted or severely injured by Aborigines. Included in the
' Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 80
. Depositions by Corporal John Shiners and Constable Thomas Williams,
4) June 1827, AOT CSO 1/316/7578, pp 31-3, 34-6
278 THE FABRICATION oF ABORIGINAL History
robberies were incidents at Gibson’s and his own run in the Western
Marshes, `?
However, his reports verified very few shootings of Aborigines by
whites. In one of the assaults on stockmen at Whitefoord Hills, north
of Deloraine, the badly injured man, George King, said he fired on
his attackers and thought he shot two. He stabbed another with a
stiletto, But when a rescue party arrived at the scene soon after, they
found blood on the ground ‘but we could see nothing of them dead
or alive’.*' In late June 1827, Thomas Baker, the overseer of Thomas
Ritchie’s run at the Western Marshes found himself surrounded by
what he thought amounted to ‘two hundred black native people’. He
escaped after killing one of those who pursued him.”
If Punch is to be believed, this must mean that, instead of dutifully
recording all clashes between whites and blacks, Laing Smith and oth-
ers in authority must have concealed the great majority of them. This
would have been a difficult task because, according to Punch, every
stock-keeper in the district had massacres to his credit. The Western
Marshes must have been saturated in Aboriginal blood. Of all these
murders, however, not a word leaked out and ex-convict Punch
remained sole keeper of the dark truth. This is not a credible scenario.
It was far more likely that the paucity of documentary records about
conflict in the Western Marshes was itself evidence there was very
little to report.
Indeed, the documentation we have of injuries to colonists would
appear to confirm this. While 1827 was obviously a bad year, with
four stockmen killed, the fact that only three were wounded over the
succeeding four years indicates that, at a time when other districts
experienced a marked increase in hostilities, the Western Marshes was
one of the least violent regions of the colony. If a larger number of
80 Malcolm Laing Smith, Reports of the murders and depredations
committed by the Aborigines in the Police District of Norfolk Plains etc,
AOT CSO 1/316/7578, pp 803—7
81 Phillips to Laing Smith, 21 April 1830, indecipherable to Laing Smith, 26
April 1830, bound with Laing Smith to Burnett, AOT CSO 1/316/7578,
pp 489-500
*2 Deposition from Henry Smith, Mulgrave to Colonial Secretary, 26 June
1827, AOT CSO 1/316/7578, p 24. Brian Plomley’s 1992 survey of clashes
between Aborigines and settlers listed another Aboriginal assault on Ritchie’s
property in November 1828 about which Plomley made the notation ‘more
killed’ (Aboriginal /Settler Clash, p 73). This was in the column where he
normally recorded the killing of Aborigines, so it seems to be sa
"ae re ying that yet
morc blacks were killed in this incident. However, if
ent. How you check the original
police record it actually says ‘mare killed’, or in full: ‘a valuable mare killed
at the above mentioned stock hut’; Laing Smith, Reports of the murders etc
AOT CSO 1/216/7578, p 805 3
EIGHT: CAPE GRIM AND THE CREDIBILITY OF THE CONCILIATOR 279
white stockmen had been killed or wounded by Aborigines, then a
higher reciprocal Aboriginal death toll would be more plausible. But
in the absence of the former, historians should have been much more
sceptical of uncorroborated tales about ‘numerous massacres’ of the
‘unprotected natives’,
THE KILLINGS BY THE 40TH REGIMENT
Punch’s account of the 40th Regiment killing nine or ten men in the
district, especially his comment about one of the soldiers regretting it
afterwards, had, on the face of it, a ring of truth. However, the way
that troops were deployed in the Western Marshes at the time should
have raised questions in the diarist’s mind.
Robinson himself observed and recorded how troops were
stationed in outlying districts like this. There was a small garrison
built at Westbury in 1828 but, beyond this, the ranks were broken up
into ones and twos and distributed among the settlers, with the
soldiers boarding at and guarding the more substantial local
properties. When Robinson arrived in the district on 24 September
1830, Punch took him to Captain William Moriarty’s farm. Captain
Moriarty had gone to Launceston, leaving his young wife and child at
home with the two soldiers who were stationed there.? In 1827, only
one soldier, Corporal Shiners, had been available in his district to
pursue William Knight’s killers. Instead of another soldier, he took
with him Police Constable Thomas Williams and three local
stockmen. This was all that ‘a party of the 40th Regiment’ amounted
to in this district at the time. The impression given by Punch’s story,
that there was a sizeable troop of soldiers in the district who might
have had the numbers to shoot ten Aborigines, is quite misleading.
As Chapter Five recorded, ten Aborigines were killed in 1828 near
Tooms Lake by soldiers of the 40th Regiment in pursuit of the killers
of four stockmen in the Oatlands district in the east of the colony.
But this party had quite a different composition to any that could be
8 Robinson, diary, 24 September 1830, Friendly Mission, p 218. Henry
Reynolds denies that troops were stationed in ones and twos, arguing that
*various detachments could not be broken up into small enough units to be
used throughout their areas of operation because that would allow private
soldiers to escape the scrutiny of their officers’: Fate of a Free People, pp 101-
4. The fact is, however, this is what actually happened throughout most of
the north of the colony, in the territory on both sides of the Tamar. To the
east of Launceston, soldiers were stationed at all the out-station huts:
Robinson, diary, 14 April 1831, Friendly Mission, p 341. At Norfolk Plains in
1831, two soldiers assigned to the farm of David Lambe and Major Thomas
Bell were attacked by a party of Aborigines: Hobart Town Courier, 26 March
1431, p 2
280 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL History
raised in the Western Marshes. It comprised nine soldiers, two field
police constables and one volunteer, a formidable enough
make credible a death toll of this size." In fact, Punch's story more
than likely had no local origin at all but derived from this same inci-
dent at Tooms Lake, a military exploit that no doubt did the rounds
of frontier yarns in most districts of the colony for years afterwards.
In short, the shocking history Robinson heard of massacres in the
Western Marshes turns out to be questionable in almost every detail.
We might be able to understand Punch’s motives, being a man living
at an isolated outpost trying to both entertain and impress a eo
who was obviously eager for stories of this kind. However, when
academic historians like Ryan and Robson glibly repeat the same
: aa h : of any
material as if it were undeniable truth, their abandonment y
critical standard is inexcusable.
force to
DEATH OF QUAMBY THE RESISTANCE LEADER
Before finishing with the level of detail needed to properly puo
claims of this kind, let us consider another example of how aca Fas
historians have used R obinson's diaries. This is his story of h n
of the Aboriginal leader, Quamby. Like the story of the SWIVE 7
this was a tale Robinson said he heard from the Van Diemen E cue
Company surveyor, Henry Hellyer. Robinson wrote: A n odd
named Quamby had disputed the land occupied by the d ES
that he had successfully driven them off, but he was afterwards e
with the others. Ryan and Robson both repeat the tale. pe pis
to Ryan: ‘In July [1830] the Pallitore disputed territory occupie y
stockkeepers and successfully drove them off. A short time later iheit
leader, Quamby, was shot. Robson says much the same: 'An
Aborigine named Quamby disputed the land occupied by the
Europeans and repelled them though afterwards he was killed. This
area became lethal to the Aborigines.’ 87
On the edge of the Western Tiers, to the south of Deloraine, there
is a striking basalt peak known
that it was named
* Hobart Town Courier, 13 December 1828, p2
8 Robinson, diary, 12 August 1830, Friendly Mission, p 198
* Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanian
s, p 141
*' Robson, History of Tasmania, Vol I, p 226
EIGHT: CAPE GRIM AND THE CREDIBILITY OF THE CONCILIATOR 281
1J
Hobart Town Courier on 14 March 1829. According to the newspaper,
the name derived from an early incident near the bluff
Uhe hill is said to have obtained its name from the circumstance of a black
native who was found near it by a party of men in quest of kangaroos in
the early periods of the colony, when other food could not be obtained.
The native being called upon to stop, and one of the party presenting his
irelock at him, is said to have fallen on his knees, calling out Quamby!
qian! That is in the native language, mercy, mercy or spare me, spare
me."
In other words, *quamby' was not the name of a man but an ex-
pression of the language. This version of the story, which predates
Robinson’s diary entry by more than a year, was then taken up and
published in the Hobart Town Almanack for 1830.9 From there, it
made its way into James Bonwick's 1870 history, The Last of the Tas-
manians. Bonwick wrote:
Quamby's Bluff, an eastern spur of the great central highlands of the
island, curling up with its crest as if torn by violence from the Tier, was so
called from a poor hunted creature there falling upon his knees, and
shrieking out: *Quamby, Quamby — mercy, mercy.”
The fact that Robinson’s version was highly questionable was
something both Ryan and Robson were well aware of when they
Wrote their own accounts. In a footnote to Robinson’s diary, at the
point where he tells this tale, his editor Brian Plomley points out that
Bonwick had a very different account in his book.” He then repeated
verbatim the passage from Bonwick quoted above. On seeing this,
both historians should have dropped the story altogether. But because
it suited their political line to portray a native resistance fighter val-
iantly struggling against incursions onto his land, they went ahead and
simply pretended the Bonwick version did not exist.
It is worth adding that none of these sources, not even Robinson,
supports Ryan’s claim that a man named Quamby was leader of the
Pallitore group or that any of the events happened in July 1830.
These are her own original contributions to the myth.
^" Hobart Town Courier, 14 March 1829, p 1
** Hobart "Town Almanack for the Year 1830, James Ross, Hobart, 1830, p 53
” James Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians, Sampson Low, Son and
Marston, London, 1870, p 62
? Plomley, Friendly Mission, p 256 n 145
282 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
THE BLACK PERSPECTIVE ON FRONTIER VIOLENCE
There is scarcely one among them but what has some monstrous cruelty
to relate which had been committed upon some of their kindred or
nation or people.
— George Augustus Robinson, diary, 14 December 18317
If the stock-keepers who spoke to Robinson were so unreliable, what
about the stories he heard from the Aborigines? When his diaries
were published, Tasmanian historians believed that Robinson’s ex-
tensive notes about what the Aborigines had told him would open up
a new, previously unheard Aboriginal perspective on the frontier.
While they have subsequently mined the diaries for anecdotes, so far
none have tried to summarize the total picture they portray. This
chapter attempts to provide such an overview.
At the end of this chapter is Table Eight, which lists every story of
white violence against Aborigines contained in Robinson’s diaries
from 1829 to 1839, including those told by both white and black in-
formants. Where information was provided by Aborigines it is identi-
fied as such, so it is possible to see just what Robinson learnt from
them. In each case, the location in the diaries is identified and the
report is assessed in terms of degrees of plausibility. In the table, every
case where an Aboriginal eyewitness claimed to have seen one of his
compatriots killed is accepted as plausible, unless there is other good
evidence to doubt it.
Despite the expectations of historians, the diaries actually record
only a small number of incidents of violent conflict reported by the
natives themselves. Table Eight lists twenty such accounts, both plau-
sible and implausible, out of more than two thousand printed pages of
the two published editions of the diaries, Friendly Mission (1829—34)
and Weep In Silence (1834—9). If you take those reports by Aborigines
which Table Eight assesses as plausible and count how many killings
are to be found within them, the death toll amounts to thirty-three.”
Plainly, this is not a portrait of a hidden frontier dripping with blood.
This is also underlined by the fact that more than half the incidents
recalled by the Aborigines were also reported on the white side of the
frontier either in official documents, journals or the local press. The
black perspective about the scale of violence, in other words, was not
radically different from the white.
7? Robinson, diary, 14 December 1851, Friendly Mission, p 553
2 For the reasons given earlier in this chapter, this tally records six killed at
Cape Grim in 1828 rather than the thirty Robinson claimed the sealers'
women told him near Robbins Island.
(ait... . umm LLL
(————
The Conciliation, by Benjamin Duterrau, 1840. Robinson is surrounded by the Aboriginal members of his
expeditions, including Truganini, two figures to the right of him, with her arms and leg raised. (Tasmanian
Museum and Art Gallery)
ISLAND
GREAT
y
Moro oa! Dunkin Moke
di ^ abot here
i A:
A^ E
> *
Z Dire ps themes hury a“
aA Li zy d
E lan uad Sad Toran he
pery sireng tidia.
EC
*
Vareaux Islands, 1832, (detail) by George Woodward (Dixson Library, State Library of New South imos )
s PN
M M EL)
SQ A
Residence of the Aborigines, Flinders Island, by John Skinner Prout, 1846 (Allport Library and Museum :
Fine Arts, State Library of Tasmania) i
‘Quamby’s Bluff from Westbury' by William Gore Elliston, 1838. The peak rises out of the plains south ¢
, í Aboriginal resistance leader’, this was tl l of 5
ite the legend of ‘Quamby, the $ t 5 he most peaceful o
V MI Hee between 1827 and 1831. (Tasmaniana Library, State Library of Tasmania)
EIGHT: CAPE GRIM AND THE CREDIBILITY OF THE CONCILIATOR 283
THE HAND IN THE TRAP
One ot the difficulties in producing an accurate tally from the diaries
is that Aboriginal witnesses, just like their white counterparts, did not
always tell the truth. For instance, Robinson’s Aboriginal informants
claimed that in October 1830 on the Launceston Road three of their
number were killed by soldiers, of whom they killed two in return.”
For reasons discussed in Chapter Six, this was plainly a story the
Aborigines invented.
Another example was a diary entry made on Flinders Island in
December 1835. Robinson recorded a conversation with the former
Oyster Bay chief, Tongerlongerter, about how his forearm came to
be amputated. Henry Reynolds accepts at face value what the diary
recorded. He reproduces this entry verbatim as an example of another
merciless attack by white colonists:
He said he was with his tribe in the neighbourhood of the Den Hill and
that there was men cutting wood. The men were frightened and run
away. At night they come back with plenty of white men (it was
moonlight), and they looked and saw our fires. Then they shot at us, shot
my arm, killed two men and three women. The women they beat on the
head and killed them. They then burnt them in the fire.”
However, Tongerlongerter had earlier given other people a quite
different version of events. According to the Quaker cleric George
Washington Walker, who visited Flinders Island in July 1832, the
Aborigines told him the arm was lost when caught in a rat trap set by
a white colonist.”
This version had more than verbal support. When the event took
place in April 1830, the macabre nature of the story ensured it was
publicized in two Hobart newspapers. A stock-keeper at Little Swan
Port on Oyster Bay had placed not a rat trap but a much larger animal
trap in his food store when he left home. When he returned he found
the door open and his stock disturbed. A trail of blood led him to a
spot where 'the instrument was found with the hand still fixed in its
iron grasp'. To escape, the trapped thief had wrenched his arm out,
^* Robinson, diary, 1 November 1830, Friendly Mission, p 263
^ Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 81. Original is in Robinson, diary, 19
December 1835, in N. J. B. Plomley (ed.), Weep in Silence: A History of the
Flinders Island Settlement, Blubber Head Press, Hobart, 1987, p 325
^ Plomley, Weep in Silence, pp 325, 627 n 4. Reynolds tells this story as if
there were no doubts about it, even though the editor's annotation called it
into question, While Plomley doubts that a rat trap could have done so
much damage, the two contemporary newspaper reports (next footnote)
called the device a ‘large vermin trap’ and a ‘man trap’. It was probably the
size of a trap used today for foxes and feral dogs.
284 THE FABRICATION OF AR IRIGINAL HISTORY
leaving his hand behind." At the
identification that Tongerlongerter was the one, but he was the only
Oyster Bay Aborigine ever recorded afterwards with an amputated
arm. When the group of twenty-six Big River and Oyster Bay
Aborigines were brought into Hobart by Robinson in January 1832,
Tongerlongerter was among them. The Hobart Town Courier
specifically identified him: ‘One of the men has lost his arm, being
the same who about 2 years ago was caught in the rat trap that
happened to be set in the flour cask in Mr Adey's stock-keepers
hat,”
time, there was no positive
James Bonwick later claimed a ‘Government official’ had told him
about ‘a certain chief on Flinders Island who had lost his hand this
way." Robinson is the only one who claims the arm was lost by gun-
shot, whereas all the other independent sources each tell the same
story about it being lost in the trap. Even Brian Plomley who, in his
1966 edition of Robinson’s diaries accepts Tongerlongerter's story as
told to Robinson, admits in his 1971 supplement to the diaries that,
after the man had died, 'the postmortem findings seem more in
accord with the lacerations caused by tearing a hand from a mantrap,
than from a gunshot wound. Robinson was aok often deceived by the
natives, but perhaps he was in this instance.’ 7
In cases like this where there are genuine doubts about an Aborigi-
nal informant’s veracity, Table Eight ranks the source as implausible.
THE DEATH TOLL FROM ROBINSON’S DIARIES
When it comes to assessing the total number of deaths that Robinson
recorded from both black and white informants, the historians of the
orthodox school do not produce a head count but fall back on theto-
ric and unsupported generalisations. The worst offender is, again,
Lyndall Ryan who is actually a far greater amplifier of violence than
Robinson ever dared to be. At one point she writes:
Even if only half the stories Robinson heard were true, then it is possible
to account for seven hundred shot. This is about three-quarters of the
Aboriginal population in the settled districts. "°
” Hobart Town Courier, 1 May 1830, p 2, Colonial Times, 30 April 1830, p 2.
% Hobart Town Courier, 14 January 1832, p 2; For Tongerlongerter as one of
the captives, see Plomley, Friendly Mission, p 572
” Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians, p 111
"? He also reported the story earlier in his diary, 3 July 1832, Friendly
Mission, pp 625-6 l
“ N, J, B, Plomley (ed.), Friendly Mission, A Supplement, Tasmanian
Historical Research Association, Hobart, 1971, p15
1 Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 175
oS
BIGHT: CAPE GRIM AND THE CREDIBILITY OF THE CONCILIATOR 285
This claim is completely baseless. It gives the appearance of deriv-
ing from an assessment of how many killings Robinson recorded in
his diaries. But Ryan has plainly not undertaken the task she pretends
to have done. The diaries’ stories about Aboriginal deaths amount to
nothing like the seven hundred she asserts, let alone the fourteen
hundred she implies.
The figures are not difficult to calculate. The diaries’ editor, Brian
Plomley, has provided a comprehensive index, which any researcher
can use to check how many stories about killings they contain. In
Friendly Mission, the index entry, Aborigines, Tasmanian: white abuse of
natives: killing and mutilation of natives, has references to incidents
described on sixty separate pages.' In my own review of the diaries,
I found another seven references to killings that the indexer missed.
This does not mean, though, that there are sixty-seven separate inci-
dents discussed in the diaries. There are some incidents that are
recorded at more than one place, including one that is discussed on
eight different pages and gets a separate index reference each time."
In Weep in Silence, there is no index to such incidents but only one
passage about killings of Aborigines by whites.* Overall, the diaries
contain a total of fifty-three separate stories told by either black or
white informants about Aborigines being killed by colonists.
To calculate the total number of Aborigines killed in these fifty-
three separate incidents requires some estimation. In most cases,
Robinson recorded the exact number he said he was told. In others,
though, he only recorded that ‘several’ were killed, and in some cases
he recorded a killing but did not indicate a quantity. If, wherever he
recorded ‘several’ or ‘plenty’ or left the number unspecified, we allo-
cate an average death toll of five, we can obtain a reasonably reliable
sum. Instead of the fourteen hundred implied by Ryan, even if all
Robinson’s stories were true, the highest total of Aborigines killed by
whites would be 188. However, within this total we need to distin-
guish between those reports that were credible and those that were
not.
Some of these killings were well-known at the time. They were
not only told verbally in the colony but were also reported in the
press and contemporary government documents. Others, however, as
'? Plomley, Friendly Mission, p 1060
10 This was Robinson’s complaint about the killing of four Aborigines by
Alexander McKay, a former member of his Friendly Mission party. McKay
became a rival of Robinson in the business of *conciliating' Aborigines. The
killings in which McKay was involved (actually, of three natives rather than
four) became an obsession for Robinson: see Friendly Mission, pp 565, 583,
588, 603, 607, 685—6, 691, 695
"5 Plomley, Weep in Silence, pp 325, 627 n 4
286 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
even Robinson himself acknowledged, were much less reliable. Some
of the stories told by the Aborigines were so lacking in detail that
they do not constitute information that anyone could trust. For ex-
ample, the diary of 13 September 1830 records: 'At night conversed
with the natives on the subject of cruelty towards the aborigines. In-
formed me a female aborigine was kept by a stockkeeper for about a
month, after which she was taken out and shot." ^ There is no other
information given about this incident: no date, no location, no tribe,
no names of victim or culprit or informant, not even the claim that
the informant knew the woman concerned. It is not possible to treat
a report with as little detail as this as a credible record of a killing.
Moreover, some stories of this kind resemble others told elsewhere in
the diary that are more specific and so to record the former would
probably be double-counting. In Table Eight, stories like this are
listed as implausible.
Another major source was stories told to Robinson by the settlers
and stock-keepers he met on his travels. Some of these also had so
little detail they were in the same category as the above; others were
plainly examples of bravado or tales told for their shock effect. For
example, on 29 March 1832, the diary recorded: A gentleman the
other day who was in company with Captain Moriarty said that he
has heard it was a practice with the stockkeepers to get the men into
the huts and cut off their penis and testicles with a knife, when they
would run a few yards and fall down dead." This tale is nothing but
an unspecific, third-hand rumour, again with no names, no dates, no
locations or any other detail to seriously count as historical evidence.
Moreover, it is a highly implausible story because, as Chapter Ten
shows, Aborigines so easily evaded capture that it would have been
virtually impossible for stock-keepers to get them into their huts to
do this to them. This report tells us of the low opinion some of the
gentlemen colonists had of convict stockmen but provides nothing
reliable about what actually happened to the blacks. Similarly, on 14
April 1831, Robinson recorded: "Williams the pilot told Captain
Jackson that the sealers have been known to burn their women
alive.” Again, there are no names, dates or locations to what was
merely third-hand hearsay. . , -— :
In Table Eight, each of Robinson’s fifty-three incidents is ranked
in terms of plausibility. As noted above, in most cases where an Abo-
rigine reported a killing to which he claimed to have been an eyewit-
ness, it is accepted as plausible, as long as there was no good evidence
1% Robinson, diary, 13 September 1830, Friendly Mission, p 210
107 Robinson, diary, 29 March 1832, Friendly Mission, p 595
108 Robinson, diary, 14 April 1831, Friendly Mission, p 342
ETN 0 — — RABBIT
EIGHT: CAPE GRIM AND THE CREDIBILITY OF THE CONCILIATOR 287
against it and even if there was nothing else to corroborate it. In other
words, if the table is biased it is towards a higher rather than a lower
tally. A number of the incidents indexed by Plomley were cases
where Aborigines were wounded or maimed, not killed, so they have
not been counted as plausible accounts of deaths. For instance, in July
1831 the Aboriginal eyewitness, Woorrady, recounted a story about
blacks being shot at many years earlier. Although he said one man
was wounded in the arm, he did not actually say anyone was killed,
so this anecdote is labelled ‘implausible’, even though there is no
reason to doubt the man was actually wounded.'” In other cases
where some deaths did occur, but where I have argued elsewhere that
Robinson’s figures were inflated, the lower figure is accepted as plau-
sible — such as at Cape Grim where he claimed thirty but I argue for
six. Taking these adjustments into account, Table Eight records the
total number of plausible killings of Aborigines reported in Robin-
son's diaries by both colonists and Aborigines themselves as fifty.
This is, of course, a much lower figure than we have been led to
believe. Even if it could be shown that I have missed some incidents
or that others deserve more credibility than I have given them, the
total picture would not change very much. No one is going to dis-
cover the hundreds of additional killings required to match the or-
thodox legend of a blood-soaked frontier. The fact is, no matter who
performs the tally, the diaries will be found to provide a record of
only a small number of violent deaths. In other words, far from sub-
stantiating Robinson’s conclusion that tales of ‘monstrous cruelty’
could be told by every Tasmanian Aborigine, his own writings do
nothing of the kind. Instead, they support the opinion presented at
the start of this chapter by his contemporary, James Calder, who said
that Robinson had ‘grieviously exaggerated’ the issue and ‘he gives
not the smallest proof of it’.
'" Robinson, diary, 7 July 1831, Friendly Mission, p 373
TABLE EIGHT: ABORIGINAL KILLINGS BY COLONISTS RECORDED BY
G. A. ROBINSON, 1829-1839
——— MM ——————————————————
Date Place Number Identity of Circumstances Source Reliability Reference
claimed killer(s)
killed
Se a ee EE ILLND LLL C MCCC MMC CINE ILL LXU£Za—]aAi1V —— entm
N/a* Recherche 1 Soldier Conflict Eye Plausible Friendly
Bay over witness Mission
kangaroo pp 84,
hunt 713,
807
N/a N/a N/a N/a Man had Second Highly Im- Friendly
trophies of hand plausible Mission
ears and p 88
noses of
those slain
N/a Cape Grim 1 VDL Tried to get Second Plausible Friendly
Company native hand (Aborig.)** Mission
stockmen women into ‘Several’ p 181
their hut. claimed by
Native men Chambler-
objected. lain p 175
implausible
: VDL See Chapter Partici- Thirty im- Friendl
Febu- Cape Gim wA Company 8 pants plausible but Mission
Gia stockmen six plausible pp 175,
(Aborig.) 183,
196
Alexander Unprovoked Second Highly Friend:
August ig Emu Pay ; Goldie aoea TT hani Plausible Mion.
1822. and VDL native pp 192,
Co woman 235,
stockmen 603
Edward Retaliation Eye- Plausible Friendl
c 1827 Eddystone E Mansell, by sealers for witness (Aborig.) M
Point Jack Wil- natives and sec- pp 192-
liams, killing four ond hand 3, 249,
John others 403,
Riddle, 437 n
Thomas 16
Tucker
y 19 Paddy Shot them Second Highly Im- Friendly
N/a Ine a Heagon, with a hand plausible Mission
5 : stockman swivel gun pp 197-
Westbury A
ae
toep sgi
"TTE
VLR —— án.
c 1820
N/a
N/a
N/a
EIGHT: CAPE GRIM AND THE CREDIBILITY OF THE Cx YNCILIATOR 289
Pha Number Identity of Cirumstances Source Reliability Reference
daimed killer(s)
killed
Western l N/a Native Second Highly Im- Friendly
Marshes leader hand plausible Mission
(Quamby resisted p 198
Blut) whites but
later killed
Epping | VDL Co During Second Implausible Friendly
Forest stockmen native hand Mission
attack, p 202
stockmen
shot a
woman
Mount 2 Sealers Raided tribe Second Plausible Friendly
Cameron to abduct handand (Aborig.) Mission
West women and eye- pp 185,
shot men witness 202,
who resisted 203-4
N/a 1 Stock- Kept her for Second Highly Im- Friendly
keeper amonthand hand plausible Mission
then shot (Aborig.) p 210
her
N/a 1 Thomas Enticed Second Plausible Friendly
John of native with hand Mission
VDL Co damper and p 210
then stabbed
him
N/a 1 N/a Skull found Supposi- Highly Im- Friendly
near tion plausible Mission
stockyard p 217
Western 3 Stock- N/a Second Implausible Friendly
Marshes keeper hand Mission
p 217
Middle ‘a tribe’ Lyons Drove tribe Second Implausible Friendly
Plains and and into lagoon hand Mission
Ritchie’s others and shot p 218
Sugarloaf several,
went to R’s
Sugarloaf
and shot the
rest
Long Several Murray N/a Second Implausible Friendly
Swamp, or hand Mission
Western Murphy p 218
Marshes and
others
290 THE FABRICATIC :
RICATION OF ABORIGINAI History
Date Place Number Identity of Circumstances 1
claimed killer(s) 5 : Source Reliability Ref
illed SUN
N/ W m , :
a is 10 Gibson's Retaliation Second Highly |
es stock- for attack on hand e
keeper v- plausible
N/a Western 9or10 Party of N/a Second Highly I
Marshes 40th Eny ims ieni
; hand plausible 2:
Regiment SH
p 219
Ba Kents 1 Bob N/a Third Plausible
Group Is Gambell, hand
sealer
Gs Piper 1 ‘white N/a Third Implausible, ^ Fre
1830 River men hand (see FM p
436 n 9)
N/a Piper Several N/a Bones on Supposi- Implausible Friendly
River banks of tion Mistion
river p 248
N/a Woody 1 James Native Second Plausible Friendly
Island Everitt, woman hand Mission
sealer would not pp 249,
get mutton- 279
birds for
him
Octo- Launceston 3 Soldiers Killed while Partici- Implausible Friendly
ber Road returning pants —see Ch. 6 Mission
1830 from dd (Aborig.) p 263
intertri
war at
central lakes
area
Octo- Break 2 Special Killed while Second Highly Friendly
ber o'Day constables resisting hand Plausible — Mission
1830 Plains arrest for see Ch. 6 pp 276
murder 284,
285
N/a Bruny 1 Soldiers N/a Second Plausible Friendly
Island hand (Aborig.) Mission
although pp 285.
location was — 439,
Bothwell: 506
Plomley,
Clash p 76
N/a Woody 1 James N/a Third Implausible Friendly
Island Everitt, hand (Aborig.) Mission
sealer p 301
p eaea
nmx---—-————————Ac— a
— ——"
EIGHT: CAPE GRIM AND THE CREDIBILITY OF THE CONCILIATOR 291
LE
Lite Place Number Identity of | Circumstances Source Reliability Reference
claimed killer(s)
killed
e a ''ÜI ÀÜÁÍÀ MÀ À— MÀ
N/a North cast N/a N/a Truganini Supposi- Implausible Friendly
coast found plenty tion (Aborig.) Mission
of bones in p 301
the bush
N/a Bruny 1 ‘a white N/a Second Plausible Friendly
Island man’, hand Mission
Mere- pp 311,
dith’s 314
people
N/a Oyster Bay 1 Mr Saw him in Par- Plausible Friendly
Wade's bush and ticipant Mission
man shot him p 320
N/a George Un- Muster of Came on Second Implausible Friendly
Town specified white them at hand Mission
number men night after p 342
they visited
Mr Kneale's
farm
N/a N/a N/a Sealers Burnt Third Implausible Friendly
women alive hand Mission
p 342
N/a N/a 1 Two Tied up Eye- Plausible Friendly
stock- woman by witness Mission
keepers heels and and sec- pp 344,
left her to ond hand 346
perish
N/a N/a 1 Stock- Gave loaded Third Implausible Friendly
keeper gun to black hand Mission
who shot p 346
himself in
mouth with
it
N/a Huon Un- ‘white ‘shot the na- Eye- Plausible Friendly
River specified people’ tives’ witness (Aborig.) Mission
p 373
md Mi 2 ‘white ‘shot two Eye- Plausible Friendly
de men who blacks dead' witness (Aborig.) Mission
landed in 375
clony a boat’ tee
HOS 465 n
202
N/ N
4 N/a 1 Doctor’s Brought Third Implausible Friendly
servant backarmof hand Mission
man he had p 428
shot
c ig
292
Date
Place
Number
claimed
killed
Identity of
killer(s)
THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
Circumstances
Source
Reliability
R efere ne
a ee NNNM
N/a
N/a
N/a
N/a
N/a
c.
1830
N/a
Late
1831
East of
Campbell
Town
Eastern
Marshes
N/a
Near
Bothwell
Shannon
River
South of
Bashan
Plains
N/a
St Mary’s
Plains.
near
Hampshire
Hills
2
‘plenty’
N/a
17
4 (3)
‘some
white
men’
Stock-
keepers
Mr How-
ell’s men
Party of
white
people
Various
white
men
Alexander
McKay
and two
VDL Co
men
Attack by
armed
whites on
the native
road
N/a
Attacking
natives at
night at
their camps
Killed seven
then
followed
rest to
lagoon and
killed ten
more
N/a
After blacks
murdered
three
settlers,
pursuit party
shot into
native camp
Various tales
of atrocities
told at camp
Shot natives
during
attempt to
capture
group
Eye-
witness
Second
hand
Third
hand
Second
hand
Eye-
witness
Eye-
witness
Eye-
witness
and
second
hand
Second
hand,
third
hand
Plausible
(Aborig.)
Highly Im-
plausible
(Aborig.)
Implausible
(Aborig.)
Implausible
Plausible
Highly
Plausible
(Aborig.)
Plausible
(Aborig.)
Plausible 3
killed,
Plomley FM
p 686 n 18
Friendly
Mission
p 493
Frien dly
Mission
p 501
Friendly
Mission
p 503
Friendly
Mission
p 506
Friendly
Mission
p 522
Friendly
Mission
p 553
Vtcrrr: CAPE GRIM AND THE CREDIBILITY OF THE CONCILIATOR 293
a ————————
Dax Number Identity of Circumstances Source Reliability Reference
claimed hiller(s)
killed
Sa N/a l Stock- Shot a Third Highly Friendly
keepers woman in a hand Implausible Mission
cherry tree p 595
N N/a 2 or 3 Stock- Their Third Highly im- Friendly
keepers practice to hand plausible Mission
shoot p 595
women
N/a N/a N/a Stock- Cut off Third Highly Im- Friendly
keepers penis and hand plausible Mission
testicles of p 595
natives
N/a Pieman 1 White Shot woman Second Implausible Friendly
River men in the head hand (Aborig.) Mission
p 646
N/a Port 1 Soldier N/a Second Implausible Friendly
Davey hand (Aborig.) Mission
p 742
N/a Along west Numerous White N/a Second Highly Friendly
coast men hand Implausible Mission
(Aborig.) p 788
N/a Nile 1 Man Shot black Second Implausible Friendly
River, passing and buried hand Mission
near Ben Glover’s him in tree p 833
Lomond farm
April Litde 6 Raid on Wood Eye- Implausible. Weep in
1830 Swan Port native cutters witness Tongerlong- Silence
camp by frightened erter pp 325,
white by natives. invented the — 627 n4
settlers Returned story
and raided (Aborig.)
camp.
18 Hamilton 1 Shepherd Natives Second Highly Friendly
August attacked hand Plausible Mission
1534 shepherd pp 925-
and one shot 6
—_—
bere number of killings is ‘several’ ‘many’ or ‘a tribe’, the figure of 5 has been
alic« ated.
* N/a = not available
** Abong, = At least one of the informants was an Aborigine
294 THE FABRICATION OE ABORIGINAL History
TABLE EIGHT: TOTALS
Total number of separate incidents: 53
Maximum number of killings claimed: 188
Total number of plausible killings reported by all informants: 50
Total number of plausible killings reported by Aboriginal
informants: 33
Sources: N. J. B. Plomley (ed.), Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Joumals and
Papers of George Augustus Robinson 1829-1 834, Tasmanian Historical
Research Association, Hobart, 1966; N. J. B. Plomley (ed.), Weep in Silence:
A History of the Flinders Island Aboriginal Settlement, with the Flinders Island
Journal of George Augustus Robinson 1835-1839, Blubber Head Press, Hobart,
1987
Postscript: There may very well be incidents in Robinson's diaries that
I have missed or some I have assessed as implausible that warrant
greater credibility. If the table contains mistakes or can be shown to
be wrong I will adjust it. I will post it, together with the other tables
from this book, on my website www.sydneyline.com. If any reader
finds incidents I have overlooked, I will add them to the website
table. If anyone provides me with evidence that the interpretations I
have made here are mistaken, I will change the outcome. I can be
contacted through the email address on the website.
CHAPTER NINE
Settler opinion and the extirpation thesis,
1830-1831
Nothing is heard of at Launceston but extirpating the original inhabitants.
Cowardly beings! I question the bravery of those persons engaged in the
crusade against the natives. What can be more revolting to humanity than
to see persons going forth in battle array against that people whose land
we have usurped and upon whom we have heaped every kind of misery.
God deliver them.
— George Augustus Robinson, October 1830!
HEN George Augustus Robinson arrived in Launceston in
October 1830 at the end of the first journey of his ‘Friendly
Mission', he found the town abuzz with preparations for the Black
Line. The local military was preparing to move south and the civilian
population was readying its able-bodied men to join them. As well as
writing the above comments to his wife, he wrote in his diary:
Enquired [of three sealers] of what was doing in Launceston. Said nothing
was heard or thought of than shooting the natives ... great preparations to
£0 against the blacks; with few exceptions they are extirpationers. i
^i. f. B Plomley (ed.) Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of
aoge Augustus Robinson 1829-1834, Tasmanian Historical Research
^sw»iation, Hobart, 1966, p 435 n 6
"T P 3 TR
296 THE FABRICA TION Or ABORIGINAL Hisrory
The belie i
| F th in Diemen's Land wa, -d
terminate the ted to this d meta
r i i ? Gay, except that it b.
been expanded from Launceston to the entire colony and from B E
ber 1830 to the whole of the period of the ‘Black War’. S E
bers of the i ü
colony were of a different mind.
included the colony's most influen
Plomley said this sentiment under
tion:
The invaders clearly intended to have their own way,
natives from the country they thought of as their own; and they were
willing to kill natives, even wantonly, to achieve this end.^
that is, to clear the
Plomley claims that the government inquiry into Aboriginal affairs
in 1850, while admonishing the convicts and the natives, *was taken
up largely in whitewashing the settlers and the government. Yet
those settlers who gave evidence, he writes, *were extirpationists
almost to a man'.?
According to Plomley, one of the worst offenders was Edward
Curr, the chief agent of the largest landowner in the colony, the Van
Diemen's Land Company. 'Curr, with the Company's commercial
interests at heart, looked solely to the Company's profits; he was an
extirpationer.'Mó Sharon Morgan claims the settlers had no moral
qualms about killing Aborigines. Their actions were rationalized by
historic notions of “white supremacy’:
The long history of British imperialism affected race relations in Van
Diemen's Land. Settlers arrived in the colony with deeply ingrained
prejudices against native peoples. Englishness implied superiority; the
Natives were an irrelevance.’
? Robinson, diary, Friendly Mission, 2 and 4 October 1830
? Henry Reynolds, An Indelible Stain? The Question
History, Viking, Ringwood, 2001, p 85
* N. J. B. Plomley (ed.), Jorgen Jorgenson and the Aborigines of Van Diemen's
Land, Blubber Head Press, Hobart, 1991, p 24
* Plomley, Friendly Mission, p 98
^ Plomley, Friendly Mission, p433n2
? Sharon Morgan, Land Settlement in Earl
England, Cambridge University P
> Pp 224, 243
of Genocide in Australia "s
y Tasmania: Creating an Anti
ress, Melbourne, 1992, p 143 Tom
NINE: SETTLER OPINION AND THE EXTIRPATION THESIS 297
Morzn's chapter on relations between settlers and natives is enti-
Oed (A “Sadistic Frenzy”: European-Aboriginal Contact’. She writes:
“Trouble from the Natives was taken as a good excuse to commit atroci-
ties against them. Mass hysteria seemed to lend justification to the murder
of Aborigines. It was, to the colonists, a case of ‘us or them’.®
EVANGELICALISM AND ENLIGHTENMENT HUMANISM
On the face of it, a demand from some settlers for the extermination
of the Aborigines would not have been surprising. By 1830, some did
feel that the violence had reached an ‘us or them’ stage. That year
was by far the worst for Aboriginal assaults on settlers and their ser-
wants, Between January and mid-March, when the government in-
quiry was sitting, there were no fewer than fifty-three separate inci-
dents of either violence, robbery or harassment — one every second
day — in which a total of nine whites were killed and twelve
wounded.? There was little doubt that the Clyde River farmer John
Sherwin spoke for many settlers when he told the inquiry:
I consider the lives and property of every white inhabitant in the Colony
are endangered, and that it is consequently not safe to reside in the Inte-
rior.!?
On the other hand, a demand to exterminate the Aborigines would
not only have meant denying them the status of human beings
protected by His Majesty's laws, but would also have gone against the
predominant religious and philosophical beliefs of the time, both at
home and abroad. For contrary to the caricature presented by Sharon
Morgan, the prevailing ideas about race relations were anything but
antagonistic to the natives. The Australian colonies were founded
during the great Evangelical revival within the Church of England in
the late eighteenth century.'’ Evangelicalism was politically conserva-
tive, to the extent that it wanted to preserve the existing social hierar-
chy, but many of its expressions were socially radical. ‘It was a warm,
practical, humanitarian movement,’ one of its historians, Stuart
p Morgan, Land Settlement in Early Tasmania, p 153
* N. J. B. Plomley, The Aboriginal/Setter Clash in Van Diemen's Land 1803-
1831, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston, 1992, pp 84-8
" Minutes of the Committee for the care and treatment of the captured
Aborigines, 23 February 1830, AOT CBE/1, p6
" ‘Evangelical’ was the name of a faction within the church, so the term
should get a capital letter, even though not all authors adopt this convention.
Their main theological and political opponents were in the High Church or
Orthodox Party, although many High Church supporters emulated the
Evangelicals in philanthropic endeavour and often worked closely with
them.
298 THe FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL History
Piggin, has written, ‘which focused on com
with Word and Spirit to
Worldly success h
mitment to the world
energize that commitment?
ad been the abolition of the British trade
port of slaves in 1807, through the efforts of its leadi
Wilberforce. In the 1820s, as Van Diemen's L
growing Aboriginal problem,
de
[ts major
and trans-
ng light, William
and wrestled with its
the Evangelical movement Was
manding the complete abolition of slavery in the British Empire, an
objective it finally achieved in 1833.
In its attitude to the indigenous people of the world, Evangelical-
ism was consistent with secular English and Scottish Enlightenment
thought, which supported the unity of mankind and the belief that all
human beings had a common origin. In Australia, as in the United
States of America, the Enlightenment’s belief in human equality was
held not in opposition to Christianity but, rather, was a principle
disseminated through the churches themselves and through their
campaigns for social reform. One of the icons of the Evangelical anti-
slavery movement was a picture of a black slave with the slogan ‘Am
I not a man and a brother'.? One of the principal reasons why all the
governors of the Australian colonies from 1788 onwards were
instructed to treat the Aborigines as fully human beings was this con-
currence of Evangelicalism and Enlightenment thought. Among the
founders of both New South Wales and Van Diemen s Land, there
was an even greater concentration of Evangelical influence than
found at home in England. These colonies were positive attractions to
Evangelicals who, as Stuart Piggin has shown, saw in them HS
opportunity to make a commitment to the world in three main areas:
The vision of a reclaimed criminal class, a converted Aboriginal race, and
the islands of the South Seas evangelised from an Australian base was
large, even grand."*
In Van Diemen's Land itself, Evangelicalism remained an important
religious and social force throughout the 1820s and 1830s. Lieuten-
ant-Governor Arthur himself was, according to his biographer, a
devout and convinced evangelical’ who had already, in his previous
administration, given a practical demonstration of his beliefs when he
'2 Stuart Piggin, Evangelical Christianity in Australia: Spirit, Word and World,
Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1996, p viii
P John Gascoigne, The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, PP 148-53
^ Pigyn, Lvangelical Christianity in Australia, p vill; see also Elizabeth
Windschutde, Taste and Science: The Women of the Macleay Family 1790-
1450, Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, Sydney, 1988, pp 73-8
A en ee tut
TT TS. etc. thes eer
oe
ANON C
MN
NINECSELTEER. OPINION AND THE EXTIRPATION THESIS 299
tree the Indian. slaves of British Honduras. Arthur had been
sppomted to Van Diemen's Land by Earl Bathurst, the British Secre-
ary of State for the Colonies, a Tory who was sympathetic to
Walham Wilberforce and the Evangelicals.'^ Shortly before the Syd-
ney Archdeacon William Grant Broughton undertook to chair the
government inquiry into Aboriginal affairs in Hobart, he had
announced an Evangelical-inspired policy for the paternal care for the
lower orders of the colony, especially its convicts and Aborigines, and
a revival of missionary activities among the natives."
George Augustus Robinson had been a beneficiary of Evangelical
philanthropy as a youth in England and, in his early years in Hobart,
he became involved in organizations in the same movement, includ-
ing the Bntish and Foreign Bible Society, the Auxiliary Bible Society
and the Seamen’s Friend and Bethel Union Society.'* One of the
main reasons why Arthur gave Robinson the original job of superin-
tending the Aborigines on Bruny Island in 1829 was his promise to
take the Gospel to them, in the best Evangelical missionary tradition.
As Chapter Seven noted, Robinson often expressed the prevailing
Evangelical/Enlightenment attitude that all men were created equal:
I looked upon them as brethren not, as they have been maligned, savages.
No, they are my brethren by creation. God has made of one blood all
nations of people and I am not ashamed to call them brothers and would
to God I could call them brethren by redemption.!”
It was not only those who took the Aborigines’ side who thought
this way. In a letter to Arthur in December 1827, in which he advo-
cated arming convict stock-keepers to keep the blacks out of the
settled districts, the landowner Roderic O'Connor expressed similar
sentiments:
Religion, and the light thrown upon Europeans by the exercise of true
Christianity, that immortal Code which teaches us, *To do unto others as
we wish should be done to us,” the discussion and final abolition of the
7 A. G. L. Shaw, Sir George Arthur, Bart, 1784-1854, Melbourne University
Press, Melbourne, 1980, pp 22, 50-3
* “Henry Bathurst, Third Earl Bathurst’, Australian Dictionary of Biography,
Volume 1, A-H, 1788-1850, p 67
7 G., P. Shaw, Patriarch and Patriot: William Grant Broughton 1788-1853,
Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1978, pp 23, 41-3
* See Chapter Seven, pp 201-2. When Robinson conducted religious
services for his Aboriginal party, he usually raised the Bethel flag: diary, 3
Apr) 1831, Friendly Mission, p 335
! Robinson, diary, 15 November 1830, Friendly Mission, p 276
300 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
Slave Trade has taught us to look on all Mankind as “Friends and Broth-
.* 20
ers"?
Nonetheless, as Robinson’s statement above indicates, not every-
one shared these views and there were others who maligned the
Aborigines as 'savages'. In his recent examination of the influence of
the Enlightenment in the early Australian colonies, John Gascoigne
argues there was a tension at the time between the respectable classes
and the lower orders on this subject:
Such admonitions to accept Aborigines as fellow human beings were
often prompted by an attempt to overcome a popular, untheoretical
racism which equated indigenous peoples with the monkey or animal
kingdom. In the first half of the nineteenth century such visceral, unsci-
entific racism was, to some degree, kept in check by elite opinion,
whether a Christian or an Enlightenment-based anthropology which gen-
erally emphasised the unity of humankind.”
Few of the orthodox historians of Van Diemen's Land, however,
recognize distinctions of this kind. They do not use religious beliefs,
or any contest about them, in their explanations of human behaviour.
Nor do they attribute to religion any causal influence. Indeed, like
Brian Plomley's opinion of Archdeacon Broughton's inquiry, they
usually dismiss religious sentiment as so much humbug or a white-
wash for much harsher attitudes.
As with their attitude to Aboriginal culture, these historians make
no attempt to think themselves into the minds of their subjects.
Instead, they attribute to them completely anachronistic views
derived from twentieth-century European and American ideologies
about race. Sharon Morgan, for instance, derives her notion of ‘white
supremacy' not from British or Australian history but from an
American study comparing race relations in the USA and South
Africa.? Had any of these authors tried to understand the mentality of
the British Empire in the early nineteenth century, they might have
realized the moral dilemma the colony faced. They might have seen
that, if the settlers had been the exterminators they portray, they
? O'Connor to Arthur, 11 December 1827, AOT CSO 1/323/7578, pp
69-70
21 Gascoigne, Enlightenment and Origins of European Australia, p 152
22 The book she cites as the main theoretical guide to her chapter is George
M. Fredrickson’s White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South
African History, Oxford University Press, New York, 1981. Her footnotes
and bibliography mistakenly list the author as ‘Frederickson’. Fredrickson is
director of Stanford University's Research Institute for the Comparative
Study of Race and Ethnicity, and is best known as a writer about ‘black
liberation’ movements and the politics of race in the USA.
NINE: SETTLER OPINION AND THE EXTIRPATION THESIS 301
would have had to disavow the ascendant spirit of the age. They
would have had to either consciously reject the dominant
assumptions of their political and religious authorities, or else have
been reluctantly driven to this position by force of circumstance.
Either way, they would not have made such a decision lightly, and it
is most unlikely they would have all come to the same conclusion
about annihilating the blacks. Let us look at the evidence of what
they actually did believe.
THE ORTHODOX VERSION OF SETTLER OPINION
In 2001, Henry Reynolds produced a list of twelve statements from
prominent settlers and newspapers of the colony discussing the ex-
termination of the Aborigines. Reynolds said of them:
What is certainly true is that prominent settlers felt no compunction about
publicly expressing their genocidal desires and intentions and apparently
had no concern about courting public disapproval or social ostracism by
advocating extermination. They clearly felt no need to guard or modify
their language.?
However, when the original sources of the statements he cites are
examined, some of them turn out to be not quite as genocidal as
Reynolds claims. It is true that, in all of the twelve statements Rey-
nolds cites — eight from settlers and four from newspapers — various
grammatical forms of the words ‘exterminate’ or ‘extirpate’ do
appear, except one from the editor of the Colonial Times, who instead
talks of the Aborigines being ‘hunted down’ and ‘destroyed’. As Rey-
nolds presents them, most do seem to advocate extermination. How-
ever, anyone who looks up their full text will find few of them actu-
ally say this. Reynolds has edited all the statements so that many of
them convey a different message than they did when they were made.
Reynolds claims one of those who added his voice to this ‘brutal
clamour’ was Edward Curr. In his 1987 book, Frontier, Reynolds
reports this as follows:
Sharpened frontier conflict called forth increased demands for extermina-
tion. They became common, for perhaps the first time, in Tasmania
between 1828 and 1830. Edward Curr, the manager of the Van Diemen’s
Land Company, argued that Aboriginal hostility was so serious that the
colonists would either have to abandon the island ‘or they must undertake
a war of extermination' ?*
? Reynolds, An Indelible Stain?, pp 71-2
* Henry Reynolds, Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers and Land, Allen and Unwin,
Sydney, 1987, p 55
302 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
In his more recent work, An Indelible Stain?, Reynolds fleshes out
Curr's opinion with more quotations from a letter he wrote to the
Aborigines Committee in April 1830. Here is his partly edited and
partly paraphrased version of what Curr supposedly said (the ellipsis
and square brackets all come from Reynolds):
‘If they [the settlers] do not abandon the Island [and will not] submit to
see the white inhabitants murdered one after another ... they must
undertake a war of extirpation on principles of which many will be dis-
posed to question ...’
He believed the matter would end ‘as all such matters have ended in other
parts of the world, by the extermination of the weaker race’, although he
shuddered at the idea of ‘butchering the poor natives in the mass’: it was
‘dreadful to contemplate the necessity of exterminating the aboriginal
tribes’.?°
Anyone who reads the original letter, however, will find that Rey-
nolds’s version of what it says is quite different from the points Curr
was actually making. When he spoke of ‘extermination’ he was can-
vassing a possibility of what might happen, not advocating it. With-
out going into every single way that Reynolds’s editing has distorted
what Curr said in this letter, let me quote the full passage from
which Reynolds has extracted the final phrase ‘dreadful to contem-
plate the necessity of exterminating the aboriginal tribes’. Curr actu-
ally wrote:
These opinions I am sure will shock the feelings of the committee: it is a
dreadful thing to contemplate the necessity of exterminating the aborigi-
nal tribes. But I am far from advising such a proceeding. All that I can say
is that I think it will come to that. My own hands however shall be guilt-
235 Reynolds, An Indelible Stain?, p 53. The location Reynolds provides made
this letter difficult to find. Reynolds does not give the original letter’s date,
he gives the wrong file prefix for its archival location, and indicates only one
of the five pages from which he has compiled his edited version of what
Curr said. Reynolds says the letter is to be found in the Colonial Secretary’s
In Letters, COL/1/323, p 373. However, there is no prefix COL used by
the Archives Office of Tasmania. The letter was not addressed to the
Colonial Secretary but to the Aborigines Committee, via Charles Arthur, the
Lieutenant-Governor’s aide de camp. The actual location of the letter is the
Colonial Secretary's Office file CSO 1/323/7578 pp 359-78, and the
passages Reynolds quotes are taken from pp 373-7
% For instance, where Reynolds quotes: ‘they must undertake a war of
extirpation on principles of which many will be disposed to question
Curr originally wrote: ‘they must undertake a war of extirpation on
principles of which many will be disposed to question the
,
justice’, (p 376)
a: V
x
^
NX SY
NINE: SETTLER OPINION AND THE EXTIRPATION THESIS 303
less of blood, and I shall discountenance it as far as my authority extends,
except under circumstances of aggression or in self defence.”
In other words, Reynolds’s claim that Curr joined the clamour for
extermination is a complete misrepresentation of his position, made
plausible only by editing out a crucial part of his statement. Rather
than advocating such à view, Curr was uttering a pessimistic predic-
tion about the likely outcome if the Aborigines continued their
attacks. In the territory where he had authority, he was affirming that
he would try to prevent any attempt at extermination. He was taking
much the same position as the colonial governors, whose views were
discussed in Chapter Six. They believed that continued Aboriginal
assaults would eventually provoke their white victims into an even
more violent reaction. The responsibility of those in authority was to
develop means to prevent this from happening. By raising the pros-
pect of extermination in his letter, Curr was underlining his case and
trying to impress upon the Aborigines Committee the urgency of the
need for an effective policy to prevent Aboriginal assaults, whose
ultimate victims would only be themselves. By selective editing and
omission, Reynolds has seriously distorted the views Curr actually
held.
The same is true of other evidence Reynolds cites to demonstrate
that the settlers advocated extermination. He introduces the subject
by claiming that debate about genocide extended over seven years:
During the period of intense frontier conflict between 1826 and 1833, the
Tasmanian settlers publicly discussed the matter of genocide. They used
the words ‘exterminate’ or 'extirpate', the latter literally meaning to
destroy by uprooting or tearing out.”
As well as the opinions of Curr, Reynolds cites seven other state-
ments by settlers as evidence for this case. The originals show, how-
ever, that only two of them actually saw extermination or extirpation
as a serious option. These were the statements by the Big River
farmer George Espie, and the solicitor-general, Alfred Stephen.”
Espie told the Aborigines Committee of 1830: 'I think that their
continued atrocities have arrived at such a crisis that no other remedy
appeared to me but their speedy capture or extermination."" Stephen
told a public meeting in Hobart:
27 Curr to Charles Arthur, 28 April 1830, AOT CSO 1/323/7578, pp 377-
8. His emphasis.
2 Reynolds, An Indelible Stain?, p 52
? Reynolds, An Indelible Stain?, pp 52, 55-6
9 The statement Reynolds attributes to George Espie was actually made by
one of his brothers, unnamed: Minutes of the Aborigines Committee, 23
February 1830, AOT CBE /1, pp 6-7; George Espie's own evidence, which
304 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
you are bound upon every principle of justice and humanity F
this particular class of individuals [that is, convict stockmen in remote
regions], and if you cannot do so without extermination, then [ say boldly
and broadly, exterminate!"
Four of the other settlers quoted by Reynolds — William Barnes,
Temple Pearson, George Frankland and Joseph Gellibrand — all
made it clear that they raised the question only to show what a
horrible prospect it was. Of the first of these four, Reynolds writes:
William Barnes, a justice of the peace, landowner and brewer wrote to
Governor Arthur in March 1830 expressing his alarm about continuing
Aboriginal hostility. If acts of mutual vengeance did not cease, he
remarked, 'then the dreadful alternative only remains of a general exter-
mination by some means or other.”
Yet the original version of Barnes’s statement reveals that, of all the
settlers in the colony at the time, he was one of the most sympathetic
to the Aborigines’ position. He believed they had suffered a great in-
justice and were the victims of ‘the barbarous hostility and treachery
with which they had been treated by the lower orders of settlers and
the convict servants in the interior parts of the island for many years
prior to 1823 and 1824’. Native hostilities, he said, had been *pro-
voked by the massacres of hundreds of their people by the Stock
Keepers in the outstations’. He was dismayed by what he regarded as
the cavalier attitude the lower orders had towards killing Aborigines,
but felt the natives were capable of discrimination and could
recognize that 'the Governor, the public officers and respectable
people are their friends'.? He was pessimistic about the future,
however, and could only foresee retaliaion from both sides
continuing until the Aborigines were exterminated. As Reynolds at
least has the decency to record, to Barnes this was a 'dreadful
alternative'. To present Barnes alongside Espie as one of those who
seriously advocated the prospect of extermination as a solution to the
Aboriginal problem is to put him in the opposite camp to that which
he belonged.
does not mention extermination, was in the published version of the minutes
of the same date: British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 219. For
brevity's sake, this chapter refers to the brother's statement as that of George
Espie.
?! Stephen's speech was reported by the Colonial Times, 24 September 1830,
p 3, where he emphasized he was speaking as a private citizen, not as a
member of the government.
? Reynolds, An Indelible Stain?, p 52
? Barnes to Aborigines Committee, 16 March 1830, AOT CSO
1/323/7578 pp 299, 302
wx:
we
NK
NINE: SETTLER OPINION AND THE EXTIRPATION THESIS 305
Reynolds makes a similar misrepresentation of the opinions of
another settler, Dr Temple Pearson of Douglas Park, near Campbell
Town, whom he quotes saying:
Total extermination, however severe the measure, I much fear will be the
only means left to the Government to protect the Whites.?*
Dr Pearson was a retired hospital surgeon and was not an articulate
man. The letter he wrote to the Aborigines Committee in June 1830
was neither well thought out nor clearly expressed. His comments
were in response to questions put to him by the committee about
whether the Aborigines were aware the government and the settlers
wanted to treat them kindly and to live with them on amicable terms,
and what measures should be taken to inform them of this and to
protect the lives and property of settlers. Pearson said he was sure the
Aborigines did not know of the government's good intentions and
then suggested how to inform them. He advocated learning their lan-
guage and then negotiating with them or, as he called it, making an
‘explaination’ to them. He said that if this failed he feared total
extermination would be the outcome. The text from which Rey-
nolds quotes actually read as follows:
Total extermination, however severe the measure, I much fear will be the
only means left to Government to protect the Whites, without some
explaination can be effective, which I do not think could be done but by
persons of their own colour, if a White person goes in search of them for
that purpose, if he is armed they will shun him, if unarmed they will to a
certainty Murder him, but from my reflection on the subject I confess I
have little faith in accomplishing it, much less in their adhering to any
terms that might be agreed upon. Their capture I think possible by well
selected parties as above stated in answer to Question 9*5
Despite their clumsiness, these were not the words of someone
making a positive advocacy of extermination. Rather, Pearson was
making a pessimistic prediction about the consequences if other
measures, such as negotiation, failed. The policy Pearson actually
supported to end the hostilities was to capture the Aborigines. His
views cannot plausibly be claimed as evidence of an explicit demand
for extermination.
Two of the remaining statements from George Frankland and
Joseph Gellibrand were not presented by Reynolds as examples of his
thesis but as counter examples that expressed more civilized views.
Frankland, the surveyor-general, was addressing the scientific-cultural
^ Reynolds, An Indelible Stain?, p 53 quoting a letter of June 1830
^5 Pearson to Aborigines Committee, 12 June 1830, AOT CSO 1/323/7578
pp 381-2
SOO PHE EABICATION OF Al ORIGINAL ElispOILY
Van Diemen's Land Society, which he called upon to amehorate th.
condition of the Aborigines to save them from cxtirpation,^ Gel),
brand, the former attorney-general and barrister, was Opposing the
proposal to mount the Black Line of 1830 and pointing out to jr
Supporters the potential outcome. He said: ‘How dreadful is it to
contemplate that we are about to enter upon a war of extermina-
tion,"
Finally, Reynolds offers the views of George Augustus Robinson
himself and the letter he wrote to his wife in October 1830 about all
the talk in Launceston of ‘extirpating the original inhabitants.”
Robinson spent three days in Launceston, from October 2 to 4. Brief
though the visit was, he met and conversed with a good cross-section
of Launceston society. As he rowed up the River Tamar on 2 Octo-
ber, he met and spoke to three sealers, Robert Drew, David Kelly
and ‘Ned’. At the cataract at Launceston, he came across the local
brewer and landholder William Barnes, the ship’s captain Oliver
Swan and the government commissary George Hull.” Later that day
he had meetings with three members of the colonial authority: the
commandant of Launceston, Major Edward Abbott, the police mag-
istrate, William Lyttleton, and an officer of the 57th Regiment, Cap-
tain Vance Donaldson, who was in charge of the northern forces of
the Black Line. In the town itself, Robinson also met two civilians,
Reverend Dr William Browne, the chaplain of St John’s Church of
England, and George Whitcomb, a clerk in the Customs Department.
He attended church with Reverend Browne on Sunday October 3.”
Of the eight people Robinson met in Launceston, at least five were
critical of the policy of mounting the Black Line and expressed their
sympathy for the Aborigines. Dr Browne offered prayers for them at
his Sunday service. Whitcomb, who became a close friend of Rob-
inson and provided a sanctuary for Aborigines in Launceston, ex-
pressed his support for conciliation. As noted above, the brewer
William Barnes was one of the most outspoken settlers in his criticism
of violence against Aborigines. Robinson commended the commis-
sary for his views: ‘Mr Hull is a humane man and wishes well to the
cause of humanity." Even Captain Donaldson, the man heading the r
* Reynolds, An Indelible Stain? p 54. The speech was recorded in the H
Town Courier, 23 January 1830, p4 thy
` Reynolds, An Indelible Stain?, p 55. The original speech was recorded in
the Colonial Times, 24 September 1830,p3 — — — E
S Reynolds, An Indelible Stain?, p 5: EL
? Robinson, diary, 2 Oc TRUE
* Plomley, Friendly Mi
* Robinson, diary, 2
NINE: SETTLER OPINION AND THE EXTIRPATION THESIS 307
military preparations, ‘deplored the proceedings against the blacks’.”
Moreover, the three sealers, who told Robinson that nothing was
heard of in Launceston but shooting the blacks, expressed their own
reservations, saying that those who advocated this ‘did not know
what they was about’.” In other words, Robinson’s own observation
that ‘nothing is heard of at Launceston but extirpating the original
inhabitants’ was an exaggeration. There was clearly a strong sentiment
of this kind at the time, but it was far from being universal. Robin-
son’s main informants about local opinion, Browne and Whitcomb,
may well have felt they were in a minority but the very existence of
their own views, and the others like them, shows it would have been
more accurate to say that the settlers of Launceston were deeply
divided over the issue.
Overall, of the eight settler opinions Reynolds offers in support of
the extirpation thesis, only two of them, those of Espie and Stephen,
unambiguously count in his favour. Reynolds is perfectly well aware
that he has not represented the full range of views on the subject.
That is why, in a recapitulation some twenty pages later, he acknowl-
edges that not all the settlers he discusses were actually advocating
extermination. However, in attempting to cover himself against
criticism, he compounds the offence with another distortion. He
writes:
During the 1820s it was, as illustrated above, clearly quite common for
the settlers to discuss the extermination of the Aborigines, whether they
favoured such an eventuality, were horrified by it or just considered it
inevitable. We have no way of knowing how many settlers were what
George Augustus Robinson called ‘extirpationists’ and how many others
opposed them. The leading scholar of the Tasmanian Aborigines, N. J. B.
Plomley, believed that in the 1820s most colonists were 'extirpationists at
heart’.
The assertion made here, that extermination was commonly dis-
cussed throughout the 1820s, is again not supported by the evidence
Reynolds produces. All but one of the twelve statements he cites
# Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp 243
4 Robinson, diary, 2 October 1830, Friendly Mission, p 224
“4 Reynolds, An Indelible Stain?, p 71. Actually, Plomley never says
*extirpationists at heart’ and in the reference Reynolds provides for the
quote, Friendly Mission p 350, there is nothing on this page, or anywhere
thereabouts, which uses the phrase. The closest Plomley comes is on page 98
where he says that those settlers who gave evidence to the Aborigines
Committee in 1830 were ‘extirpationists almost to a man’, and on page 432
n 2 where he says ‘the inhabitants of Launceston were extirpationers almost
to a man’. Both comments refer to beliefs held not ‘in the 1820s’, as
Reynolds claims, but in the year 1830.
OS THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
were made either in 1830 or 1831. The sole comment from an carhier
date was an article by the editor of the Colonial Times in December
1826, which did not actually use the words ‘exterminate’ or 'extir-
pate’, This is not some innocent mistake. To justify his extirpation
thesis, Reynolds pretends his sources range across the 1820s. He
Wants us to see them as evidence for settler intentions from the initial
outbreak of Aboriginal violence in 1824, However, by failing to pro-
duce any such evidence earlier than 1830, he throws his thesis into a
very ditlerent light. The terminology he cites was really only used at
the peak of the conflict, when passions came to a head for a brief
period. Hence any desire that did emerge among some settlers to
wipe out the Aborigines only came very late in the piece and as à
consequence of several years of black robberies, assaults and murders.
There was no support for the idea that such a desire was itself an ini-
tial cause of settler actions or provided the long-term fuel for a geno-
cidal movement among the civilian population.
Moreover, the way that Reynolds deploys this evidence is itself
suggestive. Had there been a large number of statements made in
support of this view throughout the 1820s, Reynolds would surely
have used them. The fact that he has disguised the dates of his sources
is itself an indication there were very few statements of this kind ever
made for the historian to find.
Having said this, I should report that in reading the colonial news-
papers I found one statement from a settler made earlier than 1830
that did use the word ‘exterminate’. It was made in April 1828 by a
correspondent from Campbell Town writing in the Hobart Town
Courier. In reply to a number of suggestions made by the newspaper
to solve the growing problem of Aboriginal assaults, this unnamed
writer suggested:
They have acquired such a fondness for our blankets, dampers, flour,
sugar, knives &c that for the sake of them they will continue to rob and
murder, until we exterminate them or they us, unless for the sake of
humanity they are sent off the island.”
Other examples, however, are difficult to find. It was far more
common for the press, while expressing alarm at the level of Aborigi-
nal depredations, to nonetheless counsel caution.
THE OPINIONS OF THE COLONIAL PRESS
Four of the statements Reynolds uses to back the extirpation thesis
come from newspaper articles and editorials. He claims the local press
fomented public opinion in favour of a policy of annihilation. Lyndall
^? Hobart Town Courier, 12 April 1828, p 3
p——————— ———— B a
NINE: SETTLER OPINION AND THE EXTIRPATION THESIS 309
Ryan agrees, She says that the attitude of the press in both Hobart
wd Launceston was that ‘the Aborigines were the enemy and nothing
Wort of a full-scale military operation would "teach them a lesson". ^
Let us start with Reynolds’s version of what the Hobart newspaper
the Colonial Times was supposed to have said in 1826. Here are his
comments followed by his quotation from the newspaper:
The colonial newspapers regularly reported on conflict in the interior and
at times called for the destruction of the tribes. In 1826, after reporting
several murders of frontier shepherds, the editor of the Colonial Times
declared:
‘We make no pompous display of philanthropy — we say unequivocally,
SELF DEFENCE IS THE FIRST LAW OF NATURE — THE GOV-
ERNMENT MUST REMOVE THE NATIVES — IF NOT, THEY
WILL BE HUNTED DOWN LIKE WILD BEASTS AND
DESTROYED.”
Once again, however, the full text of the statement reveals a differ-
ent agenda. The Colonial Times was not calling for ‘the destruction of
the tribes’. It was making a case for the policy that the government
eventually adopted, that of removing Aborigines from Van Diemen’s
Land to an offshore island. Rather than advocating extermination, the
article was canvassing ways to respond to the increase in Aboriginal
killings of stockmen. Here is its central passage, which Reynolds
neglects to quote.
It is impossible to suggest a perfect plan, but having collected the opinions
of many intelligent persons, we are satisfied, that the first thing, is our
own security; the second, the due and proper protection to the natives,
and last, and least, the expence of the measure to Government. In the first
place, they must be removed, either to the coast of New Holland, or
King’s Island. The latter is one of our Dependencies, fertile, well supplied
with water, and no possibility of escape.**
Moreover, the editor was not advocating this solution for all the
tribes, as Reynolds implies, but only for two of them. Removing
them to an island, the editor hoped, was the best way to civilize
them:
There are two parties who have committed outrages — the Oyster Bay,
and the Shannon parties. We would recommend their being taken, which
could easily be effected — placed at King’s Island with a small guard of
soldiers to protect them, and let them be compelled to grow potatoes,
% [ yndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, 2nd edn., Allen and Unwin,
Sydney, 1996, p 108
47 Reynolds, An Indelible Stain?, p 53. Upper case in the original source.
48 Colonial Times, 1 December 1826, p 2. All upper case is from the original.
MO THE FABRICATION OF ABDOICLIGINAL HISTORY
Wheat &c, catch seals and fish, and by degrees, they will lose the
i " ‘ . $ wT re
disposition, and acquire some slight habits of industry, which i "
m s iR n 4t )
step of civilization.”
Tiitey
e fie
This was plainly a ruthless solution but it does not mention k
mination. The rationale for it was the same as that eventually ado e
by both Edward Curr and the colonial governors: by continuing Pim
hostilities, the Aborigines were provoking a violent response and ^ii
digging their own graves. us
If they remain here, they are SURE TO BE DESTROYED. If they -
sent to King’s Island, they will be under restraint, but they will oat
from committing or receiving violence, and we are certainly bound b
é * : "V
every principle of humanity, to protect them as far as we can.” ý
At this distance, the purported humanitarian sentiment in these
words might be hard to take seriously. The author wanted the e
tribes removed from the settled districts and his humanitarianism
appears more reflex verbiage than moral principle. But this stil] dom
not justify Reynolds citing the article as an example of press demands
for the extermination of the Aboriginal tribes, when it was nothing of
the kind.
Another example Reynolds cites is from the Colonial Time; in
September 1830. At the time, this newspaper was edited by Henry
Melville, later author of the book The History of Van Deimen’s Land
(1835), which was highly critical of Lieutenant-Governor Arthur’s
policies towards the Aborigines. Reynolds quotes one of the paper's
editorial comments about the state of mind of the local settlers: ‘all
was ardour and emulation among many of the Whites, trying who
should hunt, kill, and destroy the most'?' What Reynolds fails to
point out, however, is that these remarks were made by the newspa-
per as part of a sustained argument against government policy of
forming the Black Line. Immediately after these words, which in
context were heavily sarcastic comments about the deplorable results
that government policy had cultivated among the convict lower
orders, Melville continued:
To be an Aborigine, and to once be in the neighbourhood of a settled
district, was a sufficient cause for being chased down if possible, with sav-
age ferocity; no matter whether the disposition of the individual had been
friendly or not — whether his errand had been merely to indulge tastes
and habits that had been acquired by mixing with Europeans or had been
for the purpose of rapine or mischief. So dangerous, so indiscreet a lati-
tude as was thus allowed to a class of persons so totally unable to discrimi-
* Colonial Times, 1 December 1826, p 2
°° Colonial Times, 1 December 1826, p 2
5! Reynolds, An Indelible Stain?, p 54
——— MÀ
NINE: SETTLER OPINION AND THE EXTIRPATION THESIS 311
nate as most to whom this Proclamation was particularly addressed, or at
ast, by whom its purport would have to be carried into effect, could
only have had one result.”
The etlects of these policies on the lower classes, the newspaper
continued, were foreseen at the time by ‘cool and reflecting persons’,
but not by the government. Melville went on to lambast:
the inconsistent and ill-advised conduct of the Government towards this
benighted race, and refer to an occurrence which is, and ever will con-
tinue, an indelible stain upon the history of this Colony. We allude to the
execution for murder of two of them, about three years since, [the exe-
cution of the Oyster Bay blacks, Jack and Dick, in 1826] than which a
greater cruelty was never practised — no, not even by the Spaniards upon
their first settlement of America.”
In preparing for the Black Line, the dominant attitude among the
settlers, Melville complained, was confusion about its objectives:
As things are, we ourselves really do not understand, nor have we been
able to meet with any who could explain to us, whether the sword or the
Bible is meant to be the means of instructing the Aborigines in their rela-
tive duty to ourselves. In other words, whether destruction or civilization
is to be the order of the day — are the numerous parties which are soon
to scour the interior, to destroy or save these misguided creatures? What-
ever may be the intentions of the Government, we are fully convinced,
that most of those who are now preparing for the interior are not aware
of the manner in which the Government expect them to act.™
In short, rather than evidence of an extirpationist sentiment, this
newspaper editorial demonstrated a critical attitude towards govern-
ment attempts at a military solution.
A third example of press opinion cited by Reynolds appeared in
the Launceston newspaper, the Independent, in September 1831.
Reynolds provides two instances of this newspaper’s support for
exterminating the Aborigines. In the first instance, Reynolds writes:
The Independent reported in September 1831 that following the spearing
of a prominent settler, Captain Thomas, several correspondents had
written in arguing that ‘nothing but a war of extermination now remains
to be applied’.»
In the original version of this report, however, there were fewer
readers advocating this course than Reynolds claims and they got no
support from the newspaper, which actually wrote:
52 Colonial Times, 24 September 1830, p 2
55 Colonial Times, 24 September 1830, p 2
5! Colonial Times, 24 September 1830, p 2
5 Reynolds, An Indelible Stain?, p 54
312 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
Two correspondents this week insist upon it that nothing but a way Of ex.
termination now remains to be adopted; but this is something Stronger ther;
We are at all prepared to recommend. That something must be done —
and IMMEDIATELY is evident to everyone who takes the trouble of
thinking. Who can tell to what lengths they may run this season, beyond
all precedence, in taking vengeance upon the settlers for the routing they
experience by the “Line” business?
In the second example he cites from the Independent, Reynolds ar
last reproduces the newspaper's opinions accurately. He quotes the
editor saying:
Even their warmest advocates must, we fear, admit that unless somethíng
forthwith be done by the government, the end will be, horrible as the
idea is; EXTERMINATION, as the only means of securing our settlers
from their cruel and indiscriminate attacks.
This is accurate both in the words cited and in the context of the
Story. It was written by the newspaper's publisher, Samuel Bailey
Dowsett, at a time when the Launceston community was considera-
bly distressed by the news that Captain Bartholomew Thomas had
been killed at his property at Port Sorell, along with his Overseer
James Parker. Thomas, the brother of the colonial treasurer, was a
popular and romantic figure who had served in the Napoleonic Wars
and then with Simon Bolivar to liberate South America from Spanish
rule. He arrived in the colony in 1826 and started a horse breeding
property, Cressy, on Lake River, before founding Northdown, the
first settlement at Port Sorell. He was well known for his conciliatory
attitude to the Aborigines and his good relations with them. How-
ever, in September 1831 a band of blacks from Big River, feigning
friendship, killed him and Parker and stole their guns, breaking what
had till then been a long interval without incident in the north of the
colony. Despite backing the call for extermination of the blacks,
Dowsett added immediately after the above words:
God forbid that a warfare of this nature should be undertaken until every
pacific attempt has failed; but we really do fear that the pious labour of
such individuals as Mr Robinson will produce no good result; and that
the sword and the sword only, will be a sufficient preservation to ourselves
from the dreadful incursions of these inveterate enemies. We will yet
hope, however, so long as hope is permitted us.*?
5 Independent, 10 September 1831, p 3. Emphases in original.
7 quoted by Reynolds, An Indelible Stain?, p 54
5 H, R. Thomas, Jecelyn Henry Connor Thomas and Bartholomew Boyle
Thomas’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol 2, 1788-1 850, I-Z, pp 516—
7; Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp 471 n 271, 476 n 280, 511
© Independent, 24 September 1831, p 3. Emphasis in original.
NINE: SETTLER OPINION AND THE EXTIRPATION THESIS 313
The final example Reynolds cites for his thesis comes from the
Hobart newspaper, the Tasmanian. Reynolds writes:
In February 1830 the editor of the Tasmanian remarked that the Aborigi-
nes were displaying a determination to destroy all before them. ‘Extermi-
vation’, he declared, ‘seems to be the only remedy’.”
This is, for a second time, an accurate rendition of both the words
and sentiments of the newspaper’s editor, Robert Lathrop Murray.
Moreover, in this case, the full context (reproduced below) is actually
more inflammatory than Reynolds indicates.
Anyone who has followed the career of Murray will find this a sur-
prising statement for him to have made. As a journalist on the Hobart
Town Gazette and Colonial Times in 1825-6, Murray publicized his
liberal political views and was often critical of the colonial autocracy
over which Arthur presided. He defended freedom of the press and
argued that appointees to the Legislative Council should be more
broadly representative. He was a penal reformer who was critical of
the convict system and eventually became a leading advocate for the
end of transportation. He befriended the barrister and Attorney-
General, Joseph Gellibrand, who in 1826 was dismissed from his
position by Arthur partly because he refused to institute legal action
to silence Murray’s press criticisms. In 1827 Gellibrand became part-
owner of the new Hobart newspaper, the Tasmanian, which he and
Murray used to maintain their critique of the government. In 1828
Murray began publishing the Austral-Asiatic Review, a journal that
expressed both his literary aspirations and his liberal political views. A
year later he merged it with the Tasmanian, founded in 1827 and the
most financially precarious of the four Hobart weeklies. Although
Murray subsequently modified his anti-government stance, in late
1830, when Arthur announced the formation of the Black Line,
Gellibrand remained one of its most vocal critics.
Murray’s call for extermination as the only remedy against black
depredations was made in the context of a sudden increase in black
assaults on whites in February 1830. The statement was part of a story
6 Reynolds, An Indelible Stain?, p 53
8! E. Morris Miller, Pressmen and Governors: Australian Editors and Writers in
Early Tasmania, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1952, pp 3-31
62 Murray was a well-educated man (Westminster School and Cambridge
University) who had been transported for bigamy but pardoned on arrival in
Australia. He had liberal political opinions and, through the Austral-Asiatic
Review, was the founder of literary culture in Tasmania: see E. Morris Miller,
Pressmen and Govemors, pp 9-13; C. R. Murray, “Robert William Fenton
Lathrop Murray’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol 2 1788—1850, I-Z,
pp 272-4
MÀ Ttt FABRICATION Ol ABORIGINAL HISTORY
about an Aboriginal attack on the settler John Sherwin and his family
at their home at Mead's Bottom, near Bothwell, in which the house
Was burned to the ground and all their possessions destroyed. After
announcing the attack, the story continued:
Mr Sherwin's family has been dispersed by this dreadful calamity, They
have lost their all. They are dependant for cloathing upon the humanity
of their neighbours.
A little boy was murdered by these people at Bagdad on Monday. Capt.
Clarke's wheat was set on fire on Saturday. We have also heard of
numerous other atrocities committed by them within the last week,
There seems to be something like a determination to destroy all before
them. Extermination seems to be the only remedy. It is a dreadful one.
But surely such a horrible calamity as has befallen Mr Sherwin and his
family, little short of ruin, requires some vigorous measures, or the general
want of safety in the interior will become so apparent, that the most inju-
rious consequences to the Colony will be the result.
A Magistrate from the interior, was at our office today, whose estate is
peculiarly open to the incursions of these people. This Gentleman, who
has as much humanity in his composition as any individual in the Colony
declared, that if his family was attacked, he would kill as many as he could
of the murdering incendiaries, and affix their bodies to the trees, as he
does those of any other ravenous animal! If Mr Sherwin was so to act,
witnessing as he does, the ruin of his property, the dispersion of his fam-
ily, his daughters seeking shelter wherever humanity will afford it, could
he be blamed!
This last paragraph is perhaps the most violently anti-Aboriginal
statement made during the whole of the conflict with the blacks.
Even though it was out of character with its author's usual politics,
and was, as shown in a later section below, a position Murray was
soon to recant, it demonstrated the extent to which colonial passions
could be stirred by continued Aboriginal assaults.
Overall, out of four examples provided by Reynolds, only two
support his claim that the colonial newspapers wanted the extermina-
tion of the Aboriginal tribes. Both of the latter were made in 1830
and 1831 in the immediate aftermath of particular Aboriginal atroci-
ties. What, then, can be said about the longer-term attitude taken by
the colonial press to the Aboriginal problem?
At this time, there were six newspapers published in the colony,
each appearing weekly. Even though the population was only 24,000
in 1830, the total newspaper circulation was about 11,000 copies a
week. All of them took a political stance of some kind, mostly against
the government, since Arthur retained a military man's dislike of a
free press and tried to restrict newspaper criticism by licences, libel
suits and the imprisonment of editors. However, ownership and edi-
L3
T Lad eh
Me
Malis mie Phi
ani AABAA renmin De Ws int) o
FLANDERS
j reo rali ry f» 4 Survey
sr
G tos Woodward.
A b» 4
D ii:
e £ fH Badger Corner
inders Island,
Lene? ope fe rhe wd pes Woodward, 1832. It shows the then new settlement ‘Wibeh
enad const nin et oint on the mid-west coast, and the recently abandoned site at The
e island. (Dixson Library, State Library of New South Wales)
dieto t vmi
~
i
j
Í $
|
| Anstey Barton, Oatlands, homestead of Thomas Anstey, police magistrate and Member of the p owe.
Council. Artist unknown, undated (ca 1850). (Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, State Library of
Tasmania)
‘Mr Robinson’s First Meeting with Timmy’ by Benjamin Duterrau, 1840 (National Gallery of Australia)
v
am WA.
PIRA
NINE: SETTLER OPINION AND THE EXTIRPATION THESIS 315
tonhip changed rapidly, as did political allegiances, with government
opponents one year becoming government supporters the next.” In
INAO and 1831 the papers were: the Hobart Town Gazette, a govern-
ment-directed. paper. published by James Ross, consisting almost
enurely of government and legal notices; the Hobart Town Courier, a
more commercial pro-government newspaper published by James
Ross; the Colonial Times, published in Hobart by the government
critic, Henry Melville; the Tasmanian and Austral-Asiatic Review,
edited in Hobart by Robert Lathrop Murray; the Launceston Advertiser,
published by John Pascoe Fawkner, a former felon turned successful
businessman and government supporter, and the Independent, a more
liberal and critical Launceston paper published by Samuel Bailey
Dowsett. Six newspapers serving such a small population meant that
the editorial content of each was largely a one-man show, with the
editor writing the whole of the content, except for overseas stories
and brief reports of local news posted in by correspondents from
towns and villages of the settled districts. Let me illustrate the range of
press opinion at the height of the hostilities with more examples from
the two best-read but most politically divergent newspapers, the
Hobart Town Courier, which was a member of what was known as the
‘Government House party’, and the Colonial Times, its principal
opposition.
The income of the publisher and printer of the Hobart Town
Courier, James Ross, was largely dependent upon government
patronage of his printing press. He fiercely guarded his monopoly of
this business against rival publishers. So, perhaps not surprisingly, his
paper generally reflected the views of the Lieutenant-Governor. On
Aboriginal policy, it supported Arthur's preference for conciliation
and his reluctant resort to force. In January 1829, in the wake of the
appointment of the roving parties to capture hostile Aborigines
within the settled districts, the editor wrote:
In the present state of things in this island with regard to the black natives,
we consider it our duty as public journalists to send our voice abroad in
the cause of humanity. Let the words of the late proclamation never be
forgotten by those engaged in the pursuit, which enjoin them to spare the
shedding of blood. Let them remember that when the thread of life 1s
9 E. Morris Miller, ‘The Early Tasmanian Press and its Writers’, in Charles
Barrett (ed.), Across the Years: The Lure of Early Australian Books, N. H.
Seward, Melbourne, 1948, pp 35—49; E. Morris Miller, ‘A Historical
Summary of Tasmanian Newspapers’, Parts 1 and IL, Tasmanian Historical
Research Association Papers and Proceedings, 2, 1, November 1952 and 2, 2,
March 1953
6 ‘James Ross’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol 2, 1788-1850 I-Z, pp
396-7
316 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
once snapped nothing in the power of man can ever rejoin it. Their duty
is to catch them alive, and convey them to the proper authorities, They
are part of this community, and entitled in common with ourselves to the
protection as well as the retribution of its laws and ordinances, Let us
beware then of wantonly firing upon them, or taking any measure not
imperiously called for which can deprive them of life. And when death
does occur we presume it is as much the bounden duty of the Coroners
of the island to inquire into the circumstances of it, as if their skins
white like our own, instead of black.
Were
While orthodox historians today mock any suggestion that an
appeal to Christian values might have carried weight, James Ross did
not think so at the time. In the same passage he warned his readers
against succumbing to ‘a latent spirit of revenge’:
But revenge is natural only to the savage tribes, and must not be permit-
ted to enter the breast of civilized not to say Christian men, whose pecu-
liar characteristic is forgiveness. The murders which the blacks commit are
engendered in error, and are conceived by them to be their duty. But we
have no such excuse, our religion, if not our hearts teach us better.
Even though the Colonial Times under Henry Melville was critical
of many of Arthur’s policies and although there was much personal
animosity between the two men, when colonial hostility to the Abo-
rgines was at its height in 1830, and when almost every edition
carried several accounts of assaults on white settlers and stockmen, the
paper’s reports of these incidents were nonetheless usually conveyed
not in terms of outrage but in a tone of pain and regret, very similar
to that of the Hobart Town Courier. Here are some examples of the
editorial approach of Colonial Times in August 1830. This was the
single worst month for Aboriginal attacks in all of the hostilities
between 1824 and 1831. Reporting a series of incidents in the dis-
tricts between the rivers Clyde and Dee, the paper emphasized its
regret about Aboriginal deaths, the desirability for peace, its fear that
settler revenge might lead to the destruction of the Aborigines and its
preference for capturing the offenders rather than shooting them. It
also mentioned ‘the annihilation of the whole race’. Although the
mere appearance of such a phrase in print is potential fuel for the ex-
tirpationist thesis, the full context shows that it would be unjustified
for historians to exploit it in this way. Melville wrote:
The country about Bothwell is in a sad state. The repeated attacks of the
Aborigines on the Settlers of that District are every day getting more and
more frequent. Indeed, the commencement of the spring seems to have
given these misguided wretches a fresh impetus to commence their war-
^ Hobart Town Courier, 24 January 1829, p 2
^^ Plomley, Aboriginal/Settler Clash, p 34, Graph 5
NINE: SETTLER OPINION AND THE EXTIRPATION THESIS 317
fare upon their enemies, At present, one of their chief holds is about the
Dee Hills, between the Black Marsh and the Dee. It is said that Captain
Wood's men have had several skirmishes with the different mobs, and we
are sorry to say that several of the Natives have been killed. We do not
wonder at those men taking revenge upon the Aborigines, when we con-
sider in how many instances they have been sufferers by their attacks; but
we fear the plan at present adopted will leave no other chance of obtain-
ing peace than the annihilation of the whole race; for we imagine that the
settlers have had convincing proofs that the Aborigines are a most brave
and resolute people, who cannot be intimidated but will continue their
warfare to the last moment. Something must be done! we have long ex-
claimed; but the question is, what is best to be done? The military are not
the most proper persons to be employed, being unaccustomed as they are
to the fatigues of the bush. Parties of the old inhabitants, with persons
who are as acquainted with the country as well as the Natives themselves,
would be the right kind of men to employ in capturing them, and in the
end these must be the persons fixed upon; not one party but scores should
be regularly appointed, who would be able to watch all the different
passes at once, and not as has latterly been the case, every here and there
one inefficient straggling party prowling about seeking after the Natives,
who are generally better acquainted with their manner of acting than they
are aware of.”
The same edition reported the killing of a settler at Spring Hill,
near Jericho. Before it published the report from its local correspon-
dent, the Colonial Times opened with some brief editorial opinion:
It is with great pain we have to record another instance of the dreadful
attacks of the Aborigines; it more particularly happens just at the time the
Government are attempting to bring about some peaceable reconciliation,
and we are fearful that by some the lately published Government Notices
will be considered too lenient towards these poor misguided wretches.
*Mr Hooper, who is well known to many of your Readers, with the
female with whom he lived and his assigned servant, were in the road
opposite the farm (to which he had latterly removed) when the blacks
made their appearance. The man and woman ran away, and got to the
Lovely Banks, leaving Mr Hooper to his fate, who went into the house
and procured a double-barrelled gun and fired upon them, after which
they instantly rushed upon him and murdered him with their waddies,
leaving an axe stuck in the back of his skull. Mr Batman and Mr Thomas
Pitcairn rode by Hooper's just after he was murdered but too late to save
him."6*
Even though the same edition ran three other stories about Abo-
riginal assaults, the Colonial Times could still find space to reproduce
? Colonial Times, 27 August 1830, p 3
^ Coloníal Times, 27 August 1830, p 3. The victim was James Hooper of
Spring Hill.
318 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
the following item from the Launceston Advertiser, which hardly indi-
cates an extirpationist attitude towards the whole race:
On Monday the 16" inst, two of the Aborigines of this colony were
married at St. John's Church, Launceston. This is the first marriage of the
kind which has ever fell under our notice in this Colony; they had both
been domesticated for some time amongst the European population.^
Similarly, while the Black Line was still in the field, the Hobart
Town Courier chose to publish the following item, showing that,
despite the ‘sadistic frenzy’ that Sharon Morgan claims dominated
settler attitudes towards the Aborigines, there was still an interest in
Hobart in collecting ethnographic information about them:
Some of our musical amateurs have lately made some progress in
recording the native melodies of our Van Diemen's Land Blacks, but
what we have seen are of the rudest and most uncouth kind, though no
doubt not without their charms to the sable ears.”
Even though the Hobart Town Courier generally toed the line of
government policy, in some cases James Ross did express his own
opinion. He was one of the first to argue that the only solution to the
problem of Aboriginal violence lay in their separation from the white
population. This eventually became a demand for the removal of the
blacks to an island in Bass Strait. As noted earlier in this chapter, the
idea was not original to Ross since the same call had been made in
December 1826 by the Colonial Times. By 1830, when Ross repeated
this demand, it had become a widely accepted notion. The following
editorial is revealing, not only of the mood of the press at the time it
was written. It also shows how reluctant the colony had been to
adopt such a solution and how alien the policy had initially seemed to
the instincts of colonial culture. Ross wrote:
Some years ago, when we first started our proposal of placing them on
some island from which they could not easily escape, such as King’s
Island, with a small detachment of troops and an instructor, it will be rec-
ollected what a loud and general outcry was raised against us for even
suggesting such a plan so utterly unjust, it was said, and contrary to the
laws of humanity and the rights of nations. But we doubt as things now
stand, if even the secure and convenient position of Tasman's peninsula
will now suffice to secure them ... Far be it for us to advocate harshness
or severity to these poor people, the general tenor of our writing have all
along shewn how opposite our sentiments are to such treatment. But as
circumstances now stand, we would earnestly indicate strong but merciful
measures. Misguided as they doubtless are by white miscreants, they are in
some sense more to be pitied than blamed, but truly dangerous as by that
® Colonial Times, 27 August 1830, p 3
” Hobart Town Courier, 16 October 1830, p 2
NINE: SETTLER OPINION AND THE EXTIRPATION THESIS 319
they are no more to be trusted than ought
to be a wild beast, a lion or tiger let loose in a multitude. Every one that
is caught must be kept in the most secure manner, and if even chains or
shackles be necessary they ought to be had recourse to. Revolting as the
idea may seem to the humane feelings of a stranger at a distance, unac-
h the real state of things, some compulsory measures we are
be resorted to for the sake of the general safety."
means they are now become,
quainted wit
sensible must
THE LEGEND OF THE BLACKS' WHITE LEADER.
The news pages of the colonial press were not only vehicles of
straight news and political debate. Just like their modern counterparts,
they were also repositories of entertainment, gossip, rumour and
mythology. One of the most sensational myths that circulated
throughout much of the period of Aboriginal violence in Van Die-
men's Land was the one hinted at in the above passage: the blacks
were being led astray by white men. The Hobart Town Courier even-
tually became the chief supporter of a story which held that malevo-
lent white instigation was the cause of the upsurge in black violence.
The fact the paper adopted such a thesis must have made it a
common talking point among its readers.
The origins of the story go back to the early days of the colony
when convict absconders, the original bushrangers, recounted tales of
their contact with the blacks. Between 1808 and 1810, the bush-
rangers Richard Lemon and William Russell were thought to have
had contact with the tribes. Russell was eventually killed by them.
During his career in crime from 1814 to 1818, Michael Howe was
known to have two black mistresses.” When the Aboriginal bush-
rangers Musquito, Black Jack and Black Tom organized their own
gang in 1823 and 1824, the notion of white complicity gained cur-
rency through testimony of one of their victims. In the robbery and
murder of Matthew Osborne at Jericho in the central midlands in
1824, the dead man's widow identified a white convict as one of the
gang. He was an assigned servant to Eli Begent, himself a former con-
vict and bushranger.” By 1828, the notion that other Aboriginal raids
were led by white men was being treated seriously by the Hobart
press. The Tasmanian claimed that when the Oyster Bay Aborigines
made raids, two white men were 'at the head of the horde'. These
men were 'partially naked and the parts of their bodies which are ex-
| posed are blackened' At the same time, a report in the Hobart Town
: Courier positively identified a white man with a group of Aborigines
30. THE FABRICATION Of: ABORIGINAL HISTORY
who killed a boy during a raid on a property at Green Ponds in
October 1828, One of the pursuit party, Zachariah Chaffey, a free
man, said he saw a man named Green, a former convict servant of his
father, with the Aborigines:
The man was blackened in the face, His only article of dress was a striped
shirt, below which his white Jegs were plainly seen, Zachariah Chaffey
swore positively that he was a white man for he approached close to the
horde next morning,”
These stories persisted and by 1830, the Hobart Town Courier was
certain that whites were the principal instigators of Aboriginal depre-
dations that had forced the colony to mount the Black Line. The evi-
dence the newspaper offered in support, however, was hardly con-
vincing.
That they are led on and directed in their movements and outrages by
White men is now beyond doubt ... The cunning of the Blacks ín
selecting the tempestuous night of Monday last to attempt their escape
was remarkable, and, as our correspondent remarks, being a thing hitherto
unknown, adds to the proofs already existing, of the presence of White
men among them."
Besides their use of the tempest as a cover to escape, the paper also
noted that when a hut owned by Silas Gatehouse was robbed, the
thieves found a box containing knives, but only took those that were
new and had ivory handles, leaving the older and less valuable cutlery.
This was ‘a species of discrimination that has never yet been put in
practice by the black natives’ and hence proof they were led by a
European. The paper found this prospect worthy of all the moral
outrage it could muster:
For we can conceive no species of depravity so enormous as that which
would permit a man thus to use the knowledge he had acquired in a civi-
lized and improved state of life, in order to corrupt and train to murder-
ous habits upon his fellow creatures a race of originally harmless,
defenceless people like the Aborigines of this island.
The author went on to point out that a party from the Black Line,
while out searching for Aborigines, ‘fell repeatedly on the tracks of
the blacks, invariably accompanied with the prints of nailed shoes and
other symptoms that white men accompany them’.” The paper
Hobart Town Courier, 1 November 1828, p 2. Although at the coroner’s
inquest into the death of the boy, Chaffey swore positively that the man he
saw was white, he declined to identify him under oath as Green.
7^ Hobart Town Courier, 30 October 1830, p 2
” Hobart Town Courier, 30 October 1830, p2
ee LUNAR AERE " RR iiaia aai TR NIE ETERNI ER
Me
NINE: SETTLER OPINION
reluctantly acknowledged, however
find the thesis persuasive:
directing influence of white men among the blacks, som
incredulous enough to disbelieve it, and to ffirm that t
so frequently met with are no evidence of it, as the blacks
posed to wear them to protect their feet.
It went on both to denounce these disbelievers nd to put fc
a picture that drew on other mythical white figures from the lit
ture of colonization: : d
If those who discredit the presence of White man among the Blacks
would reflect on the number of runaway prisoners that are not accounted
for, some of whom after a length of time occasionally come to light, they
would see with us the great probability of such men sojourning with the
REGES in remote parts of the country and enjoying a life of indolent
sloth.
Unfortunately for the story, when all the Aborigines were finally
rounded up and transported to Flinders Island, no one found any
white men living among them. Nor did any of the conversations
recorded with the blacks then, or at any time later, suggest that they
ever had a white leader.
PRESS OPINION: A SUMMARY
Overall, there are four conclusions we can draw about the opinions
of the colonial press. First, although they sometimes subscribed to
myth and rumour, they generally fulfilled their role as journals of
record quite well. Occasionally their reporters would let them down,
like the Great Swan Port correspondent described in Chapter Five,
but in cases of major events like clashes between settlers and Aborigi-
nes, most press reports appear to be generally reliable. They are very
often corroborated by the records of police, coroners and other offi-
cial sources. As one would expect, the colonial press shared the cul-
tural and intellectual milieu of its time but, beyond this, it does not
appear to have had any particular agenda to either play up or play
down stories about violence on either side.
Second, in both pro-government and anti-government newspapers
alike, there was no sustained campaign urging the violent destruction
of the Aborigines. Although they demanded a solution to the hostili-
ties, most of the time the press urged caution and humanitarianism,
even if this put some of their readers in the more vulnerable districts
off side. Nonetheless, as the examples from the Tasmanian in February
78 Hobart Town Courier, 30 October 1830, p 2
M2 THE PAB ATION OF ABODIGINAI Hisop y
[830 and the Independent in September 183] ily
atrocities by Aborigines could stimulate ane Ies to make ,
call for extermination, But in these cases the demand was made jr the
heat of the moment and was out of character
longer-term approach to the subject.
lhird, on matters of specific policy, the Colonial Times in 152r,
süpated the call for the Aborigines to be
strated, an Up Urz, y
ditor at tin l
with the colonjal prey,
mm
removed from the settled
districts and exiled to an island. This policy was subsequently en
dorsed by James Ross of the Hobart Town Courier, even though It was
a controversial breach with prevailing religious and humanitarian
principles. However, the policy was not od inp “
August 1830, Henry Melville of the Colonial Times Pan ya Ms
he did not know what to do. When the Black Line ee he zin
October that year, despite its endorsement d ue usd Time:
population and by the Hobart Town Courier, the C es
remained one of its strongest critics. h T
Fourth, there was little support in the press for the iii s. Henry
settlers were in awe of the fighting abilities of the scs E nii
Melville did, it is true, at times write that the settlers es be in-
Aborigines ‘are a most brave and resolute people, po ca lcm
timidated’, but in the same passage he described t em nn ini
guided wretches’. ” Other editors took a far less sername = usually
at the height of Aboriginal violence in 1830, the colonia ti rom.
described them in terms such as ‘a race of Pi y "E :
defenceless people’, who were ‘more to be pitied than b ame: iaoi
If anything, rather than fostering violent public opinion, cun
newspapers were more conciliatory on the Aboriginal questio da
their readers. By and large, they reflected attitudes of the bros B
Population centres rather than of the settlers in the countryside. The
are, in fact, clear indications that settler opinion was far from being
monolithic, despite what the orthodox school of history maintains. It
included not only moral divisions but also geographic camps.
THE TOWN VERSUS THE COUNTRYSIDE
” Colonial Times, 27 Ay
? Hobart Town Co
gust 1830, p3
urier, 30 O ,
Noieriha: 1830, p 3 ctober 1830, P 2; Hobart Town Courier, 13
m
—À€
———
Md
tronc | e
NINE: SETTLER OPINION AND THE EXTIRPATION THESIS 323
been imposed upon them by authorities in the town. This is as true
tday in debates over ‘land rights’ as it was in debates over Aboriginal
bosthües im early Van Diemen's Land where a similar division
between urban and rural values arose.
In January 1830, the first meeting of the Van Diemen's Land Soci-
ety, also known as the Philosophical Society, was held in the Court
House in Hobart. As the most far-flung outpost of the British
Empire, the educated members of Van Diemen's Land society clung
more tenaciously than most to the literary and scientific foundations
of the home culture. Lieutenant-Governor Arthur and his wife both
attended the inaugural meeting to hear the president, the surgeon Dr
John Henderson, explain the society's aims of publishing local scien-
ufic research and establishing a museum and botanic gardens. The
proceedings of the speeches and the subsequent dinner were pub-
lished in detail, taking up almost a full page of the Hobart Town Cou-
ners edition of 23 January. The main address was given by George
Frankland, the head of the government's Survey Department, who
gave a lecture on the progress of science. ‘Our very residence in this
island, he told the meeting, ‘may be termed the offspring of science,
for it was the progress of astronomy and navigation which led to its
occupation. The same was true of the nations of India, which
provided ‘the most beautiful illustration of the practical effects of
science that can be cited’. Though once ravaged by ‘rapine and
confusion’, India was now ‘by the introduction of our institutions,
resting in peace and security under the magic shield of their
influence’. Frankland continued:
Would that it were possible to trace her steps with equal satisfaction to
this naturally favoured little island! Science led to its discovery, but its dis-
coverers instead of bringing blessings in their train have heaped ruin and
destruction upon those children of misfortune, the Aboriginal owners of
the soil — a people naturally amiable and intelligent, who with better
treatment on the part of those who have come in contact with them,
might have been rendered valuable friends, and have continued a happy
nation! However I should hope that there is yet time to restore that har-
mony which, but for the brutal inhumanity of white men, had never been
broken; and surely no more glorious object could this Society propose to
itself than that of acquiring to more intimate acquaintance with this much
wronged people, with a view of ameliorating their condition, and of sav-
ing them from being extirpated from the face of that earth on which the
Almighty had placed them! *!
Frankland’s speech was followed by a commentary by Joseph
Hone, the barrister and head of the Courts of Quarter Sessions and
Requests:
^! Hobart Town Courier, 23 January 1830, p 3
324 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL History
Mr Hone said he was glad that his friend the Surveyor (
alluded to the Aborigines, as a subject towards which the
Society might be applied, He lamented the
place between Europeans and the natives
Which had been held in the building opposite (pointing to the Church) at
which he had presided. Much had been said on that occasion and much
had been done since. He regretted that he did not
individual who had been active in procuring the assembly to which he
spoke. He alluded to the Reve
assistance he should be glad to se i
ety towards so desirable an object
reneral had
Inquiries of thi
estrangement which had
taken
; and remembered 4 Meeting
A month after this meeting was held, Archdeacon Broughton S
Aboriginal Affairs Committee began issuing addresses and ip »
the local Pres. One government notice in ndis da hei
recognized that there had been a rise in assaults on settlers bu
held out hope that conciliatory policies would work:
It is with concern quite inexpressible that the Lieutenant Meu
tinues to receive statements of the atrocities committed by the — oe
natives. The moderation with which a mob of natives 2 s eden
stance lately conducted themselves in the neighbourhoo ae ciis
affords ground to hope that the way to a reconciliation may P
hopes.
At Bothwell itself, however, the settlers held few rre and
There was no sympathy for the views of Frankland ed in Hobart
more than a little resentment at a committee ensconce
Tasma-
telling them how to respond. A Bothwell settler wrote to the
nian, complaining:
Of His Excellency's P
. D. —
roclamation relative to the Aborigines, I hav
Observations to make.
But as to the address published by the Aboriginal
the settlers to act on the defensive only — to
to the walls, and not to seek the Blacks nor act
offensively! I say of this document, the catalogue of atrocities committed by
i i last month, and deduced from official reports, will
; may render very essential ser-
vice to our Colonial community.
The unnamed author then listed thirteen attacks on settlers in the
region between 4
82 Hobart Town Courier, 23 January 1830, p3
s Government Notice no, 31 Colonial Secretary’s >
| :31,C al $ ary s Office, 19 F ,
1830, published Tasmanian, 26 February 1830, p 471 ebruary
NINE: SETTLER OPINION AND THE EXTIRPATION THESIS 325
because Gilbert Robertson's party had been disbanded and most of
Jorgen Jorgenson's men had already earned their tickets-of-leave so
chat his force had dwindled to almost nothing. Only the roving party
ot John Danvers remained:
But what can one party do for the defence of an Island as large as Ireland.
God help us! Are the operations of the bush to be regulated by a Com-
mittee in Hobarton. What do they know about it? By the time the
Committee is arguing, debating, bandying letters about from place to
place, the white inhabitants are murdered, dwellings burned to the
ground, and terror and consternation spread over the country. The settlers
in the country take quite a different view of the matter to what do the
Gentlemen at Hobarton.™
In the same edition of the Tasmanian, a settler on the Clyde River
who signed himself *Cerus' also addressed the Aboriginal Commit-
tee's proclamation. He provided a list of local cases of arson and har-
assment, adding:
Please to recollect, that we in the interior, are in the most imminent daily
danger of our lives and property — of having our houses and barns burnt
about our ears in all directions, and our families butchered by these sav-
ages; and are we to be smoothly informed how we are to act, and that on
the defensive, by a few comfortably seated Gentlemen in their well fur-
nished and well-protected houses in Hobart-town.®
Despite all this heat, very few settlers in the countryside urged that
the Aborigines should be exterminated. Instead of what he called ‘the
sugar system’ of conciliation, the option favoured by “Cerus’ was not
destruction but capture. He suggested that rewards for this might be
effective, recommending that the members of the Aborigines
Committee in Hobart set the example:
Let these Gentlemen take the field, or they may drain their pockets of a
few of His Majesty's sovereigns in the shape of rewards for apprehending
the sable tribe. This will be more available than writing such addresses as
they last issued.
Rhetorical though it was in this case, capture became the most fre-
guently mentioned policy option, even from settlers in the worst
affected districts. In March 1830, a settler from the Clyde River com-
plained to the Hobart Town Courier about the ineffectiveness of the
roving parties: "They make so much noise by talking and blundering
over the dead wood and bark with a heavy tread that the Blacks have
no need to use their eyes (although very sharp sighted) their ears
being sufficient to give the alarm’. He proposed procuring a pack of
* Tasmanian, 26 February 1830, p 471
55 Tasmanian, 26 February 1830, p 471. His emphases.
A26. Tur PAMRUCATION OF ATDOIRIGINAL HISTORY
bloodhounds to follow the Aborigines so they could be either cag
tured or expelled from the settled districts."
However, even on the edge of the frontier there was no uniforrnic
of opinion. Another settler took exception to these comments from
the Clyde. He was more appreciative of the roving parties. H
thought they had a good track record in preventing Aboriginal
attacks, if not actually in capturing any. But he was particularly con
cerned about the proposal to use bloodhounds. He thought such a
tactic was alien to the British character. It would destroy the reputa-
tion of British colonialism and reduce it to that of the Spanish:
It would appear that the writer of that sensible letter has two objects in
view, viz. — to dampen the ardour of those roving parties who by day
and night have for a length of time past defended the settlements against
the incursions of the Aborigines; and to offer an advice, which if adopted,
would at once compromise the national character of Great Britain, and
expose the English to the same everlasting odium which history has fixed
on the cruelty of the Spaniards, who used blood hounds for hunting
down the unfortunate natives of the American islands who had taken ref-
uge in the woods and caverns, to sete themselves against the cruelties
and avarice of their rapacious invaders."
Bloodhounds, however, were never used in Van Diemen’s Land.
The view prevailed that tactics of this kind would stain the colonial
character. While the Clyde River settler who proposed it had some
supporters, they were out of step with the views of most of their
peers, as the next section demonstrates.
THE 1830 SURVEY OF SETTLER OPINION
One of the surprises of doing research on Van Diemen’s Land is how
rich the archival sources are. This is especially so in terms of settler
opinion. The Archives Office of Tasmania holds more than three
hundred pages of letters written by settlers about the Aboriginal
problem. Many of them were written to Archdeacon Broughton’s
1830 inquiry into Aboriginal affairs. It is an even greater surprise to
find that among these documents are answers to what was probably
the first ever questionnaire survey conducted in Australia.
Broughton’s committee, having read the relevant government reports
56 Hobart Town Courier, 13 March 1830, p 2. The author was John Sherwin,
whose loss of his house and property to Aboriginal arson in February 1830
prompted the editorial discussed earlier by Robert Lathrop Murray. Sherwin
made the same proposal to the Committee for the Care of Captured
Aborigines, AOT CBE/1, p 6
87 Colonial Times, 19 March 1830, p 3. The author was unnamed and his
address not given.
NINE: SETTLER OPINION AND THE EXTIRPATION THESIS 327
and held one meeting where it heard verbal evidence from a handful
of settlers who happened to be visiting Hobart at the time, decided
on 2 March 1830 that it needed to cast its inquiry more widely. The
chairman submitted that a number of questions ‘be circulated to
Gentlemen of experience and long residence in the Colony'. The
committee drew up nine questions and wrote to settlers of this kind.
The survey drew a retum rate of fourteen responses. They included
farmers, pastoralists and professional men from all the main settled
areas. They were:
Richard Dry: landed property Quamby Plains near Westbury, Elphin
near Launceston
Patrick Wood: landed property Dennistoun on Clyde River
William Barnes: brewer; landed property South Esk, Tamar
Edward Franks: landed property Green Ponds
James Scott: surgeon; landed property Bothwell, New Norfolk
William Clark: landed property Bothwell, Green Ponds
John Hudspeth: surgeon; landed property Oatlands
Thomas Salmon: chief constable Oatlands; landed property Oatlands
Thomas Anstey: police magistrate; landed property Oatlands; Mem-
ber Legislative Council 1830
William Gray: landed property Avoca
James Cox: landed property South Esk, Clarendon, Blessington;
Member Legislative Council 1830
George Meredith: landed property Great Swan Port
Edward Curr: chief agent of Van Diemen’s Land Company since
1826
Temple Pearson: surgeon, landed property Campbell Town
Some of their answers were very long and detailed, with Edward
Curr's running to twenty pages. All told, the responses to the survey
total almost one hundred pages, containing fifteen thousand words of
evidence. They provide an obviously valuable insight into the colo-
nial mentality.
You would never know this from reading the orthodox school of
historians, none of whom mention the survey's existence. Some of
them, such as Henry Reynolds, are well aware of it and have used it
as a source. But instead of providing a summary or overview of its
contents to indicate the full range of opinions it gathered, these his-
torians have simply mined it to find a handful of selected quotations
to support their own, predetermined theses. Reynolds has done this
in two of his recent books, Fate of a Free People and An Indelible Stain?,
** Minutes of the committee for the care and treatment of the captured
Aborigines, 2 March 1830, AOT CBE/1, pp 12-13
328 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
neither of which even hint at the existence of the survey itself.” Ap,
one wanting to read the original documents in full will find the quega
tons at one archival location” and the responses at another."
Given Brian Plomley’s claim that those settlers who gave evidence
to the committee in 1830 ‘were extirpationists almost to a man’, ind
the discussion earlier in this chapter of Reynolds’s assertions about
settler opinion, the responses to this survey provide a good opportus
nity to test the truth of the extirpationist thesis. What follows are the
nine questions it asked and a summary of answers given to each one.
1. Have you a recollection of the present Lieutenant-Governor’s assumption of
the Administration?
Arthur arrived in 1824, when twelve of the fourteen were already in
the colony. Edward Curr originally arrived in 1820, took up land at
Cross Marsh, but then returned to England in 1823. He came back to
the colony in March 1826 as chief agent of the Van Diemen’s Land
Company. Major William Gray first arrived in 1827.
2. What at that period was the general state of feeling and intercourse between
the Native Population and the Settlers?
Eleven respondents agreed that before 1824 there was only a little
contact between Aborigines and colonists but what there was had
been friendly. Richard Dry said: ‘The natives were in the habit of
visiting the settlers’ farms, receiving presents of bread and cloathing,
and in all instances that I have witnessed, seemed satisfied with the
conduct of the whites.’ Edward Franks observed that ‘considerable
numbers called “tame mobs” migrated occasionally passing thro’ the
peopled districts, in which they sojourned a few days or a week, and
appeared with proper feeling to receive the kindness of the Whites,
evinced in the distribution of bread, potatoes and clothes’. However,
* Fate of a Free People, pp 30-1, draws on the responses to the survey by
Richard Dry; An Indelible Stain?, pp 52-3, uses responses by William Barnes,
Edward Curr and Temple Pearson. In the latter book, Reynolds disguises
their origin, claiming Barnes wrote to Lieutenant-Governor Arthur, and that
Pearson wrote to the Colonial Secretary, whereas the passages he quotes
from both settlers were written actually in response to the Aboriginal
committee's survey.
? Minutes of the committee for the care and treatment of the captured
Aborigines, 2 March 1830, AOT CBE/1, pp 13-14
*! Answers by settlers and others to certain questions submitted to them by
the Aboriginal committee, AOT CSO 1/323/7578, pp 287-383
?? AOT CSO 1/323/7578 p 288
AM
"
ly v,
E ths Sf
b P 2
"d
Fr
M A
/
19
7
Ly 5 A LY
þa ID
rr
oe í €
NINE: SETTLER OPINION AND THE EXTIRPATION THESIS 329
he noted, that ‘the greater part of the black population kept aloof
3
from all correspondence ...””
Of the three who disagreed, James Scott said at that period the
natives were very hostile, except one or two small families who fre-
quented the settled districts. This was because ‘a Sydney native,
Muskitto, committed many murders at the head of a large body of
them’, ‘Any stockkeeper met without arms would have been instantly
speared — several were killed.’”* Thomas Salmon said: ‘There was at
that time a more friendly intercourse than at present between the
whites and the blacks but accompanied by a great deal of treachery on
the part of the latter’.
3. Do you remember at that time the occurrence of any instances of treachery
or hostility on the part of the former or which shewed a spirit of mischief sub-
sisting among them?
Nine of the respondents recalled cases where the blacks had assaulted
or killed settlers. In several cases the white victims had been giving
them handouts. Three respondents singled out the case of Matthew
Osborne, who was killed and his wife wounded. They repeated the
story that the couple were attacked ‘in the act of shaking hands with
one’ and ‘whilst in the act of presenting them with a loaf of bread’.”°
The blacks had been at the Osbornes’ home at Jericho for several
hours before they did this and the incident was recalled with particu-
lar bitterness. .
Two respondents, without being asked, mentioned treachery on
the part of the whites. William Barnes denied that in 1824 or previ-
ously there had been any instances of black treachery or hostility. “But
if a solitary instance had occurred, I do not hesitate to say that it was
provoked by the massacre of hundreds of their people by the stock
keepers in the outstations.'?" William Clark recalled the case of a man
named Jenkins, a stock-keeper employed by Edward Lord, who
'seized a native woman and kept her confined for some days in his
hut, always chaining her with a bullock chain to his post whenever he
went abroad'.??
? AOT CSO 1/323/7578 p 307
AOT CSO 1/323/7578 p 315
Ay j^ k (2,
94
95.
O 1/323/7578 p 299
O 1/323/7578 p 320
330 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL History
4. If any such instances occurred do you conceive them to have originated ig
any provocation offered by the Whites, or to what cause do you attribute
them?
Five respondents agreed that actions by the whites had been the cag
of hostilities. Three of these settlers blamed bushrangers and stod
keepers at remote locations, while one of them also thought the
ers in Bass Strait who stole Aboriginal women were another caug
Thomas Anstey mentioned the original conflict at Risdon Cove
1804. ‘I have heard and read much of the natives having been wag
tonly subjective to a murderous platoon firing in the early days of the
colony; but of this I know nothing beyond common report.’ Anste
denied, however, that any hostility was generated by the violation
black women by the whites. ‘This is disproved by the universally ad
mitted fact that the Aborigines will shamelessly prostitute their gins
the whites for so trifling a present as sugar or bread." d
Four respondents disagreed that the whites were to blame. e
Wood and John Hudspeth thought the cause lay in the po e
Aborigines ‘to obtain the comforts enjoyed by the settlers an E E
thirst for plunder in the blacks’.'°° Similarly, George Meredith to :
two incidents in which shepherds in his district had been murdered:
"The chief originating causes in such appeared to be a desire on their
part for the possession of dogs, although in the latter other property
was plundered.”
2. What is the present state of the Natives in your neighbourhood with respect
to their feeling towards the White Population, and what instances of violence
or depredation committed by them upon the Whites, or by the Whites upon
them, have fallen within your knowledge during the last six years? .
There was unanimity in answer to the first part of this question. Six
respondents chose the words ‘decidedly hostile’, while others said
‘most hostile’,
‘the most rancorous animos-
al hostility’. Only Edward Curr modified the
Picture by saying that the feelings of the natives ‘seem to differ in the
I am concerned’. At the Surrey Hills they were
? AOT CSO 1/323/7578 p
341-2
™ AOT CSO 1
/323/7578 Pp 295, 328
e AOT CSO 1/323/7578 p 355
AOT CSO 1/323/7578 p 361
FU tts ^1 Puta à "
Aiit ont ptm retira
NINE: SETTLER OPINION AND THE EXTIRPATION THESIS 331
ited by whites against the blacks, Three others thought
at whites attacked blacks was when in pursuit of them
crimes the blacks had initiated.
S chan Dry reported one incident in which stock-keepers at
Noc on Quambie's Plains (Western Marshes) ‘had forced some
Mack women to their hut and that in revenge for this outrage the
natives Waylaid and killed the two stockmen'. William Barnes
described another incident in which a group of Aborigines had come
into Launceston and camped near Government House. However,
convicts had ‘abused’ the women and beaten the men. Apart from
this, he did not give any specific instances or name any of those
responsible, but he was nonetheless certain the whites were responsi-
lence comm
che only time th
ble for terrible atrocities:
The depredations committed upon them by the white people have been
carried on for many years and have been upon so large a scale the slaugh-
ter has been so indiscriminate and attended with such heart rending and
unheard acts of barbarity, that it is impossible to describe them. These acts
are never published in the papers, but are recounted by the propitiators
and are made the subject of exultation — when the killing of from two to
twenty blacks is spoken of without the least remorse.
Thomas Anstey also said: ‘I have heard that wanton acts of violence
have been committed by the whites upon the blacks, but I cannot at
present recollect a specific instance.’!™
On the other hand, James Scott said that while instances of depre-
dation by the blacks were numerous, and although he had heard
reports of violence on both sides, his own personal experience had
always been friendly. ‘I have often fallen in with them in the interior,
during the last ten years — but always being sufficiently armed, and
invariably treating them with kindness, have never been obliged to
have resource to violent measures — I have often been obliged to
them for a meal, after being some days on short allowances." l
John Hudspeth strongly denied the whites were to blame and said
stories of outrages committed by convicts and stock-keepers were
fanciful:
I have never known an instance of wanton aggression on the part of T
whites — on the contrary, I have witnessed nothing but the utmost kind-
ness and liberality towards these people — the settlers generally giving
them bread, sugar, and articles of dress, being what they seemed € to
prize ... I am moreover of opinion that injuries alleged to have been
13 AOT CSO 1/323/7578 p 289
10 AOT CSO 1/323/7578 p 300
15 AOT CSO 1/323/7578 p 343
1% AOT CSO 1/323/7578 p 316
332 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAI History
inflicted on the Aborigines by the convict population are More ide
real. I have had opportunities of knowing the intercourse t
men and the native women w
al thar,
)CUween White
as not offensive to these tribes and cannor
suppose than any bad blood has sprung from that cause,
All fourteen of the respondents mentioned murders and robberies
committed by the blacks. Some of them, such as Edward Franks, John
Hudspeth and Thomas Salmon, gave specific d
etails of recent Abo-
riginal assaults in their districts, with their answers listing up to fifteen
separate incidents.
Edward Curr did the same for the territory occupied by the Van
Diemen’s Land Company, with his answer to this question taking
eleven pages. 95 However, he was more concerned than the E to
play down the question of violence. Curr recorded one inci Bat at
Circular Head where Aborigines robbed the hut of company sawy :
observing: "They might have securely speared the sawyers : scot ti
had been their object.’ On another occasion, shortly after they aed
dered a hut, the blacks came within ten yards of a man digging p -
toes but did not molest him. 'I mention these circumstances thus s
cerely, that the Committee seeing on the one hand the apii i
the natives have had, and on the other their forbearance, may ee
their own judgement of their dispositions.’ Curr said there i eris
possible reasons for this forbearance. They might have been yos
dated by ‘the example which was made of them two years since hes
killings at Cape Grim), or by the sealers who ‘have occasio -
landed on the main and made havoc amongst them’. On the ot E
hand, he argued, ‘it is possible that conciliation may in some degr
be the cause of their forbearance'. He then went on to describe an
experiment he conducted with an Aboriginal youth who he accom-
modated, took out on his boat and taught some English. Curr tried to
persuade the youth that the intentions of the settlers towards the
natives were peaceable and asked him to take this message back to his
tribe. He thought it possible that the recent lull in hostilities was due
to this contact. Of all the settlers, Curr was the only one who tried to
see the relationship through Aboriginal eyes:
1” AOT CSO 1/323/7578 p 330
"^ AOT CSO 1/323/7578 Pp 360-71
NINE: SETTLER OPINION AND THE EXTIRPATION THESIS 333
murder, I certainly will not sanction their being fired upon in retaliation
for such an offence. If they attack our flocks again I shall consider the case
to be quite different. To steal what is of use to them may be consistent
with their notions of amity, and I think it is; but if they should commence
a wholesale slaughter of our Stock it can have no other motive than our
expulsion, and will justify our taking strong measures in our own
defence,”
6. What is your opinion as to the natives of the transactions of the past year
as compared with the preceding?
Twelve of the settlers agreed that Aboriginal assaults had got worse in
the past year and that the natives had become more hostile. The other
two were Edward Curr, who said he did not know enough about the
settled districts to have an opinion, and James Cox who, although
agreeing there had been increased hostility, said the government was
now on the right track: “At present the blacks coming into the settled
districts, therefore consider the measures adopted during the last year
to be highly creditable to the government for the protection given to
the people and that the necessity of continuing and increasing that
protection is strongly called for."!!?
Some respondents said there was a qualitative difference in the
hostilities of the past year compared to those previous. Richard Dry
said that until recent years the hostility did not appear to have ex-
tended beyond the tribe or family in which it originated, perhaps by
‘some temporary aggression of the whites, the remembrance of which
gradually gave way to better feelings’. However: ‘during the later
years a determined spirit of hostility has been manifested by the whole
of the black population, and acts of outrage committed by them on
the lives and property of the settlers in almost every district of the
island." William Clark observed that the blacks ‘no longer confine
their depredations to remote stock huts and isolated dwellings, they
now plunder houses in populous places ...’ Clark was particularly
alarmed that they had added arson to their crimes: ‘Lately they have
commenced a system of destruction, which if persevered in, will in-
volve many families in ruin, by destroying houses and barns by fire.’
He described two instances of Aborigines setting fire to houses ‘while
the blacks looked on at a short distance, gonne the confusion the
family were thrown into by the conflagration’.
"Tree other settlers, James Scott, John Hudspeth and Thomas
Anstey, also mentioned the increase in arson. Anstey noted: "The
Li
70-1
19 AOT CSO 1/323/7578 pp 3
uo AOT CSO 1/223/7578 p 353 *
11 AOT CSO 1/323/7578 PP Pan
u2 AOT CSO 1/323/7578 pp
334 THE FABRICATION Ol ABORIGINAL HISTORY
murders in this district have been less 1
)umerous, but the burnings of
houses, corn stacks,
fences have greatly increased,’
He went on to
lament the changed attitudes on both sides:
The natives are become bolder and the whites more timid.
cnm ' The latter save
their lives by timely flig
ht and sacrifice their property without resistance,
Thus, so far from acting on a system of “wanton aggression" — the
settlers and their men have not even spirit enough to defend themselves
when attacked by the blacks. l
7. To what causes would you attribute the rise and progress of the hostility
displayed by the Natives?
The most common answer given to this question was to blame the
hostilities on the shooting of Aborigines at Risdon Cove in 1804.
Even though none of the settlers in the survey had been in the colony
at that time, they believed that subsequent relations between the races
had been poisoned by this incident. Edward Franks said: ‘It would be
difficult to assign a cause for the enmity of the blacks other than the
one generally attributed, viz the unfortunate transactions on the first
landing." John Hudspeth and William Gray agreed that the cause
lay in ‘some premature and ill-judged severity practised upon them by
the white people immediately after the first settlement was formed
here"? James Scott showed that he had derived his view from read-
ing Charles Jeffrey's guide for immigrants to the colony. He repeated
Jeffrey’s false claim that the Aborigines at Risdon Cove were carrying
branches of trees as emblems of peace and blamed the officer in
command for ‘having caused one or two guns loaded with canister
shot to be fired into their ranks and swept up great numbers of
them'.!!6
As well as these four, a clear majority of the respondents thought
that the whites themselves, for various other reasons, were to blame.
William Barnes referred the committee to his answer to the previous
question where he had said ‘their experience of the barbarity and
treachery of the whites must render them for ever mistrustful of our
professions." Edward Curr agreed: 'I consider, as I have said above,
the rise of hostilities to be attributable to the whites, and its progress I
"3 AOT CSO 1/323/7578 pp 343-4
114 AOT CSO 1/323/7578 p 310
"5 AOT CSO 1/323/7578 pp 331, 347
46 AOT CSO 1/323/7578 p 316. For the itiaccurac
see Chapter One, pp 24-5
"7 AOT CSO 1/323/7578 p 301
y of Jeffrey’s assertion
NINE: SETTLER OPINION AND THE EXTIRPATION THESIS 335
believe. has. been caused by mutual wrongs, and the difficulty of
coming to any understanding with the natives,’ |!*
Two settlers agreed. with the explanation put forward in various
proclamations by the lieutenant-governors that the lower orders of
the colony in remote locations were responsible. William Clark iden-
titied remote stock-keepers and bushrangers as the principal culprits
in his district around Bothwell. ‘Until Dunn the bushranger violated
one of their women at Mr Thomson’s hut, whither he had forcibly
carried her in Oct. 1826, no murders were perpetrated in this vicin-
ity. On the contrary, a friendly intercourse subsisted between the
natives and the settlers'.' ^ James Scott thought ‘various wanton acts
of bushrangers, sealers, stockkeepers and others’ had helped maintain
the animosity.'”°
Scott also thought that the displacement of the natives from the
land was another cause: ‘for all the best tracts of land in the island
where they were originally to find abundance of game, being taken
from them by settlers, arriving year after year from England'."! Tem-
ple Pearson concurred: ‘In some measure the ill usage of their women
and children, but more especially the occupation of their favourite
hunting tracts by the whites’.'!” This explanation also generated a
marked difference of opinion by two of the respondents, who both
argued their case thoughtfully and who deserve to be quoted in full.
The first was Richard Dry:
To the rapid increase of settlers who now occupy the best portions of the
land, extensive plains and fine forests where formerly emu and kangaroo
fed in such numbers, that procuring subsistence was pastime to a black
native, and not as it is now, attended with toil and uncertainty, from this
land they are excluded and daily witness our encroachments in the exten-
sive fences erecting by the settlers. These circumstances ’tho inseparable
from the nature of the settlement, must impress the blacks with unfavour-
able ideas of our intentions towards them; yet the results cannot be [as]
distressing to them as those arising from the wanton destruction of the
animals on which they subsist, by collectors of kangaroo skins for sale; and
to whom the carcass is of no value. I am confident that in this way also
there are not less than eight thousand of these animals killed annually; by
parties stationed in the interior, by stockkeepers, bushrangers, and others
who to gain six pence / the value of a skin / destroy a quantity of food
sufficient for the daily subsistence of six natives.'*
115 AOT CSO 1/323/7578 pp 371-2. His emphases
11? AOT CSO 1/323/7578 p 322
7? AOT CSO 1/323/7578 p 316
7! AOT CSO 1/323/7678/9 p 316
12 AO'T CSO 1/323/7578 p 380
322 AOT CSO 1/323/7578 p 290-1
THE FABRICA TION OF ABORIGINAL History
Che other was Patrick Wood, who wrote:
occasioned by the difficulty they had i e numbe
of kangaroos destroyed by stockkeepers and time-expired men who killed
them for their skins and under this impression I urged His Excellency the
Lieut. Governor to issue orders restraining the u
se of kangaroo dogs and
since that time there can have been no scarcity o
f food as the kangaroo at
present seem to be more numerous than at any former period. I therefore
do not think that the present hostile spirit can be attributed to ill usage or
the scarcity of food but is occasioned by the wish to possess themselves of
the property of the settlers with whose weakness they are acquainted from
their being so widely scattered and they have now much more confidence
" . 2.
in their own prowess.'?*
A smaller number of explanations for the cause of hostilities attrib-
uted responsibility to the blacks rather than the whites. Thomas
Salmon blamed ‘chiefly the depredations committed by Musquito in
the presence of his tribe’.'” Similarly, Edward Franks thought the
‘tame mobs’ and their early leaders had committed most atrocities.
From them, the antagonism spread to tribal Aborigines. "These have
perhaps taught their wilder countrymen many things relating to the
whites unknown to them before and possibly have inspired them
with greater confidence.’!”° William Clark argued that once the Abo-
rigines discovered they could rob settlers with impunity, this encour-
aged them to continue their actions:
The progress of this hostility, and the alarming height to which it has now
arisen, may, I think, be attributed to the want of energy in the parties sent
in pursuit of them and to the facility with which they can plunder the
settlers. The occupation of a settler detains him, and his men, for the most
part, in the fields and his house, left without protection, becomes an easy
prey to these insidious depredators who will, for days and weeks, watch a
house that they have marked out for plunder, till they find the whole of
the males absent, they then pounce upon the dwelling, and with a celerity
incredible plunder it of every article they consider valuable. They are sel-
dom pursued by the settlers, from a despair of finding them in the dime
inaccessible fortresses, which this side of the island everywhere Presents, to
facilitate concealment, thus escaping with impunity they are led a nd
renewed acts of outrage.'^
However, John Hudspeth thought the initial
n cause lay in t
rigines’ desire for British goods. Eventually, Y 1n the Abo-
settler retaliation and
124 AOT CSO 1/323/7578 p 296
128 AOT CSO 1/323/7578 p 337
1^ AOT CSO 1/323/7578 p 310
127 AOT CSO 1/323/7578 p 323
NINE: SETTLER OPINION AND THE EXTIRPATION THESIS 337
^. forced the clash into a more general conflict.
iolence has encreased from a desire to possess without limitation
'ommon necessaries such as bread, sugar, blankets, knives etc, to ob-
ich without resistance they committed murder in such repeated
| at length to rouse a spirit of retaliation on the part of the
rather a determination to repel them whenever they attempted
h our dwellings. The Government also found it expedient to
arties with a view to capture them. This they are well aware of,
ommenced a general and open warfare upon the settlers."
th them on amicable terms?
th respondents gave negative answers to this question, with
benefit they might derive from living with us on friendly
5.29 Two settlers, Patrick Wood and William Gray, said that the
es once thought both the government and the respectable
ould treat them with kindness, but the situation had dete-
ed to the point where they must no longer believe this. William
thought the blacks could once discriminate between the atti-
the government and of the respectable settlers and the actions
ers who had been their enemies. ‘But I think there is now no
l of convincing them that every person meeting them will
imm diately destroy them.'? James Cox thought that many of
ust be aware of the good intentions of the government and
people to treat them kindly, but cannot suppose this to be generally
understood by them, and from their wandering habits and savage and
hostile manner they will I fear never be brought thoroughly to un-
derstand it?!
$ 9. What measures are in your opinion proper to be adopted for attaining this
P last mentioned purpose, or if it should prove unattainable for protecting the
P lives and property of the Community against the attacks of the Savages?
There were two parts to this question, which really amounted to
" asking, first, how to conciliate the Aborigines, and, second, if con-
ó ciliation failed, what action to take then. Despite the general pessi-
1 KOT CSO 1/323/7578 p 331
12 AOT CSO 1/323/7578 p 291
1» KOT CSO 1/323/7578 p 301
?! AOT CSO 1/323/7578 p 353
338 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
mism about how the situation had deteriorated to the point where al]
the Aborigines were hostile to the white presence, seven of the four-
teen settlers still thought conciliation was an option worth trying.
Both James Scott and William Gray thought it would still be possi-
ble to negotiate with the Aborigines. Scott recommended employing
a party of five or six natives from New South Wales to persuade the
local tribes to come in from the wild, after which they should be
taken to an uninhabited part of the colony and confined there. Gray
also suggested employing a party of Sydney natives to ‘open up a
means of communication’ with them. John Hudspeth also recom-
mended importing natives from Sydney to act as trackers, and advised
that, to ensure their perseverance, they should be allowed to bring
their gins with them.
The other four settlers who thought conciliation was still possible
all proposed capturing some of the Aborigines, holding them for a
time while the government’s good intentions were explained to
them, and then releasing them back to their tribes so they could
communicate the good news. William Barnes proposed offering
rewards of ten pounds for every male Aborigine, five pounds for
every female and three pounds for every child captured and delivered
alive to Ross, Launceston or Hobart. He spelt out what should hap-
pen next:
I would then propose that they should be treated with every possible
degree of kindness to convince them of the sincerity of our views —
They should be made to understand most fully that the object of bringing
them in, is not to punish or to injure them, but to prevent any further acts
of hostility between them and the whites — after keeping them for some
weeks with great care and incessantly explaining to them that the Gover-
nor, the public officers and respectable people are their friends, and as
soon as there is reason to believe that they fully understand us — dismiss a
few of them and their families with presents to join their tribes, to whom
they will communicate what they had been told and how they had been
treated. ??
Others who advocated a policy along much the same lines were
William Clark, Edward Curr (in his answer to question five) and
Temple Pearson. As discussed earlier in this chapter, Pearson warned
the committee that unless conciliatory measures were effective, total
extermination would be the only option left. His preferred policy was
that someone should learn the native language and negotiate with
them, preferably someone of their own colour. He knew some of
their vocabulary and offered to provide it to the committee. Small
parties of prisoners should be used to capture Aborigines and explain
132 AOT CSO 1/323/7578 p 302
PINION AND THE EXTIRPATION THESIS 339
NINE: SETTLER O
ments intentions. They were not as difficult to track in the
the government s inte
woods, he said,
prospect Edwar
as many people thought.
| Curr raised was for the Aborigines to be
One : : , ue 5
civilized through the medium of their vices’. In North and South
america, he observed, the natives had been taught to drink and
smoke:
Occasional indulgence soon grows into a habit. When their supply is
stopped they begin to consider how they can renew it, and they soon un-
derstand that they can only have their wants supplied, by giving an
equivalent. There is the first dawning of trade: they process skins that they
may barter them for spirits and tobacco, and then the gradation from
Drunkenness to Christianity even! is not very remote.'?
This was hardly, however, a practical proposition to put before this
committee. It was more a sardonic barb aimed at Archdeacon
Broughton and his evangelical ambitions than a seriously intended
recommendation, Some of Curr’s other answers can be read in a
similar light, particularly the passage discussed above where he raised
the prospect of exterminating the Aborigines, only to then declare
himself against it. Curr was an intelligent man who enjoyed pursuing
the logic of a position to its conclusion, even when he did not
endorse the direction the argument took. He believed the situation
between blacks and whites in Van Diemen’s Land to be irreconcilable
and he mocked the committee’s hope of finding a solution.
The other seven respondents thought both the time and the
Opportunity for conciliation had now passed. Three of them sug-
gested capturing the Aborigines and removing them to a location
where they could no longer harass the settlers. Edward Franks
thought it ‘desirable to remove them to some place, or island, where
they would be harmless and where their children might be reared
with better feelings and receive instruction.’ Franks also discussed
using bloodhounds: ‘however repugnant to British feeling and to the
dictates of humanity, I would suggest but cannot recommend the
ultra measure of the bloodhound’, a proposition he thought ‘appears
frightfully on paper’. However, the ‘obduracy and sanguinary temper
of this savage race’ meant the prospect should be raised.'** Thomas
blacks could be induced to live with
Anstey said he did not think the i
‘Their capture and deportation to a
the whites on amicable terms.
distant land is the most efficient and humane measure that I can
é
suggest. ^^ James Cox wanted them captured and transported to
s ecure place and when removed from their native soil I have
ome secure ,
4 /323/7578 PP 376-7
17323/7578 pp 311-12
133 AOT CSO
/7578 p 345
134 AOT CSO
35 AOT CSO 1/325
340 Tur FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
no doubt but they might be
made useful in agricultur;
food for themse
il purposes, raise
oper Management’, !36
Ives under pr
The other four who de
resort to arms. Rich
‘armed associ
spaired of conciliation re
ard Dry suggested the
ations in each district ready to
and military’, They would eventually force the Aborigines into con-
ciliation. ‘When they are convinced that the forbearance of the
whites hitherto has not proceeded from a want of power to repel
their attacks and are made sensible of our superiority they may then
be induced to enter into communications that may lead to an amica-
ble termination,’!37 Patrick Wood thought it was ‘not until a severe
example has been made of them that they may again learn to respect
the Europeans’. Thomas Salmon could only suggest to oe out a
sufficient number of parties and station them judiciously'."? George
Meredith proposed the most extreme solution:
commended 4
settlers should pay for
act in aid of the police
the earliest possible importation of bloodhounds — dogs has
thought ought to have been sent for at the first appearance o - MA ecl
ing — and in the meantime the training of colonial dogs — no debeo
and destroy the natives — but to be attached to every field mod ad
used in hand — and thus to track unerringly and either insure thei
j == ir annihila-
ture, or if indeed the alternative must be resorted to the
tion,
ER hn
The only other settler to seriously advocate extermination es J pom
Hudspeth. While he initially recommended a policy of gere
Aborigines, he said he doubted this was a practical solution, a 8:
I am solemnly of opinion that they can never be got alive in any po al
able number — that their implacability will never cease and that i "e
were only five in number existing in the bush, these are pu ds ri
get more enlightened) to devastate the island from one end to the o
: EF E ihilation to
and consequently I conceive the only remedy is their total annihila
save ourselves from a similar fate, !^!
CONCLUSIONS FROM THE SURVEY
What overall conclusion
confined to the views o
comprehensive informati
the crisis of Aboriginal
s can we draw from this survey? Although
f fourteen individuals, it provides the most
on about settler opinion at the time when
violence reached its peak. It was a selective
™ AOT CSO 1/323/7578 p 354
7 KOT CSO 1/323/7578 p 292
P AOT CSO 1/323/7578 p 296
7 KOT CSO 1/323/7578 p 337
® AOT CSO 1/323/7578 pp 357-8
^H! AC] CSO 1/323/7578 p 333
k Mene - »
NINE: SETTLER OPINION AND THE EXTIRPATION THESIS 341
E
surt
ovlonial society.
v that obviously did not represent a complete cross-section of
; Those approached were ‘gentlemen of experience
amd long residence! and were representative of the respectable classes
gather than the lower orders. Nonetheless, it is a valuable insight into
he temperament of the times. The questions probed opinions about
ke causes and the history of the conflict and asked the settlers what
hev thought should be done about it. There is no other contempo-
rary source that comes even close to providing such a range and
depth of opinion.
i The conclusions that may be drawn from the survey are fairly clear.
They do not favour the interpretation offered by Brian Plomley,
Henry Reynolds and Sharon Morgan. In fact, they refute the extirpa-
donist thesis. Even at the height of Aboriginal violence, when Mor-
= dimid they were consumed by mass hysteria and a ‘sadistic
el e and tried to assess the situation
erecta oie g black violence as an excuse to commit
eir own, most placed more blame on their own side
than on the blacks and sought to understand where they had
wrong. y nad gone
, .
a sar aa settlers who gave evidence to the Aborigines
d E _ extirpationists almost to a man', is not only false but
5 e majority by attributing to them an outlook they never
eld. The evidence shows that h i m
1830 still believed ; s that alf of those questioned in March
hogen d aj de p P Only when asked what would
Abeicnes Gale pw id any of them advocate exterminating the
Ae o ix out of fourteen settlers made an unequivocal
UR qud im . This position was clearly at the extreme end of the
iNet ae At the other end were those who despaired of
Secreted e Aborigines had received at white hands and who,
icreasing attacks on white households, still wanted them
treated with 'every possible degree of kindness'. In the middle were
settlers who generally supported the policy that was eventually
adopted, the capture of the Aborigines and their removal to a secure
location where they could no longer raid the settlers’ properties.
There were also some who supported a big show of strength by the
colony, which to this point had been lacking. Some settlers saw that
the lack of a more determined military response had encouraged the
Aborigines to imagine themselves more invincible than they really
were and this had itself contributed to the growth of violence.
It is also worth emphasising that the survey is largely the voice of
n. Ten of the settlers came from
the countryside rather than the tow
the three districts that had suffered most from violence: the central
midlands (Oatlands, Green Ponds, Campbell Town), the Clyde and
Big River districts, and Oyster Bay. All of them knew people who
342 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
had been killed or assaulted by Aborigines in the r
especially true of the two m
en who
Meredith and John Hudspeth. Mere
been raided a number of
killed on his |
ecent past. This was
advocated extermination, George
dith’s Property at Oyster Bay had
times and two assigned servants had been
and. Later that year, t
wo more men were to be killed
On his stock run.!? John Hudspeth was the surgeon at Oatlands,
which between 1828 and 1830 was the district that suffered the worst
human casualties, Hudspeth had frequently been present immediately
after Aboriginal assaults to attend the wounded and dying and was
often a witness at coronial inquests. Given some of the details he
described in his clinical evidence, such as the mutilation of murdered
white women and children," it would not have been surprising to
hear him express even more
bloodthirsty opinions than he gave.
Clearly, the settlers inhabited a culture that fostered restraint in these
matters.
THE GREAT DEBATE, HOBART, SEPTEMBER 1830
In September 1830 an extraordinary public meeting was held at the
Court House in Hobart. It was ostensibly to organize the free settlers
into a town guard that would maintain security while the military was
in the field pursuing Aborigines along the Black Line. The pera
however, turned into a full-scale public debate over the merits of e
Black Line itself. The proceedings were reported by the Colonia
Times. Its edition of 24 September 1830 devoted two of its four
broadsheet pages to the speeches given and to editorial comment
about the government's decision. The meeting, it should be empha-
sized, was held on the eve of the most dramatic event that had ever
occurred in the colony. The week before, the Lieutenant-Governor
had announced the general mobilisation of the white population. The
'* Hobart Town Gazette, 24 July 1824, p 2; Francis Aubin, Report of the
Outrages Committed by the Aborigines at Great Swan Port, AOT CSO
1/316/7578, , 24 September 1830, p 3
Nw
m o 1*809000000—
NINE: SETTLER OPINION AND THE EXTIRPATION THESIS 343
line itself was due to begin its march in less than three weeks time.
This was a heady moment.
The meeting elected as chair the master of the Supreme Court,
Joseph Hone. The first speaker was Anthony Fenn Kemp, the former
soldier, now a prominent merchant. Kemp said that, because of the
atrocities the Aborigines had committed in the interior, it was neces-
sary for the settlers to support the government by taking up town
duty. But he blamed the origin of the conflict on the whites, espe-
cially those who fired on the Aborigines at Risdon Cove in 1804.
Although he had been stationed at Launceston at the time, he had
firm opinions about the incident. The Colonial Times wrote:
Mr Kemp commented at some length upon the aggression 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."
He was followed by the barrister and former Attorney-General,
Joseph Gellibrand, who said he would express his opinions plainly
and without reserve:
It has been stated by Mr Kemp that we have been aggressors in the pre-
sent unhappy state of hostility that prevails between the white people and
the black Aborigines. This reflection cannot but give rise to the most
painful feeling. How dreadful it is to contemplate that we are about to
enter upon a war of extermination, for such I apprehend is the declared
object of the present operations and that in its progress we shall be com-
pelled to destroy the innocent with the guilty.
Gellibrand argued that, as the law of the colony now stood, those
engaged in the Black Line were putting themselves in ‘considerable
peril’ of criminal charges for they could not distinguish between the
innocent and the guilty among the blacks:
I admit that if any of the blacks who have committed the dreadful atroci-
ties, the existence of which no man laments more than myself, could be
identified, and were pursued and could not be captured, that it might
then be justifiable to shoot them. But I doubt very much, whether, if
unless such identity were ascertained, that any individual who should shed
ot, in the present state
the blood of one of these unhappy people, would n
of the law, be guilty of murder.
confine the debate to the
After some appeals by other speakers to deb
farmer, Benjamin Horne,
purpose of the meeting, the midlands
144 Colonial ‘Times, 24 September 1830, p 5. All the speeches that followed
were recorded in the same edition.
344 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL History
reminded Gellibrand th
elty of shedding the blood of the
their slaughter
the grass has h
who were recentl
shepherds in the
atrocities th
sheep, whic
on:
at, while he ‘spoke on the subject of the cru-
he had Overlooked
have forgotten that
of the two children
Horne said that the
had become so alarmed by Aboriginal
at ‘they peremptorily refuse to go out with the flocks of
h are thereby left to wander and stray away’. Horne went
Aborigines’,
of the whites. ‘Surely he cannot
ardly yet grown over the graves
y so barbarously murdered!’
interior
I am always op
posed to appeals to the feelings in the way of argument.
On th
t
€ present occasion that appeal has been most ide a a s
entirely on one side, in favour of the blacks against the whites. If there
: : i see what
extermination is necessary, horrible as is the alternative, I do not
other means of protection exist.
k
The Hobart medical practitioner Dr Adam Turnbull then too
s enn Kemp
issue with some of the reservations expressed by Anthony F
ar
and argued that they should not be daunted by the prospect of a w
of extermination:
ony's Solicitor-
emphasized he
the governmen
missed Gellibrand's argu
possibly commit a crime
d, is
It is so already, and a movement on a large scale as at present P e cm
infinitely preferable to a lingering warfare, in the course nindot
flocks are cut off little by little — but still it is a [w]ar ee seven oken
The present plan will strike them with dismay — they wi a The pre
or destroyed or driven into some of the recesses of the interi liac cia
sent warfare of the stockkeepers is infinitely more one of ex ‘iL excite
than the proposed one will be. The simultaneous ibo e s "ice
terror, not rage. Two interests are concerned — the black anc cde
— and I think the simultaneous attack will be the means of saving a
e 1 ore
shedding blood. The blacks will be less injured— the whites m
secured.
After some more business about forming the town guard, the col-
General, Alfred Stephen, returned to the debate. oF
was only there as a private citizen, not as a member ia
t. He took the hardest line of all the speakers. He dis-
ment that in pursuit of the blacks they might
E 33 . Er : m
The original report transcribed this as ‘law of extermination’ but ‘war’
makes more sense.
NINE: SETTLER OPINION AND THE EXTIRPATION THESIS 345
hourly loss of their lives. 1 say, sir (Mr Stephen here spoke with much
animation), that you are bound upon every principle of justice and
humanity, to protect this particular class of individuals, and if ;
do so without exterminati | = vue
LÍ nation, then I say boldly and broadly, exterminate!
trust | have as muc anity as : jue
e dps ich humanity as any man who hears me, but I declare
c ` h rye ` s ` 1 P 1 a :
i a was ure in the pursuit of the blacks, and that I could
ot capture them, which I w v i
; ould endeavour t i
aapa ! : o do by eve :
power, | would fire upon them —_—
The Sh: 1 dese ~
N dude s i George Thomson seconded Stephen’s
Backs. tien t a ah bn e is an imperative necessity to destroy the
placed in our hands ior ees to i the means that Providence has
critics, accusing Fiame as bei dese RAF then replied to his
nising the issue of Filii gw enar than he, especially in
deaths had arisen ‘entirely in P 2 ildren. Gellibrand claimed their
horrid sort committed upon ie Heck: I SEO esis OF De aN
refused to abandon his Bow s p odis Rar HOSEA ED ES Me
pursuit of the Aborigines: out the settlers breaking the law in
I am of opini
thore fae pes n the law now stands any man who may kill one of
remember the tin place himself in a very dangerous situation. I well
that high office na) when the gentleman who here presides [Hone], filled
stand. At that a the power of the sanctions of which no man can
ties that had been c don SHONE feeling existed in respect to the atroci-
Acie, «ides fe s upon the blacks, and I take upon myself to
bixdessios bad s of contradiction, that if any man who had killed a
ve Geerd ns vr brought here under such a charge, that the Attor-
den. and thorth uld have brought him before the Chief Justice for mur-
at the Judge would have directed the jury to find him guilty.
St à
Bl then replied that he could not clarify the settlers’ legal
e had a responsibility to advise the government on the
t
question, but he did support Gellibrand on one point:
cks, particularly in
I a 1 oe
dmit that the atrocities of the whites against the bla
to be
rie instance which Mr Gellibrand described to me this morning,
readful beyond belief, and if I could discover the monsters by whom
they had been perpetrated, I should only wish that they had each ten lives
to expiate with them the horrid crimes they had committed.
Dr Turnbull, however, would not concede anything. He said:
ew Mr Gellibrand has taken upon the subject
has been adopted in the sister colony,
I differ entirely with the vi
of extermination — that measure
with the greatest success. 'The natives h
the Government sent out a military force against
were so destroyed, that the inhabitants of Sydney
the tranquillity which has resulted therefrom.
aving committed great atrocities,
them, by whom they
have since boasted of
Site of the great debate: The Court House,
(W. L. Crowther Library,
Hobart Town, 1834, by Henry Melville
State Library of Tasmania)
However, this claim was immediately challenged by Robert
Lathrop Murray, the editor of the Tasmanian.
I beg leave to set Dr Turnbull right as to New South Wales. There was
not a war of extermination there — nor was the measure of the Govern-
ment such as he describes it. The incursions of the blacks had been found
annoying in the neighbourhood of the new discovered country, over the
Blue Mountains. General Macquarie dispatched Captain Schom with the
light company of the 46th Regiment, with instructions to drive the
natives into the interior, but to do so with as little bloodshed as possible.
Those who knew General Macquarie need not be told of his humanity.
Captain Schom marched about some weeks — drove the blacks into the
interior — and the order ended, I believe, without the loss of a single life.
The Hobart distiller James Hackett then weighed into the debate in
support of Gellibrand and Murray:
The proceedings of this day will have a materi
opinion. Previous to the adoption of the measure
has been spoken of, I am desirous of its being
thing possible has been done in the way o
attempts have been made to effect so desirable a purpose? Not one! It is a
national disgrace to us, that this has been omitted. I believe | may venture
to state, that there are not six persons in the whole Colony who are able
to communicate with the blacks in their own language. Had we beem
Colony of Frenchmen how different a polic
y would have been adopted
This, I think, is a matter deserving the most serious consideration
al influence on public
of extermination which
considered whether every-
f conciliation. I ask what
NINE: SETTLER OPINION AND THE EXTIRPATION THESIS 347
The editor of che Hobart Town Courier, James Ross, then took issue
with Hackett, giving the meeting a brief history lesson:
| think, looking at the evidence of history, that the French, Spanish and
Portuguese Colonists have treated the Aborigines in all the countries
where they have settled very differently to what Mr Hackett seems to be
aware of. | was a member of a corps of volunteers in one of the West In-
dies Islands some years ago, raised for purposes similar to the present, and
the result was most satisfactory. We are blind to the situation of the
settlers in the interior, that demand the strongest measures of protection.
Atter some banter by Murray who urged Ross to join the town
guard rather than remain at his business in Hobart, the two delivered
the following exchange:
Dr Ross. — I cannot agree to that, the exigency is most serious, and
requires the co-operation of every individual, and to such an extent have
the aggressions of the blacks been carried, that if they are not prevented,
they will come and drive us from this very Court-room, and compel us to
take refuge in the ships. The present situation of things is extremely
alarming, and I trust the strongest measures will be adopted, without any
reference to the legal question which Mr Gellibrand has raised, with
which I consider we have nothing whatever to do.
Mr Murray. — I differ entirely with Dr Ross, on the subject of the alarm
he feels as to the natives driving us from this room to the shipping. No
doubt that they are enabled to commit many atrocities, most frequently
by the exercise of that cunning by which all savages are distinguished; but
to talk of six dozen of miserable creatures, and never was a larger body
seen assembled than 72, driving us from this room, is of course a joke.
The meeting then went on to appoint a committee to organize the
town guard and distribute its posts.
If one were adjudicating this particular debate simply on the num-
ber of supporters for each side, the result would be almost a te.
There were four main speakers for the anti-extirpationists (Kemp,
Gellibrand, Murray and Hackett) and four for the extirpationists
(Horne, Turnbull, Stephen and Ross), with the single-sentence con-
tribution of Thomson tipping the balance in favour the latter. This is
a result reasonably consistent with the answers to the questionnaire
survey of the Aborigines committee earlier in the year, but indicates
that there had been a hardening of attitudes between March and
September, especially now that a full-scale military action was immi-
nent. .
It also indicates, however, how wary readers should be when his-
torians quote isolated statements to illustrate the beliefs of people in
the past. There are obviously opinions expressed in this debate =
could be selectively extracted to provide evidence in support o
whatever position the historian chooses to adopt. In his book An
MS Vti: FABRICATION OT: ABORIGINAL History
indelible Stain?, Henry Reynolds does give a partial account of
sides of this debate by citing two of the speeches." He
brand decrying how dreadful it was that the colon
enter upon à war of extermination, Reynolds then ‘Among
the numerous speakers who stood up to oppose Gellibrand, the Bos
articulate and influential — was Alfred Stephen, the colony’,
solicitor-general’, Reynolds then goes on to give a long quotation
from Stephen’s speech, the most inflammatory of the gathering, Rey-
nolds’s account gives the false impression that Gellibrand was a lone
and futile voice, engulfed by the clamour of the meeting,
Moreover, it is clear that opinions on both sides were not perma-
nently fixed. They waxed and waned in response to events and the
shifting. opinions of others. As the earlier discussion of the colonial
press demonstrated, the editors Murray and Ross could both be
quoted in other contexts taking the opposite positions to those they
supported in the great debate in September. In the Hobart Town Cou-
rier right up to November 1830, Ross supported a policy of capturing
Aboriginal assailants, urging his readers to ensure they were taken
alive, while in the Tasmanian in February 1830, Murray had made a
call for their extermination. Even the most fervent Speaker at the
meeting, Alfred Stephen, soon tempered his remarks and agreed with
his opponents that the whites shared part of the blame.
What this debate really shows is the agonising dilemma that the
continuation of Aboriginal violence created for the settlers. They
were clearly shocked and angered by the escalation of Aboriginal
robberies and murders and by the insecurity under which outlying
settlers, their families and servants were forced to live. However, the
more sensitive of them were also aware of the need to preserve their
own reputations and sense of values. They wanted a solution to the
Aboriginal problem but not at any price. They felt compelled to
counsel their fellow colonists against the rush of blood to the head.
It is also clear that neither the speakers in the great debate, nor any
who answered the survey questionnaire, nor any of the writers for the
colonial press, expressed anything resembling the motives attributed
to them by the historians of the orthodox school. No one called for
extermination of the blacks in order to clear them out of their Way or
to remove them from the land they coveted, as Brian Plomley claims,
or because of any sense of superiority or white supremacy, as Sharon
Morgan alleges. In every case, even the hardest attitudes Were gener-
ated solely by the desire to stop the blacks from assaulting and mur-
dering whites. They would have been a peculiar people had they not
felt the urge to retaliate. Despite the restraints of their culture and
both
146 Reynolds, An Indelible Stain?, pp 54—6
wo
NINE: SETTLER OPINION AND THE EXTIRPATION TE 1ESIS 349
religion, and the admonishments of their government, the settlers of
v an Diemen's Land were only human.
POLITICAL INFLUENCE OF THE SETTLERS
Despite all this analysis of settler opinion, it is important to recognize
that it was not the decisive factor in determining what action would
be taken against the Aborigines. The colony was not a democracy. Its
Lieutenant-Governor was answerable not to the settlers but to the
Secretary of State for Colonies, a minister of the British government.
It they had a major disagreement with the Lieutenant-Governor’s
decisions, nie could write to London with their complaints, but
had little other formal redress.
In 1830, Arthur took major decisions with the concurrence of his
Executive Council, which comprised himself, the Chief Justice, John
Pedder, the Colonial Secretary, John Burnett, and the Colonial
Treasurer, Jocelyn Thomas. These were the four who, in August
1830, decided to put the Black Line into the field. Since 1828, Arthur
had also appointed a Legislative Council to make and approve laws
for the colony. The Legislative Council included the members of the
Executive Council, four other public servants, two bankers and five
landowners.
Among the range of settler opinion discussed in this chapter, only
two members of the Legislative Council were represented. Thomas
Anstey and James Cox both answered the questionnaire put out by
the Aborigines committee. By 1830 both supported firm measures
against the Aborigines, in the form of their capture and removal to a
secure place, but neither publicly expressed a sentiment in favour of
their extermination. Anstey did play a role in Arthur’s decision to
mount the Black Line. In August, he passed on a note of concern
from the coroner’s jury that had inquired into the death of the Oat-
lands settler James Hooper, who had suffered his third Aboriginal
assault in three years. Anstey added his own prediction that ‘the
ensuing spring will be the most bloody that we have yet experienced,
unless sufficient military protection should be afforded’.'"” These were
two of the most influential documents the Executive Council consid-
ered when it made its decision. Apart from this, however, the voice
of the settlers was not decisive in determining either how or when
Arthur acted.
It should also be emphasized that this whole chapter has been a dis-
cussion of expressions of opinion only. The fact remains that none of
the few who called for the extermination of the blacks acted out their
sentiments, or had the power to do so. In fact, not one of the speak-
*' See Chapter Six, p 171
330 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HisTORY
ers at the Court House meeting in September joined the Black Line
or took up arms of any kind. When put to the reality test rather har
the annihilation of the blacks, the military campaign that BV eed
resulted in nothing more genocidal than the shooting of three and in
capture of two Aborigines.
In matters. of this kind, the responsibility of the historian is not
simply to report the opinions of the people of the past as if they were
the definitive word on the subject and an accurate guide to what ac-
tually happened. There are two other issues the historian needs to
resolve: whether their opinions were well informed by the actual
events of the time and whether their words were matched by their
deeds. The next chapter attempts to do this by examining the number
of Aborigines who died violently at white hands,
CHAPTER TEN
The death toll and demise of the
Aboriginal population, 1803-1834
That many hostile collisions occurred between the two races during the
30 years that succeeded the first colonisation of the country is true
enough; but I know of no trustworthy record of more than one, two,
three or at most four persons being killed in any one encounter. The
warfare, though pretty continuous, was rather a petty affair, with grossly
exaggerated details — something like the story of the hundred dead men,
reduced, on inquiry, to three dead dogs.
— James Calder, The Native Tribes of Tasmania (1875)!
HS" many Aborigines died violently at the hands of colonists in
Van Diemen's Land? If the orthodox school and those who
have repeated its claims about genocide are right, it must have been a
great many. After reading the secondary literature on Tasmania for his
bicentennial history of Australia, The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes was
certainly left with this impression: ‘Perhaps ten blacks were killed for
every white, perhaps twenty'? Since some 187 colonists died at
J. E. Calder, Some Account of the Wars, Extirpation, Habits, &c, of the Native
Tribes of Tasmania, Henn and Co, Hobart, 1875, p8
‘Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to
Australia 1787-1868, Collins Harvill, London, 1987, p 414
352. THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL History
indigenous hands,* this would mean the tot
al numb -
killed was between 1870 and 3740. In the er of Abo; ne
aS DENN dr following passage, one of
Hughes’s principal sources on Aboriginal affairs, Henry Reynold; ;
more circumspect but still implies the total +
was more than 4 thousand:
There is hard evidence of a decline from
manians at the beginning of the Black War
As well, the high death rate at Wybalen
known, with numbers falling from about
the first period, many Abori
offici
perhaps 1500 indigenous Tas.
in 1824, to about 350 in 1831,
na on Flinders Island js well
220 in 1833 to 46 in 1847. In
gines must have been killed by British troops,
al paramilitary roving parties or armed settlers encouraged by the
government to defend themselves. Many others may have succumbed to
the extreme rigours of guerilla war and the pressure exerted by the mili-
tary campaign waged at the direction of Governor Arthur!
While Reynolds here avoids putting a precise figure on it himself,
the implication of this statement is that between 1824 when there
were 1500 and 1831 when only 350 were left, some 1150 Aborigines
were either shot dead by armed parties of troops and settlers or else
succumbed to exposure and hunger during the military campaign.
Since he believes that, before British colonisation, there were
between 5000 and 7000 indigenous people in Tasmania,’ Reynolds is
therefore saying that between 16 and 24 per cent of the original
population was wiped out during the ‘Black War’ alone. Lyndall
Ryan also argues the death toll from violence was substantial,
although her sums are not as high as those of Reynolds:
In 1823 the estimated population of the Big River, Oyster Bay, North
Midlands, North East and North tribes was about a thousand. By 1832,
156 had been captured, 50 lived with sealers, and 27 lived with settlers.
Of the remainder, 280 were recorded shot, which leaves some 480 unac-
counted for. It seems that even on the Tasmanian frontier only about
one-third of the Aborigines killed were recorded and that a more realistic
total would be about 700, or nearly four times as many as the 176 Euro-
peans killed by the Aborigines.°
Since she believes that before the British arrived the indigenous
population was between 3000 and 4000, Ryan’s total of 700 killings
in the Black War is, proportionately, about the same as that of Rey-
? Chapter Four has the statistics for
white deaths and inj
3 Henry Reynolds, An Indelible Stai
n?, Viking, Ri juries, p 85
5 1 ing, in oo
Reynolds’s figures for Aboriginal casualties in Fare o E Eve d eh
lower than those he supports in An Indelible Stain?. In Fare ofa Pree Deoa]
81-2, he put the total at 100—150 killed between 1803 and 1824 es €, pp
250 after 1824, that is, between 250 and 400 all up. ; and 150—
$ Henry Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, Penguin, Melbourne TR
^ Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, (1981), Allen and Un ik
Sydney, 1996, p 174 win,
re T NIE RENS
n
TEN: DEATH TOLL AND DEMISE OF THE ABORIGINAL POPULATION 353
nolds: between 17 and 23 per cent. Among some tribal groups, how-
ever, Ryan claims there was an extraordinarily high degree of violent
death, ‘Although the official reports suggest a much lower figure,’ she
argues, “some 240 Big River people were killed in this period; out of
the three hundred living in 1823, less than sixty remained in 1831."
The numbers of Aborigines in the districts settled by colonists
declined by a similar proportion, but at a much faster rate. She writes:
‘Of the two hundred Aborigines in the settled districts in 1828, fewer
than fifty survived the settlers’ guns to surrender to Robinson.’®
Let us defer for the moment any discussion of how these authors
arrived at their ‘before’ and ‘after’ figures. The truth is that, despite
Reynolds's claim, there never was any ‘hard evidence’ about Abo-
riginal numbers at all. Until they got to count those captured and
shipped to Flinders Island, the colonial authorities and settlers relied
upon nothing better than uninformed speculation and wild guesses.
Reynolds himself admitted this in an earlier book when he criticized
the claim by the economic historian Noel Butlin that there were still
7000 Aborigines in the colony in 1818. This total, Reynolds said, ‘is
almost certainly mistaken. Officials had no idea of the population and
7000 was far too high a figure.” A later section of this chapter will
take up this issue in detail. First, however, let us focus on two major
contradictions in the orthodox case.
AGILE BLACKS VERSUS BUMBLING WHITES
The argument of the orthodox school is hung on an unresolvable
dilemma. On the one hand, its members want to argue that the Abo-
rigines were accomplished guerilla warriors whose fighting skills, agil-
ity and knowledge of the bush easily outdid the bumbling red-coated
British soldiers and the equally inept local settlers. On the other hand,
they want to argue that the same soldiers and settlers mercilessly out-
gunned the blacks, almost slaughtering them at will, and inflicting
four times as many casualties as they suffered themselves.
To preserve his guerilla warfare thesis, Reynolds wants us to see
the Aborigines as accomplished warriors, well versed in military tac-
tics. “Observers not blinded by prejudice,’ he writes, ‘could discern
the skill and the intelligence informing both raid and retreat. ^ He is
critical of other historians who have exaggerated the number of blacks
killed in order to emphasize the brutality of the colonial encounter.
He thinks this tendency is ‘understandable’ but is concerned that it
7 Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 122
* Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 113
" Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 224 n 98
" Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 68
354 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
inflates the abilities of the Europeans
s bi and underestimates those of th
Aborigines. ‘The story then becomes a struggle between cruel bu
clever whites and sympathetic but stupid blacks,’!! i bitu,
overcome such prejudice, Reynolds claims the bl
superior at bush fighting. British soldiers and sett]
wardly through the strange Tasmanian terrain whil
exploited their environment with consummate skill.
ernor Arthur himself recognised that the expertise o
combined with the ‘rugged and impervious nature' of the country,
gave them ‘an infinite superiority over their pursuers’, Reynolds
claims." The ease with which they slipped through the Black Line of
1830 was proof of this. Reynolds writes:
ers moved awk-
e the Aborigines
Lieutenant-Goy-
f the Aborigines,
We know that even when European parties pursued Aborigines after a
raid when they or their fresh tracks were clearly seen, the white men were
rarely able to reach their quarry. So commonplace was this that the settlers
often decided it was pointless to pursue the blacks into the bush. Some-
times the Europeans were lucky or the Aborigines less cautious than usual.
But the record suggests that when Aborigines chose to avoid the Europe-
ans they could do so with ease. When they met the Europeans it was at
times and in places of their choice."
Some of the early colonists who took the Aboriginal side in the
conflict made the same point. In December 1831, George Augustus
Robinson considered the issue in his diary:
The military operations and armed parties sent out in quest of the hostile
natives has frequently been the occasion of much reflection to my mind
and the futility of such endeavour has been apparent. Nay, it has
appeared to me as a visionary scheme, a battle with a shadow. They have
not succeeded. None have been successful. How could they be? How
could it be expected? ... The whole face of the country (with few ex-
ceptions) serves as a secure retreat. The woods, or to use the colonial
phrase ‘bush’, is sufficient shelter that let you see a native, nay, let you be
but a yard distant in some places and let him see you, he has sufficient
time for him to escape and you lose him in the secure recesses of the
forest. Instances, and not a few, have been where they have escaped from
towns when surrounded by their foes. !*
On the other hand, Reynolds claims the guerilla war found the
colonists well out of their depth. The British troops had been trained
1! Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 77
? Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 118
? Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 78
^ Robinson, diary, 14 and 15 December 1831, N. J. B. Plomley (ed.)
Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Fide. ;
Robinson, Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Hobart, 1 996 —€—
556 2
I m
TEN: DEATH TOLL AND DEMISE OF THE ABORIGINAL POPULATION 355
for European conflict in formal, disciplined manoeuvres on open
battlefields. In the bush, they suffered the disadvantages of other
European parties. They were on foot and had to carry their food,
weapons and camping gear. They had little knowledge of the country
and found the terrain difficult. They lacked bushcraft. Moreover, the
soldiers were reluctant warriors. They were poorly paid, ill-educated
and, to prevent them from getting drunk and fraternising with the
convicts, their officers controlled them with rigid discipline, incessant
drill and flogging.^ Worst of all, according to Reynolds, while on
patrol in the bush they were forced to wear their ridiculous red coats:
The fact that discipline mattered more than effectiveness in the field
against bushrangers and Aboriginal war bands was illustrated by the con-
tinued use of red uniforms which were unsuitable for life in the bush and
highly visible for anyone seeking to evade capture."
Reynolds also argues that the firearms used by the colonists and
troopers did not give them superiority over the two main indigenous
weapons, the waddie (club) and the spear. He cites the observations
of James Calder who thought the Aborigines had the better of the
conflict because the English musket was ‘far less deadly than the spear
of the savage'." Reynolds describes the problems of using European
weapons against the Aborigines:
During night attacks the gunpowder often became damp from the dew
and wouldn’t ignite. The best chance of success was with a small party but
this had limited firepower. Four men would only manage four shots at
best, at obscure targets. The chance of reloading in the dark and shooting
again were minimal.'?
Sharon Morgan takes the same line:
Spears thrown with dexterity could be far more dangerous than unreliable
guns hastily used by inexperienced shooters. George Hobler commented
wryly on the inefficiency of firearms of the period. The Natives, he said,
‘appeared at the back of the farm robbed Mrs Monaghan of her bedding,
her screams brought to her assistance two of my men clearing, who had a
musket which as usual would not go off."
Other primary sources confirm that this aspect of the orthodox
story is accurate. In June 1827, when Corporal Shiners of the 40th
Regiment and four stockmen, in pursuit of the Aboriginal murderers
15 Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, pp 100-1
'* Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 104
Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 75
18 Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 80
1? Sharon Morgan, Land Settlement in Early Tasmania, Cambridge University
Press, Melbourne, 1992, p 158
356 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
of a Western Marshes stockman, rushed their camp at night, three of
their guns went off. However, ‘Baker attempted to fire, but his pistol
flashed in the pan’,”’ that is, the gunpowder burnt without making an
explosion in the chamber to fire the bullet. Edward Curr described
one incident in January 1829 when a hostile tribe surrounded three
employees of the Van Diemen's Land Company. “The men had a
musket, or I believe two, but one was useless, and the other soon
became so, from their laying down their powder horn on the grass,
and not being able to find it again?! As Chapter Eight recorded in
more detail, the Aborigines were well aware of the guns' limitations
and knew that, once they had been fired and before they could be re-
loaded, they had plenty of time to either attack or flee. Moreover, the
uncleared Tasmanian countryside, even in the drier south-east, is very
rugged and densely wooded, which made shooting very difficult. At
Prosser Plains in October 1830, a group of Aborigines tried to break
through the Black Line and speared a sentry. Some of his colleagues
came to his rescue:
These men came up, but the blacks succeeded in making their retreat
good, from the first man when running and in the act of cocking his fire-
lock, falling over a dead tree, and from the country in that place being so
rocky and heavily timbered.”
While these arguments and examples are convincing in showing
that the Aborigines were not the helpless victims of ruthlessly efficient
British forces, they raise a major problem for orthodox claims about
the ratio of blacks deaths to white. If the Aborigines were the better
fighters, if they made better use of the local environment and had
better weapons, how could they have been defeated so badly in the
war? What reason could historians have for claiming that in unre-
corded conflicts on the edge of the frontier the whites killed four
times more blacks (Ryan), or six times more blacks (Reynolds), than
their own side lost? Either the Aborigines were not the great guerilla
warriors they have been portrayed or their death toll was much lower
than has been claimed. The orthodox thesis cannot have it both ways.
Brian Plomley attempts to get around the dilemma by saying the
Aborigines were, in the end, simply outnumbered. Too many whites
kept coming in boats. "The Aborigines attempted to gain their ends
by waging guerilla warfare against the settlers: tactically it was highly
successful, defeated only by the declining number of the Aborigines
20 Deposition of constable Thomas Williams, Mulgrave to Colonial
Secretary, 30 June 1827, CSO 1/316/7578, p 31
*! Curr to Aborigines Committee, 2 April 1830, CSO 1/323/7858/8, p 362
? Hobart Town Courier, 30 October 1830, p 2
SN
NY
TEN: DEATH TOLL AND DEMISE OF THE ABORIGINAL POPULATION 357
and the rapidly increasing number of the settlers.’ But this still can-
not account for the low white death toll compared to the black. If the
Aborigines were the more successful warriors, the expansion of the
White population, which in the 1820s grew from 5000 to 24,000,
should have produced a far greater number of white casualties than
187 Killed, compared to alleged black losses of between 700 and 1100
people.
Moreover, in this period the armed forces available to the colonial
government did not expand at anything like the rate of the white
population. Apart from the appointment of the effectively useless
roving parties between 1828 and 1830 and the transfer the previous
year of an additional thirty-four members of the 40th Regiment from
the supervision of convicts to the protection of settlers in outlying
areas,’ there were few additional military resources deployed to
counter the rise in Aboriginal violence. Several orthodox historians
mention that soldiers from the 57th and 63rd Regiments were sent to
Van Diemen's Land in 1829 but they neglect to say that that these
were replacements for, not additions to, the troops of the 40th
Regiment, which that year left for Bombay.” No matter how
historians try to explain it away, this dilemma of the thesis remains.
There was one nineteenth-century author who resolved this ques-
tion in favour of the Aborigines. While his opinions are rarely repro-
duced today, James Erskine Calder deserves to be taken seriously. He
arrived in the colony in 1829, aged twenty-one, in the middle of the
'Black War' and was employed as a government surveyor thereafter.
In the 1870s he wrote a series of essays on the demise of the
Aborigines, which were later collected in his book, Some Account of
the Wars, Extirpation, Habits, &c, of the Native Tribes of Tasmania. Ever
since his arrival, Calder had been sympathetic to the native plight.”
Even though he thought George Augustus Robinson had exaggerated
the degree of violence done to the natives, he nonetheless named
Robinson on the dedication page of his book, describing him as
"Tasmania's greatest benefactor'.
When Calder wrote his essays, he examined the voluminous files
on the subject that Lieutenant-Governor Arthur had ordered to be
preserved intact. Calder said he had made ‘a pretty attentive perusal of
the massive correspondence on the subject of the long quarrel
between the two races, that is deposited in the office of the Colonial
Secretary, filling nineteen awful volumes of manuscript papers.' From
23 N, J. B. Plomley, The Aboriginal/Settler Clash in Van Diemen's Land 1803—
1431, Queen Victoria Museum and art Gallery, Launceston, 1992, p 23
^ See Chapter Five, p 142
© Historical Records of Australia, 1, XV, pp 274—6
% See Chapter Two, p 36, and Chapter Four, p 104
358 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
this perusal he concluded that ‘aggressiveness was almost always on
the side of the blacks’. He made an estimate of the ratio of black
deaths to white. The evidence he used came from the reports of cor-
onial inquests into deaths after Aboriginal raids on white homesteads.
Calder wrote:
In the five years preceding the close of 1831, 99 inquests were held on
such of the white people, whose bodies could be found after death
against 19 blacks, killed in these farm fights; and it is further recorded, that
in the same period 69 Europeans were wounded against one, or at most
two, of the other race; some of the latter were also taken.”
While these ‘farm fights’ were by no means the only kind of con-
flict, they provided one good indication of who got the better of the
violence that did occur. Instead of four to six blacks killed for every
white, Calder's findings led him to reverse this ratio. ‘They [the
Aborigines] took life about five times as often as it was inflicted upon
themselves. While this conclusion clearly rejects most of the ortho-
dox case, it does bear out part of it: the Aborigines were, indeed, the
more deadly of the two sides.
THE QUESTION OF UNRECORDED FRONTIER KILLINGS
The problems of the orthodox case are compounded by a second
inconsistency. This derives from the claim that the great majority of
black deaths went unrecorded because they took place in remote
regions on the edge of the frontier, and that those whites responsible
covered up their deeds for fear of incriminating themselves.
In Van Diemen's Land, according to Lyndall Ryan, only one-third
of violent Aboriginal deaths were recorded. The other two-thirds of
her total of 700 went undocumented in the records of the day. This is
one issue on which Henry Reynolds takes her to task. In his 1995
book, Fate of a Free People, he says Ryan’s total is a serious attempt to
arrive at a ‘reasonable figure’ but such an assessment is fraught with
difficulty:
No reliance can be placed on reports of Aboriginal deaths. No systematic
count of bodies was ever made. Guesswork and exaggeration were
common. Ryan’s estimate is also based on the presumed population of the
major tribes in 1823 which she puts at ‘about a thousand’. This may have
been wide of the mark. No one had any idea of the real figure.”
However, by 2001 when he wrote An Indelible Stain?, Reynolds
seems to have forgotten his own comments and now made estimates
?' Calder, Native Tribes of Tasmania, pp 8-9
8 Calder, Native Tribes of Tasmania, p 55
? Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p 76
py o ERN
[NES
TEN: DEATH TOLL AND DEMISE OF THE ABORIGINAL POPULATION 359
of the same kind he criticised in Ryan’s work. In his latter book
Revnolds now claims there is ‘hard evidence’ that the Aboriginal
population declined from 1500 in 1824 to 350 in 1831. A later sec-
gion of this chapter looks at the credibility of his and other estimates
er the size of the Aboriginal population. For the moment, let us focus
on the question of unrecorded frontier killings. This is a contentious
isue not just in Van Diemen's Land but for the entire history of race
relations in Australia.
The first and most obvious point to make is that any claim by a
historian about unrecorded deaths is hard to sustain since deaths that
went unrecorded would, by definition, remain hidden from histori-
ans. There might be rumours, gossip and legends that surface later but
if there is no documentary evidence at all it is hard for the historian to
determine the truth. This 1s not to argue that the lack of documents is
of itself proof that nothing happened but, without reasonable evi-
dence, the historian will find it difficult to sustain a case that some-
thing as dramatic as a killing did take place.
In some cases, though, where there was someone with military or
police authority over a region and whose duty was to record violent
deaths, a lack of documentation can sometimes be taken as grounds
for believing there was actually little to record. As Chapter Eight
argues, this is a plausible conclusion in the case of the Western
Marshes in the late 1820s. In this district from 1828 to 1830, there
were few incidents of Aboriginal assault, with only three white men
wounded. This suggests that this district had the lowest level of vio-
lent confrontation in the colony and, therefore, the corresponding
lack of documentation about Aboriginal deaths would have been an
accurate reflection of the reality.
In a series of articles for the journal Quadrant in 2000, I made simi-
lar points about exaggerated claims by historians of violence across the
whole of the Australian frontier. The articles generated a number of
heated replies in the press and in subsequent media and conference
debates. When I argued there was very little reliable evidence for
most of the claims about the killing of Aborigines, defenders of the
orthodoxy replied that this is just what you would expect in a frontier
war situation. The frontier was a place where whites could kill blacks
with impunity. No other settlers on the frontier would have reported
them and the police either turned a blind eye or were complicit in
massacres themselves. Hence widespread killings would have occurred
without leaving any trace in the historical evidence. As it stands, this
is a circular argument. To explain why there would be no evidence
of widespread killings, it claims there was a frontier war situation,
which, under this definition, is a place where there were widespread
killings but where no evidence of them remained.
A60. THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
The Quadrant series also said there were two powerful constraints
on white settlers killing Aborigines in the colonial period, one reli-
gious, the other legal. Most colonists were Christians to whom the
killing of the innocent would have been abhorrent. But even those
Whose consciences would not have been troubled knew it was against
the law to murder human beings, Aborigines included, and the ulti-
mate penalty was execution. Now, the mere mention of Christianity
in this context brought forth the most derision of all from my critics,
not only from the usual suspects but also from commentators once
regarded as less conformist, such as the Queensland anthropologist
Ron Brunton, who called the suggestion ‘either disingenuous or
naive’.*”
Yet the orthodox position is dependent on these very concepts for
its own claims about the unrecorded massacres of Aborigines in Tas-
mania and throughout the mainland. According to the Melbourne
historian Bain Attwood: ‘Most of the historical sources that might
have enabled us to enumerate the number of Aboriginal people killed
on the frontier have, for various reasons, either never existed or have
since been lost or destroyed.”' Attwood does not specify the ‘various
reasons' for the loss and destruction of the records, but what reasons
could frontiersmen have for deliberately concealing their deeds?
Either they were worried about moral condemnation from their
fellow colonists, or else they were hiding the fact that they had bro-
ken the law by killing the blacks. If orthodox historians don't invoke
either religion, or a similar moral force, and/or legal sanctions, they
are left without any explanation for the purported concealment and
destruction of evidence. If they insist that neither Christian morality
nor the rule of law had any force on the frontier, their whole thesis
about unrecorded killings has no legs to stand on. Brian Plomley has
unwittingly conceded this point for the history of Van Diemen's
Land:
In almost all the statements regarding the roving parties, there are refer-
ences to the reluctance of the settlers to kill Aborigines unless it became
necessary to do so to protect themselves during a hostile attack. Were
these in fact sincere statements or face-saving declarations? The whole
history of the reaction of white settlers to the presence of Aborigines on
? Ron Brunton, ‘Theories on black massacres don't add up’, Courier-Mail,
16 March 2002. Others who derided the notion were Richard Hall,
“Windschuttle’s Myths’ in Peter Craven (ed.) The Best Australian Essays
2001, Schwartz Publishing, Melbourne, 2002, pp 127-8; and Robert
Manne, In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right, Australian Quarterly
Essay, Schwartz Publishing, Melbourne, 1, 2001, p 98
? Bain Attwood, ‘Attack on Reynolds Scholarship Lacks Bite’, Australian, 20
September 2000, p 35
PEN: DEATH TOLL AND DEMISE OF THE ABORIGINAL POPULATION — 361
lands which they believed to be theirs is littered with such statements, but
the actions taken were quite the reverse, The settlers did not allow any-
thing to prevent or hinder them from using land they had appropriated in
apy wav they wished, and their pronouncements were no more than an
appeasement of conscience or an insurance against later blame or legal
proc CSS,
In this last sentence Plomley confirms that the prevailing religious,
moral and legal codes had to be mollified, even beyond the frontier of
settlement. If these codes had not existed, there would have been no
reason for settlers to keep their alleged atrocities secret. There would
have been nothing to inhibit them from boasting about their deeds.
Again, the members of the orthodox school cannot have it both
ways. They cannot claim both that settlers concealed their killings
because of the prevailing religion and law and that these institutions
were irrelevant to their actions. If they want to retain their ‘unre-
corded killings’ thesis, they have to acknowledge the force of religion
and law. But if they do the latter, their case about unrestrained fron-
tier killings is severely weakened because they have to admit the
existence of powerful social influences working to inhibit such deeds.
One thing the proponents of the ‘unrecorded killings’ thesis forget
is that it was only relevant in Van Diemen’s Land before the declara-
tion of martial law in November 1828. For the following two years,
it became legal for soldiers and police to shoot Aborigines on sight in
the settled districts. Rather than reasons to conceal or gloss over their
activities, colonial troops and police now had incentives to publicize
any actions they might have taken against the Aborigines. They had a
positive inducement to exaggerate their body counts in order to earn
the gratitude of an apprehensive colonial populace. However, after
November 1828, the documentary record does not show a sudden
increase in the number of killings by whites. No previously concealed
pattern of white violence came out into the open to reveal itself. As
the next section demonstrates, there was, in fact, nothing in the em-
pirical evidence on either side of this divide to provide any support
for the ‘unrecorded killings’ thesis at all.
THE EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FOR ABORIGINAL KILLINGS
The only previous historian who has made a credible attempt to cal-
culate the total number of casualties in Van Diemen’s Land is Brian
Plomley, who published a monograph on the subject in 1992. Plom-
Jey employed research assistants to comb the colonial newspapers and
to go through the records held by the Archives Office of Tasmania.
^ N. J. B, Plomley (ed.), Jorgen Jorgenson and the Aborigines of Van Diemen’s
Land, Blubber Head Press, Hobart, 1991, p 22
362 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
From this he produced a table listing incidents reported between
1803 and 1831. The table recorded the date of the incident, its Joey
tion, those affected, the nature of the assault or property damage, the
reference to the original source, and incidental comments. From the
data in the table, Plomley produced several graphs and maps showing
the growth of violence in the late 1820s and early 1830s, the seasonal
distribution of Aboriginal attacks, the type of damage done, the prop-
erty stolen by Aborigines, and the correlation between assaults and
the spread of white settlement.
This was a big project and had the potential to considerably illumi-
nate the violence that marred the colony in this period. However, it
had one great omission. Despite having seven columns of data, the
table did not include a column specifically devoted to death or injury
to Aborigines. This omission was not because Plomley did not have
the information. Indeed, he did record Aboriginal casualties in the
table but confined them to the column for references and incidental
comments and did not summarise them. So while the table provided
a very useful account of what whites suffered at the hands of blacks,
which Chapter Four of this book uses for its own tables, it did not do
the same for black suffering at the hands of whites. It is puzzling why,
in a monograph entitled The Aboriginal/Settler Clash in Van Diemen’s
Land, Plomley declined to make a separate tally of black casualties.
Anyone who goes through Plomley’s table to make his own list of
the native casualties will find there are far fewer of them than the or-
thodox school would have us believe. In fact, if you add them all up
(allocating three or five when the columns record ‘some’ or ‘several’)
you find that, for the whole period 1803-1831 they amount to sixty-
three Aboriginal dead and twenty wounded. This total excludes any
number for the shootings at Risdon Cove in 1804, for which Plom-
ley did not record a figure, and also excludes deaths on the property
of the Van Diemen’s Land Company, which he provided in a sepa-
rate table. Adding this latter table plus three killed at Risdon Cove
produces a grand total of 109 dead. Plomley believed that thirty
Aborigines had been killed at Cape Grim in 1828, so this total in-
cludes that figure, not the six that I argue for in Chapter Eight.
Whatever way you look at them, these figures are very low. Over
the entire period from 1803 to 1831, they average just four deaths a
year, which, in the history of imperialism, must surely rank as just
about the lowest rate of violent death ever meted out to indigenous
inhabitants anywhere. Yet Tasmania is supposed to have been the site
of one of the world’s worst examples of genocide, the home to the
greatest internal struggle Australia has ever faced, a killing field of
guerilla warfare that lasted seven long years. There must be a mistake
somewhere.
TEN: DEATH TOLL AND DEMISE OF THE ABORIGINAL POPULATION 363
It is true that Plomley's survey did not include any of the killings
recorded in Robinson's diaries, including a number by the Bass Strait
sealers that did not make it into either the press or official records of
the dav. But as Chapter Eight argued, the diaries do not turn out, on
examination, to contain a very large death toll either. Moreover,
many ot the incidents recorded by Robinson were also documented
im the local press and government reports. Plomley picked up a num-
ber ot them trom these sources. The fact is that Robinson’s diaries
and Plomley’s survey both record totals that are only a fraction of the
number claimed by Henry Reynolds, Lyndall Ryan and other ortho-
dox historians. Where, then, does the truth lie?
At the end of this chapter, Table Ten is my own attempt to answer
this question. It was compiled in the following way. I started with
Plomley's 1992 survey and then checked all his original sources. The
great majority confirmed his account. In my own reading of the local
newspapers and archive documents, I found a number of incidents
that Plomley had not included. The major one was the killing of ten
Aborigines by a party of the 40th Regiment near Tooms Lake inland
from Oyster Bay in December 1828.? On the other hand, I excluded
a small number from Plomley's list because the evidence indicated
they were unlikely candidates. This included, for example, an
incident on the west bank of the Tamar River in February 1829
where the press reported a military commander claiming his party had
shot seven Aborigines, whereas his own officers subsequently denied
this, telling the same journalist they had not even seen any blacks on
their patrol. Plomley records this incident, without further comment,
as seven natives killed,” but it seems to have been a case of a military
officer misleading the media and should be put in the dubious-to-im-
plausible category. Where there are conflicting accounts like this in
the primary sources, I have indicated the reason for my decision in
the last column. After making the additions and adjustments to
Plomley's table from my own research, I also included those reported
by Aborigines that did not make it into any colonial documents.
These are all the incidents from Robinson’s diaries listed in Chapter
Fight, Table Eight, as either plausible or highly plausible. This added
thirty-three deaths to the total. Where Robinson discussed events that
Plomley also recorded, I have retained Plomley's version, as long as it
was accurate.
Table Ten is therefore an attempt to record every killing of an
Aborigine between 1803 and 1834 for Which there is a plausible
record of some kind. As with Table Eight, there may well be some
7 Chapter Five discusses this incident, pp 160-1
* Vlomley, Aboriginal /Settler Clash, p 76
| 4414-55 - > - paar...
A04 PHE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
reports that Plomley, Robinson and I have all missed. I will post the
table on my web site www.sydneyline.com and if anyone can point
out incidents that should have been included, I will add them. The
sole objective of the table is to produce as accurate a count as possi-
ble. As it stands now, the table in this third reprint lists a total of 121
Aboriginal deaths in the period. In other words, the indication given
by Plomley’s original survey was not a mistake. Both Robinson’s dia-
ries and my own work are roughly in line with it. British colonists
killed very few Aborigines in Van Diemen’s Land.
Moreover, whatever adjustments are eventually made to these fig-
ures, another thing is also clear. The number of Aborigines killed by
colonists was far fewer than the colonists who died at Aboriginal
hands. As Chapter Four recorded, between 1824 and 1831, the blacks
killed a total of 187 whites. In the same period, Table Ten records
the plausible total of blacks killed by whites as seventy-two. No mat-
ter how the figures might be revised in the future, the overall con-
clusion appears inescapable: during the so-called ‘Black War’, more
than twice as many whites were killed as blacks.
THE SIZE OF THE PRE-COLONIAL POPULATION
The orthodox story is that Aboriginal society was devastated by the
arrival of the British colonizers. From a pre-contact population now
widely accepted as between 4000 and 7000, it fell to 2000 in 1818
(Ryan), to 1500 in 1824 (Reynolds), to 350 in 1831 (Reynolds), to
200 in 1834 (the number that eventually arrived at Flinders Island).?
Clearly, the scale of the demise and its possible causes depend upon
the accuracy of these figures.
These Australian estimates are part of an international debate over
the size of indigenous populations of the New Worlds colonized by
Europeans from Christopher Columbus onwards. In the United
States, a movement emerged in the 1960s to radically redefine the
subject. Until then, anthropologists had estimated the pre-1492
populations of North and South America based on their general un-
derstanding of the normal population densities of Neolithic tribal
peoples. Their estimates ranged from 4 to 15 million, with the con-
sensus of around 8 million people across the whole of the two conti-
nents. However, in 1966 the American anthropologist Henry Dobyns
used estimates of deaths from European-imported diseases to radically
revise the figures. He argued that pre-Columban North and South
America would have held from 90 to 112 million people. In other
words, according to this estimate more people lived in the Americas
in 1491 than in the whole of Europe. This made central Mexico,
?5 These estimates are sourced on pages 52, 226 and 352
repas Gih
x)
coda
TEN: DEATH TOLL AND DEMISE OF THE ABORIGINAL POPULATION 365
with about 50 million people, the most densely populated region on
Earth. Using accounts by Spanish priests of the impact of smallpox
and other European-imported diseases, Dobyns claimed that in the
first 130 vears of contact, about 95 per cent of the indigenous popu-
lation died. In 1983, he made further calculations of the pre-contact
numbers in the areas colonized by the British in North America and
revised his figures upwards." Dobyns has been followed by a number
of authors, including William McNeill in Plagues and People (1976),
Kirkpatrick Sale in The Conquest of Paradise (1990) and David Stan-
nard in American Holocaust (1992) who all claimed the earlier, lower
estimate was an imperial myth, invented to make colonization appear
to be a progressive development in which Europeans occupied a
sparsely inhabited land, blessed with bountiful resources that the in-
digenous people were incapable of utilizing. In place of this myth,
they substituted a picture of two continents that once teemed with
vast populations, who used sophisticated agricultural practices and
crops far in advance of those of their imperial conquerors.
In the past decade, however, these claims have been subject to a
sustained revisionist critique. Their authors have been accused of se-
lective and careless use of sources, questionable mathematics, mis-
translations of the original documents, implausible epidemiological
assumptions, as well as numerous unwarranted speculations and out-
right fabrications. Their main critic has been the University of Wis-
consin historian David Henige, whose book Numbers from Nowhere
(1998) shows how these authors have consistently refused to respond
to serious criticisms and have publicly persisted with their claims in
order to vilify the European presence in the Americas. Although
only a few Australian authors cite these American debates in their
work,” most would be well aware of them. The orthodox school of
Tasmanian history shares many of the assumptions about European
imperialism that have emerged over the past thirty years, and has the
°° Henry F. Dobyns, ‘Estimating Aboriginal American Population: An
Appraisal of Techniques with a New Hemispheric Estimate’, Current
Anthropology, 7, 4, 1966, pp 395—416. Other contributors to the debate over
the Mexican population are Sherburne Cook, Lesley B. Simpson and
Woodrow Borah: for a review of the literature see Lawrence Osborne, ‘The
Numbers Game’, Lingua Franca, September 1998, pp 49-58
?' Henry F. Dobyns, Their Numbers Became Thinned: Native American
Population Dynamics in Eastern North America, University of Tennessee Press,
Knoxville, 1983
^^ David Henige, Numbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact
Population Debate, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1998
” Henry Reynolds uses some of the American arguments about smallpox as
a biological weapon in colonial warfare in An Indelible Stain?, pp 45-8
*
uM y? et
366 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY Z A "2
. . P, CP
same propensity to argue for as high a pre-contact indigenous popu- / Ao jP
td as possible, in order to make the decline appear all the more A a
dramatic. ; E ge!
. When historians today report the total pre-contact population of Ki
l'asmania, they choose from the high range of the estimates. Their 4 fr!
figures also vary considerably, even in the one book. In Fate of a Free f£, ny 1
People, on page four Henry Reynolds puts the total at 5000—7000, but » b
by page 52 it is down to 4000. Both Lloyd Robson and Lyndall P pro
Ryan say the population ranged from 3000 to 4000 people, an esti- ^ d »
mate they take from a study by Rhys Jones.*' Brian Plomley estimates $^
the population at 4000 to 6000.7 Michael Roe in the Oxford Os
Companion to Australian History claims it was 6000.9 The highest m
recent estimates are from the economic historian Noel Butlin, who ^3
claims there were still 7000 Aborigines left in 1818, and the zø p
anthropologist David Davies, who says that in 1803, the indigenous “pode
population totalled 15,000, though he offers no explanation and cites “ds h
no reference for the figure.” qe
In the nineteenth century, the estimates had an even wider span. ub
They ranged from Henry Melville's 20,000, to James Calder's 6000— P n
8000, Joseph Milligan's 2000, James Backhouse’s 700—1000 and que
George Washington Walker’s 500—650.*° Melville and Calder arrived zu
40 «
In 1830 alone', Reynolds writes on page 52, 'over 2000 whites arrived, a Sai
figure representing perhaps half the total indigenous population at the time =
of settlement.’ A comparison of Fate of a Free People and An Indelible Stain? =
shows that, even though he confidently offers specific figures when it suits
his case, Reynolds has no consistent view about the size of the Aboriginal
Was
population, nor of the rate of its decline. he
^! Lloyd Robson, A History of Tasmania, Volume One, Oxford University :
Press, Melbourne, 1983, p 17; Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 14; Rhys j
Jones, ‘Tasmanian Tribes’, appendix to Norman Tindale, Aboriginal Tribes of
Australia, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1974, p 325
?? N. J. B. Plomley, The Tasmanian Tribes and Cicatrices as Tribal Indicators
among the Tasmanian Aborigines, Occasional Paper No. 5, Queen Victoria
Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston, n.d., p 12. In his book The Tasmanian
Aborigines, Plomley Foundation, Launceston, 1993, p 85, he put the total at a
more precise 5500.
? Michael Roe, “Tasmania’, in Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart
Macintyre (eds.) Oxford Companion to Australian History, Oxford University
Press, Melbourne, 1998, p 628
^ N. G. Butlin, Economics and the Dreamtime: A Hypothetical History,
Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1993, p 211
+ David Davies, The Last of the Tasmanians, Shakespeare Head Press, Sydney,
1973, p 120
*^ H. Ling Roth, The Aborigines of Tasmania (1890), F. King and Sons,
Halifax, 1899 edn., pp 163-5
Vis: DEATH POLL AND DEMISE OF THE ABORIGINAL POPULATION 367
in the colony in 1828 and 1829, respectively, Backhouse and Walker
visited between 1832 and 1834, while Milligan was medical officer
and superintendent of Aborigines from 1843 to 1855, so all were
contemporary with at least some of the Aborigines. However, the
low estimates by Backhouse and Walker have been quietly airbrushed
trom the debate and no historian today ever mentions that any con-
temporary believed the pre-contact indigenous population was only
500-1000 people. In 1898, James Backhouse Walker, the son of
George Washington Walker and a frequent contributor of historical
and anthropological papers to the Royal Society of Tasmania, made
the first attempt to use ethnographic evidence to analyse the tribal
divisions and locations of the Aborigines. He estimated that when the
British arrived, the population was less than 2000."
Of all the above, the only serious studies are those by Rhys Jones,
Brian Plomley and James Backhouse Walker. Each used similar
methodology. They worked out how many Aboriginal tribes or
bands there were before colonization and then multiplied this number
by an average band size. The principal source each used to calculate
the number of different tribes or bands was the information provided
by George Augustus Robinson. Wherever he went on his great treks
around Tasmania, Robinson questioned the Aboriginal members of
his party and those he encountered along the way about the names of
the local tribes. Both Brian Plomley and Rhys Jones have gone
through Robinson’s diaries and extracted all the different tribal
groups he identified. Plomley initially found ninety-seven different
tribal names but because each tribe had two names, one by which it
was known to itself, the other by which it was known to outsiders,
he calculated they belonged to forty-six different tribes. He produced
a map of their locations." Jones argued that Plomley missed a few
groups and so increased their total to fifty-three to fifty-five. Plomley
later accepted this adjustment to the total, although he then added
another two to lift it to fifty-seven." Jones called these ‘bands’ rather
than ‘tribes’ because he wanted the word ‘tribe’ to refer to the
^' James Backhouse Walker, ‘Some notes on the tribal divisions of the
Aborigines of Tasmania’, in Early Tasmania: Papers Read Before the Royal
Society of Tasmania 1888-1898, Government Printer, Hobart, 1950 edn., pp
269, 278. As well as being, with Ling Roth, one of the two genuinely
scholarly nineteenth-century investigators of the subject, Walker was Vice-
Chancellor of the University of Tasmania 1898-99: Peter Benson Walker,
All That We Inherit: The Walkers in Van Diemen’s Land, J. Walch and Sons,
Hobart 1968, pp 75-81
^ Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp 970-5. Plomley provided a clearer picture in
his 1971 Supplement to Friendly Mission, map 4 and pp 21-2
*” Plomley, The Tasmanian Tribes and Cicatrices, p 12
368 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
broader groupings identified by the white colonists. Hence, what the
settlers identified as the Oyster Bay tribe actually contained ten differ-
ent bands, The Big River tribe contained five bands. According to
Jones's map (reproduced here), there were nine of these broad tribal
groupings, although he admits these were the impressions of the set-
ders only and derived from no good ethnographic information ^
Jones argues that
the fifty-three to
fifty-five bands that
were identified by
‘ee name in Robinson’s
-am diaries are not all
those that existed
prior to colonization.
He says that Robin-
son provided no
names for bands who
frequented the set-
tled areas of the
midlands, an area
that would once
have supported a
sizeable Aboriginal
population. So Jones
arbitrarily increases
€ Local residence of a band
— weal boundary Reef the total by more
than fifty per cent to
put it at seventy to eighty-five bands to account for those ‘missing’
from the settled districts.
To work out the average number of people in a band, both Plom-
ley and Jones relied upon the first observations made by pre-colonial
explorers and by settlers in the early days of colonization. Plomley
derives his average mainly from the head counts provided by the
French marine explorers Bruny D’Entrecasteaux and Nicolas Baudin.
He concludes that the average number of people in a tribe or band
was seventy.?' Jones bases his average size of a band on a wider range
of observations, including those from settlers and others after 1803.7?
5? Jones, ‘Tasmanian Tribes’, p 327. Map reproduced here is also from p 327.
5! Plomley, The Tasmanian Tribes and Cicatrices, pp 1011 "Y
52 Rhys Jones, ‘The demography of hunters and farmers in Tasmania’, in D.
J. Mulvaney and J. Golson (eds.) Aboriginal Man and Environment in Australia,
Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1971, pp 271-87
TEN: DEATH TOLL AND DEMISE OF THE ABORIGINAL POPULATION 369
His original estimate was that typical band sizes were from forty to
seventy people, but he later modified this to forty to fifty people.”
Plomlev's best estimate, therefore, is that there were fifty-seven
mbes each with an average of seventy people, which gives a total
population of 3990. Plomley adds that an upper limit of 5500 ‘may be
more realistic’. Jones’s best estimate is that there were seventy to
eightv-tive bands each with an average of forty to fifty people, which
pun the original population at 2800 to 4250.
There are two problems, however, with both these estimates. First,
thev count too many tribes or bands. Second, they do not take into
account observations of some very small band sizes, especially on the
west coast.
For a start, Jones’s decision to arbitrarily add up to thirty additional
bands to the total recorded in Robinson’s diaries is unwarranted. This
decision assumes that, when settlers took up land in the midlands, all
the bands there suddenly ceased to exist. It is obvious that this would
have once been a region that supported a relatively high Aboriginal
population because it was good grazing country for kangaroo. It is
equally obvious, though, that rather than simply disappear from the
face of the earth, as Jones implies, these bands continued in existence,
but they traversed slightly different areas. As Chapter Four argued,
the maps that both Plomley and Jones provide for the distribution of
bands are misleading. They imply that Aborigines were comparatively
fixed to the one location, whereas they moved seasonally across far
greater stretches of territory.^' In the 1820s, bands from both Oyster
Bay and Big River still regularly crossed the midlands, as numerous
sightings by settlers testified. On its seasonal migration, a band that
found some of its path across these plains occupied by whites could
skirt around them. The band did not automatically become extinct
just because one part of its nomadic route contained a farm. Even by
1823 when pastoral runs traversed much of the midlands, the settlers
had still only alienated 3.1 per cent of the land of the island.?
Another reason why the band count is too high is that not all the
groups named by Robinson existed at the same time, even in the pre-
colonial era. Within tribal society, the formation and extinction of
hunter-gatherer bands was a very fluid process. Bands could merge
with one another or be destroyed by internecine warfare, all within
the span of one generation. Robinson’s own diaries provide plenty of
evidence of this. He recorded one incident where natives from Bruny
Island mounted a ‘war expedition’ to the Tasman Peninsula where
Jones, ‘Tasmanian Tribes’, p 325
^ as demonstrated in Chapter Four, p 106
sec Chapter Three, p 78
ATO TUE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
they killed several of the men of the local tribe and took away their
women, Obviously, without women, this band could not survive
beyond the remnants of the current generation. Robinson records at
least ten other incidents of inter-tribal fighting to capture women,”
some of which must also have led to the complete inability of the
losing band to reproduce itself. So just because there is a name of a
band in the diaries this does not mean that we must assume the group
had a permanent existence in the pre-colonial period. Several of the
names were of bands that no longer existed, as he acknowledged
himself.”
While Plomley’s analysis of the French explorers’ observations of
Aboriginal numbers are all carefully done and credible as far as they
go, the observations he uses were geographically limited, coming
mainly from the east and south-east coasts. This was a fertile maritime
and land environment with a moderate climate that could obviously
support greater numbers than elsewhere. On the other hand, Jones’s
average population of forty to fifty people per band takes in the
whole of the island, including many areas much less favourable for
habitation.
However, Jones does not take into account some of the observa-
tions from Robinson’s own diaries that reveal some areas had a very
much lower population than others. This is especially true of the
comparatively inhospitable south-west coast, which had no grazing
land to speak of and where the Aborigines eked out a living mainly
from the seashore of the rocky coastline. In terms of the original
native habitation, this was a pristine region, untouched by the colo-
nial presence. Apart from the penal settlement at Sarah Island in Mac-
quarie Harbour and an abandoned attempt at another at Port Davey,
there had been no colonists on the south-west or southern coasts until
Robinson arrived. Yet in March 1830 he could find only twenty-six
members of the Port Davey tribe. In 1833, when he went looking
again, he could find only sixteen members of the Point Hibbs band,
which by then included some ex-members of the Port Davey tribe.
Yet according to Plomley's survey there should have been six bands
56 Robinson, diary, 21 June 1830, 24 July 1830, 25 October 1830, 16 July
1831, 15 November 1831, 11 December 1831, 15 December 1831, 19—20—
22 June 1832, 19-21 June 1834, Friendly Mission, pp 181, 187, 257, 579,
520, 548, 554, 618-9, 887-8
57 Robinson, report February 1831, diary, 20 November 1831, Friendly
Mission, pp 225, 526
55 M, D. McRae, ‘Port Davey and the South West’, Tasmanian Historical
Research Association Papers and Proceedings, 8, 3, May 1960, p 47
*' Robinson, diary, 20 May 1833, Friendly Mission, pp 724. Their names are
on pp 741-3.
Pen: DEATH TOLL AND DEMISE OF THE ABORIGINAL POPULATION 371
wa this region, ® numbering 420 people. Applying Jones’s lower aver-
age, there sall should have been 240—300 people there. The same was
tue of most of the west coast north of Macquarie Harbour. Here, ac-
eondiny to Plomey's survey, there should have been seven bands with
anything trom 280 490 people. But all that Robinson encountered in
ISSO were two groups at Sandy Cape and Mount Cameron West
totalling, at most, fifty people."
It is possible that the numbers of these bands might have been
reduced by European disease, since some Port Davey natives had vis-
ited Bruny Island and the settled districts of the south-east in the
1820s, while the north-western tribes had some contact with the
sheep run at Cape Grim. Nonetheless, the huge discrepancies
between what the assumptions about band sizes would predict and
what Robinson actually observed still leaves Plomley's and Jones's
tallies for this region as considerable overestimates. Moreover, in
February 1831 Robinson himself tried to calculate the population of
the entire west coast from the information he had gleaned about the
tribes. Using the same data as Plomley and Jones, he claimed there
were still 700 Aborigines living there. Yet all he could find to bring
in over the next two years was a mere 108.
In the light of these qualifications, let us make some very modest
adjustments to the estimates made by Plomley and Jones. First, there
is no good reason to accept Jones’s proposal to add another thirty un-
named bands to the population of the midlands. The fifty-five bands
Robinson named remain the best count we have. However, this total
should be discounted by at least five bands to account for some whose
names he heard but which, in the normal process of band reforma-
tion, had probably ceased to exist even before white settlement. This
means there were about fifty bands in the pre-colonial period. This
total, it should be noted, is still more than the forty-six bands Plomley
accepted in 1966 in his edition of Robinson’s diaries, so it is still a
generous assumption. Second, in the light of the fact that the typical
size of a band was probably smaller than the maximum estimated by
Jones, we should accept an average at the lower range of the band
size he proposes, that is, of forty people. Fifty bands at an average of
forty members per band equals 2000 people. Given the generosity of
the assumptions involved in this estimate, we should thus regard the
total pre-colonial Aboriginal population of Tasmania as less than
2000.
^ Plomley, The Tasmanian Tribes and Cicatrices, p 38
- Robinson, diary, 1 and 12 June 1830, Friendly Mission, pp 166—7, 172-4
^? See Chapter Seven, pp 224—5
372 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
This is, in fact the same
! JR aot, fi , ackhouse Walker
arrived at in 1898 after erus
before the tendency
high as possible
BULLETS RATHER THAN BACTERIA?
On the Australian mainland, Aborigines were recorded d
European diseases after even minimal contact with whites,
to Lyndall Ryan, however, there were no comparable ep
Van Diemen’s Land. ‘Aside from the Aborigines at Bruny
were decimated by influenza in 1829, Ryan writes,
ence was found of an Aboriginal in the settled districts who suffered
from disease before he was captured.'? In Sydney, a plague of small-
pox wiped out a large proportion of the local Aborigines in 1788 and
at Port Phillip an outbreak of influenza did the same in 1836. But the
Tasmanian settlements at Hobart and Launceston were, she claims,
largely spared such ravages. .
There were two explanations for the native resistance to disease,
according to Ryan. First, there were no epidemics among the British
settlers in the early period and so no contagious diseases to pass on to
the Aborigines. Second, the indigenous people themselves were a
ticularly healthy. They inhabited a benign, temperate climate Fi
their diet was high in protein, vitamin C, iron and thiamine. In vue
north, contact with the small number of sealers in Bass Strait in the
decade before colonization may also have helped them build up a
resistance to common European diseases. Henry Reynolds agrees
with Ryan’s thesis on this issue. In a critique of Geoffrey Blainey s
writings, Reynolds argued:
ying from
According
idemics in
Island who
‘only one refer-
There were no epidemics in Tasmania. Blainey’s claim that by 1830 dis-
ease had killed most of the island blacks is simply not true, as Lyndall
Ryan’s research established as far back as 1976. The Tasmanians remained
healthy until they came into European settlement. The same situation
existed in most of north Australia where disease followed rather than pre-
ceded frontier conflict; bullets rather tha
n bacteria broke Aboriginal resis-
tance in many parts of the continent.
The ‘bullets rather than bacte
ria' thesis, however, flies in the face of
all white observations of Abori
gines in Van Diemen's Land. Even a
? Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 175
^ Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 175
^ Henry Reynolds, ‘Blainey and Abori
and M. C. Ricklefs (eds.) Surrende
Immigration, George Allen and Un
criticising comments made by Ge
ginal History’
r Australia? Geoffrey
win, Sydney, 1985, P 88. Re ae
offrey Blainey in A [, TE Us vas
>in Andrew Markus
Blai
TEN: DEATH TOLL AND DEMISE OF THE ABORIGINAL POPULATION 373
small degree of contact with the white population sent diseases rav-
aging through Aboriginal communities. The principal colonial ob-
servers all acknowledged this. Despite the vitamins in their diet, the
Tasmanian Aborigines were highly susceptible to European diseases of
the respiratory system, especially colds, influenza and pneumonia.
George Augustus Robinson observed this everywhere he went:
The aborigines of this colony are universally susceptible of cold and that
unless the utmost providence is taken in checking its progress at an early
period it fixes itself on the lungs and gradually assumes the complaint spo-
ken of i.e. the catarrhal fever.
The first contacts he made with tribal Aborigines were usually
accompanied by the rapid onset of this kind of respiratory disease. In
1829, after the establishment of a whaling station at Adventure Bay
and after a convict work party arrived to clear Robinson's land and
construct his cottage at Missionary Bay on Bruny Island, the conse-
quences for the local natives were devastating. That winter, twenty-
two of them died from some kind of respiratory infection. By January
1830, of the total of more than forty Bruny Islanders who were there
when Robinson arrived to civilize them, only seventeen individuals
were left alive.”
l This outbreak, moreover, was not confined to this tribe or loca-
tion. In February 1830 at Recherche Bay, as he began his first trek to
the west, some of the natives in Robinson’s party found the body of a
woman from Port Davey who had previously become ill and had
been left by her tribe to die. The Aborigines told Robinson that her
sickness had been widespread:
The natives informed me that plenty of natives had been attacked with
Raegerwropper or evil spirit, and had died. Thus the mortality with
which the Brune natives had been attacked, appears to have been general
among the tribes of aborigines.”
He found much the same pattern on both the west and north
coasts. In September 1832, Robinson reported:
The number of aborigines along the western coast have been considerably
reduced since the time of my first visit. A mortality has raged amongst
them which together with the severity of the season and other causes had
rendered the paucity of their number very considerable.”
*^ Robinson, note with letter, Maclachlan to Colonial Secretary, 24 May
1831, Friendly Mission, pp 461-2
67 For Robinson’s reports of the death toll and the original size of the
sce: Plomley, Friendly Mission, p 77
2 February 1830, Friendly Mission, p 113
22 September 1832, cited Friendly Mission, p 695 n 113
population
^^ 2 obinson, diary,
^^ 12 obinson to Curr,
374 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
That year, he left twenty-seven natives on Hunter Island off the
north-west coast to be shipped to the Aboriginal settlement at Flin-
ders Island. While they waited, four of them di
ed. A year later, the
death rate
among his captives was much higher. In late July and early
August 1833, Robinson held twenty-five of the west coast Aborigines
in the prison on Sarah Island in Macquarie Harbour. Within the space
of nine days, fourteen of them died from respiratory infection." Brian
Plomley has argued that the symptoms Robinson described indicated
they all died of pneumonia." At the same time, Robinson received
news that another thirteen he had recently shipped to Flinders Island
had died shortly after they arrived there.” . l
This type of sudden outbreak of disease, which carried off d
ous people at a time, was characteristic of the pattern of deaths at the
Flinders Island settlement throughout its history. Twenty-three ae
ple died from June to August 1833. Seventeen died in six —
from January to June 1836. Another thirteen died from January F
March 1837. In February 1839 after two supply ships, the ere :
the Vansittart, brought a new influenza infection tei thi island, eight a
the Aborigines quickly died in the ensuing epidemic. The ae i
the postmortems routinely conducted on those who died at WY
balenna revealed symptoms consistent with viral respiratory infection,
particularly influenza and pneumonia, followed by a bacterial disease
of pyemic nature. From 1837 onwards, acute pulmonary or as
tuberculosis joined the other respiratory diseases as a major cause o
death.” In all, between 1831 and 1847, some 132 Aborigines died on
Flinders Island, the majority of them young adults, principally from
common cold, influenza, pneumonia and tuberculosis"?
Death by disease also fits the observation by Brian Plomley that no
large collection of bones of Tasmanian Aborigines was ever found."?
Had large numbers of them been shot dead there would have been
no one left to burn the bodies, a ritual that most tribes observed
7 Robinson, dia
T N. J. B. Plo
ia, 151, December 4—18 1989
gust 1833, Friendly Mission, p 785
Weep in Silence: A History of the
nt, Blubber Head Press, Hobart, 1987
^ Plomley, *Disez
Flinders Island
ise among the Tasmanian Aborig
Mission, p 965
PP 75, 108, 700
ines’, p 667; Friendly
” Plomley, Weep in Silence, pp 52-4, 99
" Plomley, Aboriginal/Settler Clash, pp 10—11
—— v
TEN: DEATH TOLL AND DEMISE OF THE ABORIGINAL POPULATION 375
meticulously when they were able." A more gradual process of death
Ay disease would have given the survivors time to observe this rite.
Indeed, it was likely that European diseases had a dramatic effect on
the Aboriginal population even. before the first British settlements
were founded at Hobart and Launceston in 1803 and 1804. The
Aborigines probably contracted them from the Bass Strait sealers.
Brash and American ships brought seal hunters to the Furneaux
group of islands from 1798 onwards. These vessels would put ashore a
small party of men on an island and return some weeks or months
later to collect them and the seal skins and seal oil they had accumu-
lated. The islands were within rowing distance of Tasmania and the
sealers went there by whaleboat to acquire native women, either by
trade or abduction.? They were probably responsible for introducing
diseases that the Aborigines later recalled had a catastrophic impact on
their numbers. James Bonwick recorded:
Mr Catechist Clark was informed by the Natives, when at Flinders Island,
that, before the English ships arrived in Sullivan's cove, a sudden and
fearful mortality took place among the tribes. It was viewed as a premoni-
tion of a dreadful calamity affecting the race.”
The evidence for disease, then, as the major cause of depopulation
is compelling. The indigenous people had no resistance to the diseases
the British brought with them. Medical practice of the day had no
cure for them, no proper understanding of their causes, nor even
means of relieving their symptoms. Moreover, the experience in Van
Diemen's Land was the same as that of mainland Australia, New
Zealand and the Pacific Islands in the same period. There is no reason
to believe the Tasmanians, the most isolated people of them all in this
region, could have remained immune from the same fate.
VENEREAL DISEASE AND LOSS OF REPRODUCTION
If disease reduced the size of the Aboriginal population, did it also
prevent their reproduction? Lyndall Ryan denies this, claiming there
was not much incidence of venereal disease among the Aborigines in
7 While cremation was the most common, others disposed of their dead by
placing them in trees. Some made tombs of bark. Ling Roth, The Aborigines
of Tasmania, pp 116-22
% The most reliable account is Plomley, “The Sealers’, Appendix 7 to
Friendly Mission, pp 1006-20
? James Bonwick, Daily Life and Origin of the Tasmanians, Sampson Low,
Son, and Marston, London, 1870, p 87. In Fate of a Free People, p 185,
Reynolds records a similar conversation, but it is not to be found in the
location he cites, James Bonwick's Last of the Tasmanians, p 85, or on any
other page of that book that I could find.
376 THE FABRICATION OF
ABORIGINAL HISTORY
Tasmania. This is puzzling, she admits, because a number of th
. . » Ose
whites who had sexual contact with Aboriginal women, especial]
, D y
ave syphilis. The Tasmanian
of sexually transmitted disease
arts of south-eastern Australia. Once
again, however, her conclusions are unsustainable.
stockmen and sealers, were known to h
natives, she claims, had a far lower rate
than Aborigines in other p
What evidence we do have suggests that venereal disease spread
rapidly among Aboriginal women. Truganini and two of her female
triends, Pagerly and Dray, all picked up what Robinson called a
loathesome disorder’ from the whalers at Adventure Bay in 1829,*!
Traganim’s biographer, Vivienne Rae-Ellis, says this was most likely a
form of venereal disease that left her without obvious symptoms but
infertile. During her long life, she had many lovers, including Rob-
inson, but no children." Brian Plomley suggests the disease was
probably gonorrhoea, which, while rarely fatal or even likely to cause
à marked deterioration in health, effectively inhibited pregnancy and
child bearing? Pagerly's infection, however, was obviously more
virulent. She became the third wife of Truganini's father. He con:
tracted venereal disease from her and died of it four months later.
On Flinders Island, there were only a small number of children
born, and the birth rate was noticeably lower than in tribal society.
iiè women had no children and those that did often lost them in
infancy. In the final years of the Oyster Cove settlement, the P
James Bonwick paid a visit and interviewed the nine ri a died
ing. Only two of them had ever had children, and they ha Sb.
many years ago. On this issue, if few others, Bonwick was cre
when he wrote: ‘The absence of births even more than the frequency
of deaths completed the destruction of the people.'** l T
There is, however, another dimension to this explanation, whic
: a ise
neither Bonwick nor any of his followers have felt the need to rais
but which is essential to complete the story.
^ Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, pp 175-6
" Robinson, diary, 21-23 September 1829, Friendly Mission, p77
Vivienne Rae-Ellis, Black Robinson; Protector of Aborigines, Melbourne
University Press, Melbourne, 1988, p 50
” Plomley, ‘Disease amo
^ Rae-Ellis, Black Robin
” Plomley, Weep in Sile
^ lames Bonwick, The
ng the Tasmanian Aborigines', p 667
son, p 32
nce, pp 204—5, 702
Last of the Tasmanians, Sampson Low, Son and
Marston, London, 1870, p 386
014 - © -9 =9-0p-cupeeee
(0
"eer gf
; TION 377
TEN: DEATH TOLL AND DEMISE OF THE ABORIGINAL POPULATI
THE POSITION OF WOMEN
When first contacted in the eighteenth century, the Tasmanians i
the most primitive human society ever discovered. One eT cout
this was the simplicity of their technology. The men hunted w1
one-piece wooden spears, wooden clubs and stones. The ye
used wooden digging sticks to uproot vegetables and ee
to prise shellfish from rocks. They lived off kangaroos, wallabies an
possums in the inland, and shellfish, birds and seals on the coast. For
shelter, they sometimes stacked branches and bark to make temporary
windbreaks and domed huts, but they usually slept in the open. They
rarely stayed in one place more than a day or two. Settlers who came
across their abandoned campsites found them strewn with the rotting
remains of the animals they had eaten, and their faeces deposited close
to the fires where they slept." Their most sophisticated possessions
were grass ropes to climb trees and woven grass bags. Their entire
catalogue of manufactured goods comprised about two dozen articles.
They went about completely naked, even in the snow-covered high-
lands. The women slung kangaroo skins over their shoulders not for
clothing but to carry their babies. For warmth, they smeared them-
selves with animal fat and huddled around fires at night. Until they
acquired British containers, they could not boil water. The colonists
were astonished to observe they could not make fire, a skill that even
Neanderthal Man had mastered. They carried firebrands and coals
with them on their nomadic journeys. If the fires of one family were
doused by rain or flood, they had to go in search of others to ask for a
light.**
CULTURAL VULNERABILITY AND
87 The most useful overall view of Tasmanian Aboriginal culture is still H.
Ling Roth, The Aborigines of Tasmania, F. King and Sons, Halifax, 1899,
which discusses the findings of all the original ethnographic studies. On
campsite detritus: the Quaker cleric James Backhouse observed that the
Aborigines 'daily moved to a fresh place, to avoid the offal and filth that
accumulated about the little fires which they kindled daily, and around
which they slept’: Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies, p 79. In an
1830 report on various sightings he had made of the Oyster Bay Aborigines,
the settler F. G. D. Browne described coming across a campsite where ‘we
found seven small fires still glowing, a number of kangaroo bones, several
skins and a considerable quantity of human excrement ... appearances
warrant the idea that they will not leave their fire, even to answer the calls of
nature.' Browne to Mulgrave, 28 February 1830, AOT CSO 1/323/7578,
pp 123, 129
88 Robinson, diary, 28 December 1831, Friendly Mission, p 567. Their
inability to make fire has long worried many observers who do not like to
admit the Tasmanians were bereft of so basic a skill. For several implausible
rationalisations, see Ling Roth, The Aborigines of Tasmania, pp 83—4
378 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
From excavations of some long-used campsites and caves, the
chaeologist and prehistorian Rhys Jones, has concluded that sev w
thousand years earlier, their technology had actually been more c s
plex." They once used bone tools, barbed spears and weaving Beef:
made of fish bone. They also had wooden boomerangs, hafted sto "
tools, edge-ground stone axes and tools fashioned from volcanic glass
However, these had all long been abandoned by the time Europeans
arrived. Only the tribes of the west and south coasts had canoes
which they made from buoyant bark strips of the swamp tea-tree Ged
together with grass rope, and propelled by sticks, not blades. In the
east, the Aborigines crossed rivers and off-shore channels on bundles
of logs, which they swam alongside.” Fish were originally an impor-
tant part of their diet but the archaeological record shows they gave
up eating fish, and the manufacture of fish hooks and fish spears
about 4000 years ago. Mainland Aborigines, for whom fish was 4
dietary staple, were amazed to find the Tasmanians refused to eat fish
even though they were abundant in the sea and the inland rivers and
lakes, especially in winter when other food was limited. Instead of
technological progress, the Tasmanians had experienced a techno-
logical regression. Isolated from the mainland when the waters rose
10,000 years ago, and lacking any outside source of competition or
innovation, the Tasmanians suffered the consequences. Jones writes:
Like a blow above the heart, it took a long time to take effect, but slowly
but surely there was a simplification in the tool kit, a diminution in the
range of foods eaten, perhaps a squeezing of intellectuality. The world’s
longest isolation, the world’s simplest technology ... a slow strangulation
of the mind.”!
*? Rhys Jones, Rocky Cape and the Problem of the Tasmanians, PhD thesis,
University of Sydney, 1971. The thesis was subsequently elaborated and
debated in several journal articles: see footnote 91.
? James Calder, Native Tribes of Tasmania, p 35
*! Rhys Jones, ‘The Tasmanian Paradox’, in R. V. S. Wright (ed.) Stone
Tools as Cultural Markers: Change, Evolution and Complexity, Australian
Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra, and Humanities Press, New Jersey,
1977, pp 202-3. See also Rhys Jones, "Why Did the Tasmanians Stop Eating
Fish?’, in R. A. Gould (ed.) Explorations in Ethnoarchaeology, University of
New Mexico Press, Santa Fe, 1978. There have been several attempts to
argue the Tasmanians were not as technologically backward as Jones claims.
Few dispute his evidence, however, and instead offer rationalisations to show
their actions were always ‘functional’ for their conditions. Arguments
include: the abandonment of fish was adaptive behaviour in an especially
abundant environment; when the weather turned colder 3800 years ago they
chose richer sources of animal fats; they gave up fish because lobster was
more to their taste. See D. R. Horton, ‘Tasmanian Adaptation’, Mankind,
zd
Charles Alexandre Lesueur and Francois Péron (Tasmaniana Library, State Library of Tasmania)
Aboriginal women diving for shellfish, by Colbron Pearse (Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery)
P oci
"GA E AM.
EPEE.
"Hobart Town and view of the Derwent River Taken
Parker King (Mitchell Library,
from Signal Hut, Mount Nelson’, 1819, by Phillip
State Library of New South Wales)
e
TEN: DEATH TOLL AND DEMISE OF THE ABORIGINAL POPULATION 379
v their technology that caused problems for the Tas-
manians. The aspect of their society that left them most vulnerable in
the tace of the European arrival was the treatment of their women.
Apart from hunting kangaroos and wallabies, Tasmanian Aboriginal
men contributed little to the social unit. The first European observers
and ‘extremely selfish’ and said they treated
called the men ‘indolent’
their women like ‘slaves’ and ‘drudges’.”” It was the women’s task to
d canoes. The
make windbreaks and huts and to construct rafts an
hellfish and crayfish, diving deep into coastal
waters. Women also climbed trees to catch possums and swam to
offshore rocks and islands for muttonbirds and seals. Despite the fact
that they also cooked the food, they fed their husbands before them-
selves. According to a contemporary observer, they watched while
he satisfies himself with the choicest parts, handing her from time to
time the half-devoured pieces over his shoulder; this he does with an
air of great condescension, without turning round'.? In 1802, the
French anthropologist Francois Péron observed twenty women de-
posit the results of their fishing at the feet of their men. Although the
women had not eaten, the men:
It was not onl
women alone collected s
immediately divided it up, without giving them any, they proceeded to
puni themselves behind their husbands, who were seated on the back of
a . i : : ;
Fil sand-bank; and there, during the remainder of the interview, these
unfortunates dared neither to raise their eyes, speak, nor smile.”*
T a 5 ]
he women also endured frequent violence. Péron said of one
group: "They were nearly all covered with scars, the miserable results
of the bad treatment of their brutal husbands.’ Ling Roth argues these
scars could have had other origins. They might merely have been the
cicatrices, or ritual scarring, with which they adorned themselves.” It
is true they were ritually scarred but nonetheless there is abundant
‘Left Out in the Cold: Why the
12, 1, 1979, pp 28-34; H. R. Allen,
efact, 4, 1979, pp 1-10; Gary Dunnett,
Tasmanians Stopped Eating Fish’, Art
‘Diving for Dinner: Some Implications from Holocene Middens of the Role
of Coasts in the late Pleistocene of Tasmania’, in M. A. Smith, M. Spriggs
and B. Fankhauser (eds.) Sahul in Review, Department of Prehistory,
Australian National University, 1993, pp 247-57; Sandra Bowdler, ‘Fish and
culture: a Tasmanian polemic’, Mankind, 12, 4, 1980, pp 33440
7 44, Ling Roth, The Aborigines of Tasmania, F. King and Sons, Halifax,
1899, pp 113-4
93 ja, H, Davies, ‘On the Aborigines of
Journal of Science, M, 1846, p 415, cited Roth,
"^ François Péron and Louis Freycínet, Voyage
Australes ... le Géographe, et le Casuarina, 2 vols.,
Roth, Aborigines of Tasmania, p 113
95 Roth, Aborigines of Tasmania, p 113
Van Diemen’s Land’, Tasmanian
Aborigines of Tasmania, p 114
de Découvertes aux Terres
Paris, 1807-1816, cited by
380 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
evidence of the violent nature of relati
Augustus Robinson recorded the
men to stab their intended with
knives. In November 1830, on Swan Island, the first of
Informed that Mannerlelar
because she would not sto
tent and informed me that
the bush and took knives
cut the women. And wh
them.
genner had cut Tencotemainner with a knife
p with him. The aboriginal females came to m
several of the men had concealed themselves in
with them, and when night came they meant to
y would they do so? Because women no marry
The next evening the same courtship practices were re-enacted:
Tonight was another scene of confusion, the men running after the
women with knives in their hands and the women running away.”
If a woman or her family objected to the suitor, he would often
abduct and rape her. On the other hand, if a woman refused a man
who was favoured by her parents, then a sequence of violence, mur-
der and retribution might ensue. In one diary entry Robinson wrote:
Woorrady entertained the natives with an account of his nation. Said that
plenty of mothers and fathers kill their daughters on account of their
attachment to men whom they dislike and to prevent their marriage. He
knew a mother kill her daughter whilst sitting at the fire by jabbing a
spear through her body, in at her back and out at her belly, and kept stab-
bing her till she killed her. The lover hearing of it watched an opportu-
nity when the men were away hunting, and went and killed the mother.
The natives form very strong attachments and they bear implacable
enmity to their foes. The Toogee and Ninenee have killed many daugh-
ters from the same cause.”
Aboriginal women who rejected advances from amorous males put
their lives in danger. Tasmanian marriage was largely monogamous
but murder of women because of insult, jealousy and infidelity was
common.” The Big River chief, Montpeliatter, killed a ‘tall, fine
young woman’ because she did not like him.” Out of jealousy, a man
named Nappelarleyer killed ‘quite a young girl’ on Robbins Island,
'spearing her in both her sides and in her neck’. The murderer was
” Robinson, diary, 19 and 20 November 1830, Friendl
" Robinson, diary, 20 December 1831,
Robinson’s account of ‘marriage of the
^ Jones, “Tasmanian Tribes’, p 324
dd Robinson, diary, 24 November 1831,
y Mission, pP 280
Friendly Mission, P 560. See also
aborigines', p 888
Friendly Mission, p 529
TEN: DEATH TOLL AND DEMISE OF THE ABORIGINAL POPULATION 381
himself then Killed by another man."" Even the heroine of modern
feminist authors, Walyer the Aboriginal amazon, was subject to the
sime treatment, although this is something her current admirers are
reluctant to divulge. In an attempt to kill her, an Aboriginal man beat
her with a waddy and broke her back. To escape him, she made her
wav to the white sealers in Bass Strait! This endemic violence left
Women in a state of fear during courtship, lest they offend their
suitor, In. 1829, when Woorrady was pressing his suit on Truganini,
she was repulsed by him, branding him a raegewropper, ‘a fearful
tenn implying a reference to some evil quality’. Nonetheless, Rob-
mson observed that ‘though highly averse to her suitor and even in-
censed at his unceasing importunities she is fearful to betray her feel-
ings by a word or a look ... This arises out of the fear of offending
and a dread apprehension for its consequences’ .'”
Under these conditions, it was not surprising that some of the
Abonginal women who lived with the sealers found their position
preterable to that in tribal society. This was apparently true even of
Walyer, who assumed the name of Mary Ann and cohabited volun-
tarily with John Williams on Penguin Island until removed by Rob-
inson to join his group on Swan Island." Although Robinson
claimed that the sealers’ women were slaves subject to a cruel captiv-
ity, others who spoke with them received a different impression. In
his book published in 1820, Lieutenant Charles Jeffreys wrote:
The author had several opportunities of learning from the females that
their husbands act towards them with considerable harshness and tyranny.
These women are known sometimes to run away from that state of bond-
age and oppression to which they say their husbands subject them. In
these cases they will attach themselves to the English sailors ... They give
their European protectors to understand that their own husbands make
them carry all their lumber, force them out to hunt, and make them per-
form all manner of work; and that they find their situation greatly im-
proved by attaching themselves to the sealing gangs. '™
The brutality that characterized personal relations between the
sexes was matched at the group level. As Chapter Four demonstrated,
the biggest single cause of internecine warfare between the Aborigi-
nes was the custom of bands raiding one another to abduct women, a
practice that sometimes led to all the men on the losing side being
'^ Robinson, diary, 11 July 1830, Friendly Mission, p 187
Robinson, diary, 20 December 1830, Friendly Mission, pp 296-7
* Robinson, diary, 14 October 1830, Friendly Mission, p 83
"^ Robinson, diary, 20 December 1830, Friendly Mission, pp 296-7
"c harles Jeffreys, Van Diemen's Land: Geographical and Descriptive Delineation
of the Island of Van Diemen’s Land, London, 1820, pp 118-9, cited by Roth,
Aborigines of Tasmania, pp 114-5
382 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HisTORY
killed. While this is hardly an unfamiliar source of co
communities the world over — the Trojan Wars had th
— the fact it was so commonplace in the small, isolat
community was anything but conducive to its long-
There is not enough evidence to estimate how ma
were regularly killed in these exchanges, but if the Tas
ence was anything like that of mainland Australia,
Blainey has estimated the annual death rate from inte
at between one in eve
tion,
nflict in tribal
€ same origins
ed Tasmanian
term survival.
ny Tasmanians
manian experi-
where Geoffrey
r-tribal violence
ry 270 and one in every 300 of the popula-
then it must have been one of the major causes of Aboriginal
deaths. It was much higher than anything inflicted by British colonists
who, as recorded earlier, were directly responsible for an average of
only four deaths a year, or one in 500 of the pre-contact population.
This pattern of tribal conflict, involving raid, counter-raid and the
pervasive fear it all engendered was, according to the American
anthropologist Robert Edgerton, ‘deadly, disruptive and purposeless’.
He writes:
There were no social or economic imperatives that drove Tasmanian men
to treat their wives badly, to require them to carry out dangerous tasks, or
to kill other men in pursuit of more wives, but there may well have been
psychological imperatives that in the absence of social or cultural con-
straints led men to behave in these ways. Like many other small societies,
Tasmanians failed to devise social and cultural mechanisms to control their
destructive tendencies, '%
'? Geoffrey Blainey, Triumph of the Nomads: A History
revised edn., Sun Books 1983, pp 108—
were made, Blainey's figures are on the
confirmed by more recent international
Lawrence Keeley has shown that prehist
frequent and proportionately more ruthl
that of the wars between modern European nations: Lawrence H. Keeley,
War before Civilization, Oxford University Press, New York, 1996.
'* Robert B. Edgerton, Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive
Harmony, Free Press, New York, 1992, p 52. The Tasmanians were by no
means the only primitive society to act this way and there is a body of
anthropological work on the general topic. Edgerton writes that without
strong selective pressures from other populations or a rapidly changing
environment, this is what one would expect unless populations’ early
solutions to the demands of their environments were remarkably efficient. C
R. Hallpike has argued that ‘mediocre’ practices and beliefs have quite i
commonly survived in small-scale societies, even though th
or inefficient to begin with, because there were too few selective pressu
force change, Weston LaBarre has used the term ‘group archosis’ to des
the persistence of false beliefs and lethal practices under similar conditio
Edgerton p 53
of Ancient Australia,
10. Though controversial when they
conservative side and have been
studies. The anthropologist
oric warfare was more deadly, more
ess than modern warfare, including
€y were simple
res to
Cribe
ns;
TEN: DEATH TOLL AND DEMISE OF THE ABORIGINAL POPULATION 383
Into this setting, the British arrived. They soon put additional
pressures onto Aboriginal women that probably tipped the balance of
this already precarious population over the edge. The initial impact
was the connection between prostitution and disease. As noted above,
in the south of the colony, especially on Bruny Island, several young
Aboriginal women began selling themselves for provisions to the
convicts employed as whalers, timber-getters and stockmen. They
quickly contracted venereal and other diseases and spread them
among the local blacks. Within months, the majority of those on
Bruny Island were dead.
In the north, the Bass Strait sealers both abducted Aboriginal
women and purchased them from tribesmen. According to the har-
bour pilot James Kelly, a former sealer himself, Aboriginal men would
barter women for dogs and supplies." James Hobbs told the 1830
Committee that he knew of native men who had sold their women
for four or five carcases of seals." Lyndall Ryan claims the men were
trying to incorporate the white visitors into their own society, but
this is merely her interpretation of their motives.” Brian Plomley
says, more truthfully: ‘It is not known what the relationships were
between the sealers and the tribes.’''® The existing evidence is that the
trade had a material rather than a political basis and that the women
were bartered very cheaply. One Aboriginal woman, named Mary,
told Robinson that the women were exchanged for provisions and
that ‘she herself had been bought off the black men for a bag of flour
and potatoes’.''' Mary did not agree to her sale and had to be carried
off bound hand and foot. Another woman, named Jumbo, told him
her group from Cape Portland raided other bands to seize their
women and trade them: ‘her people took the black women from the
natives at Port Dalrymple and sold them to the sealers for dogs, mut-
ton birds, flour &c.’''* The travelling Quaker, James Backhouse,
described one case on the west coast where local Aborigines traded a
fourteen-year-old girl to the pilot at Macquarie Harbour in exchange
for a dog. ?
The loss of these women to their bands had serious implications for
the ability of Aboriginal society to reproduce itself. Most of the femi-
"7 Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp 23-4
1% James Hobbs, evidence to Aborigines committee, 9 March 1830, British
Parlíamentary Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 221
"? Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p 67
1 Plomley, Friendly Mission, p 23
' Robinson, diary 10 October 1829, Friendly Mission, p 82
"^ Robinson, diary, 20 October 1830, Friendly Mission, p 254
'? James Backhouse, A Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies, Hamilton
Adams, London, 1843, p 58
384 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
nist historians who have commented on the trade de
the white men who wanted these women, but they say nothing
about the active choices often made by the women themselves nor of
the role of their menfolk who either did not prevent the trade or
actively colluded in it. Although most historians portray the sen as
bywords for slavery and cruelty, when Robinson tried to Seis oe
wives for his settlement, a number of the women made it clear : ey
preferred these Englishmen to their black PME ie To ie sae
like Walyer, the sealers offered the less objectionable o m ee
alternatives. When interviewed by James Backhouse in 1832, se
of the women expressed their fondness for their sealer husbands.
Backhouse concluded:
plore the lust of
alers,
Though they may sometimes have been treated roughly ng a ie of
their state may upon the whole be better than amongst unciv
ops . dges of their
their own race, who like other uncivilized tribes make dru g
women.!!5
: e
Traditional Aboriginal society placed no vinci a S:
women's sexual behaviour with white men. Their prs mcn
fathers appeared to encourage their prostitution. In the : "s Abe
common for convict stockmen in the Oatlands district to pri ci ee
nginal men with sugar to gain sexual favours from fhe pone g
Some tribesmen would offer their wives for bread." At 5
Town in the north, a police constable reported:
i their
It was well understood there that Black men would Pn hinc
women to the stock men and others for sugar, bread and such iem "a
I always understood that the Blacks were not jealous of their women,
arnal
that they would, on the contrary, force the women to go and m inen
intercourse with the stockkeepers for any small present the Blac
could get.!!?
While Truganini was
Prostituting herself with convict whalers on
Bruny Island in 1829, he
r father was also living there but did nothing
James Backhouse, Journal, Vol 2, 18 February 1832
Library, London, cit ivi
" Deposition by Thomas McMinn, 16 March 1830, CSO 1/323/7578, pp
197-8. There are tw. i
in the second series.
MOONY A, Brodribb, e
1830, British Parliame
" Deposition by Joh
There are two series
second series,
vidence to 1830 Aborigines Committee, 11 March
ntary Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p 224
n Jones, 16 March 1830, CSO 1/323/7578, p 171.
of pages 170—199 in this file. This deposition is in the
Bw ~~ — «ee
TEN: DEATH TOLL AND DEMISE OF THE ABORIGINAL POPULATION 385
to stop her. Two of the other native women who sold themselves to
the island’s whalers were married at the time yet their Aboriginal
husbands made no apparent complaint about what their wives were
doing: 'they used to go of their own accord to the whalers and
cohabited with them’.''? Only Robinson went down to the whaling
station two or three times to try to retrieve them and to scold them
for their ‘evil habits'.'? But they would not listen to him and, for all
their menfolk knew, they might never return. At least three women
from Bruny Island did end up with the sealers in Bass Strait and,
although later reports claimed they were forcibly taken,’ their
removal was probably more an extension of their existing prostitution
than outright abduction. Far worse, however, were those Aboriginal
men who actually sold off their women for sacks of flour or dogs.
They took an exceptionally short-sighted view of what they were
doing, even in terms of their own selfish motives. They deprived
themselves not only of sexual companions and mothers for their
children but of important providers of their own food.
Most orthodox historians agree that the sealers were responsible for
the depopulation of many of the coastal bands. By abducting, buying
or luring away their women, the sealers had a devastating effect on
reproduction rates and had a major impact on the long-term demise
of the Aboriginal population as a whole. There is some dispute over
how many women the sealers actually removed from the tribes. Ryan
says that between 1800 and 1835 there were seventy-four women
with the sealers.'” She claims to know their tribal origins but gives no
indication of where her information came from. However, when
Brian Plomley compiled his own list he could find only forty-nine
women. He named each one of them and gave the names of the
sealers with whom they lived plus a brief account of the information
known about each individual. His is the only reliable count.'?
Whether the true figure was about fifty or even seventy, the loss of
this many women would not have had a major impact on reproduc-
tion if the total population was as large as the orthodox school claims,
that is, from 4000 to 6000 people. However, if the population was
the size argued in this chapter of less than 2000 people, then the loss
''* Statement by John Freake, 27 November 1829, cited by Plomley, Friendly
Mission, p 105 n 52. Freake identified four of the women as “Dray,
Tookanenna, Jack's wife and the Doctor's wife’.
‘2 Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp 77, 105 n 52
'?' Robinson, diary, 10 October 1829, 11 October 1830, Friendly Mission, pp
82, 246. Robinson said the three women were Murrerninghe alias Kit, and
two of Truganini's sisters, Lowhenunhe and Maggerleede.
'7 Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, Appendix 1, p 313
'? Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp 1017-20
386 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
of even fifty out of its one thousand females would have been signifi-
cant. It would have been five per cent of all females, and a much
greater proportion of women of reproductive age. It would also have
been a sizeable proportion of the population on the north and east
Coasts from where most of them came. The orthodox school cannot
have it both ways and claim that there was a larger overall population
and that the loss of women to the sealers contributed to population
decline. If we accept the smaller population size, the case becomes
credible.
In the long run, it seems clear that the loss of women had two
conflicting influences on Aboriginal society. On the one hand, it is
probably true that it played a significant role in population decline.
On the other hand, the tiny mixed-blood community the women
and the sealers created in Bass Strait was the principal means through
which the ancient people of Tasmania left any human legacy at all.
In Fate of a Free People, Henry Reynolds urges us not to underesti-
mate the ability of the Aborigines. They did not lack control over
their own fate, he argues, and we should not see them as helpless vic-
tums of the invaders. This is a valid point. But it also means we should
see them as active agents in their own demise because their men hired
out and sold off their women without seriously contemplating the
results. In doing so they dramatically reduced the ability of their own
community to reproduce itself. Only men who held their women
cheaply would allow such a thing to happen. The real tragedy of the
Aborigines was not British colonization per se but that their society
was, on the one hand, so internally dysfunctional and, on the other
hand, so incompatible with the looming presence of the rest of the
world. Until the nineteenth century, their isolation had left them
without comparisons with other cultures that might have helped
them reform their ways. But nor did they produce any wise men of
their own who might have foreseen the long-
their own behaviour and devised Way:
for millennia, it is true, but it seem:
social relationships. Hence it was not surprising that
arrived, this small, precarious society quickly colla
weight of the susceptibility of its members to disease and the ab
and neglect of its women. abuse
PENS DEATH TOLL AND DEMISE OU THR AUORIGINAL POPULATION. — 387
PARLE TEN: ABORIGINES KILLED BY WHITES, VAN DIEMEN'S LAND
[803-1834
Irate Place Number ldentity of Cinumstances Reliability Reference and
chained hiller(s) comments
killed
1804
ð May Risdon 3 O2 Regt Native Plausible All sources
Cove hunting discussed in
party mis- Chapter One
taken for
attackers
12 Nov Port l Guard of Natives tried Plausible Historical
Dalrymple Marines to steal tent Records of
and throw Australia, TL, T,
sergeant into p 607
sea
1807
14 Feb New 1 Robert Attacked by Plausible Knopwood
Norfolk Waring, natives in diary 14 Feb
kangaroo hut and 1807
hunter speared, shot
one native
28 Feb Frederick 2 Two Conflict Plausible Knopwood
Henry Bay kangaroo over diary 2 Mar
hunters ownership 1807
of dead
kangaroo,
Natives
threw spears,
hunters shot
back
19 April Near ] Kangaroo Governor's Plausible Knopwood
Hobart hunters kangaroo diary 19 Apr
hunters 1807
attacked,
shot one
native
1808
Jan-Feb N/a 5 Convicts Confessed to Plausible See Chapter
Richard killing 3 Two
Lemon and men and 2
John Brown women
c. 1816-18
1819
c. 1819
18 March
1820
c. 1820
1826
3 Nov
22 Nov
New
Norfolk
Bruny
Island
Oyster Bay
Stocker’s
Tier,
Macquarie
River
Mount
Cameron
West
Shannon
River
Allenvale,
Macquarie
Plains
Number Identity of
claimed killer(s)
killed
3 Stock-
keepers
1 Sealers
1 Stockman
1 Stock-
keeper
2 Sealers
1 Stockman
2 Pursuit party
Circumstances Reliability
Stock- Plausible
keepers fight
off attack by
20 natives
White men Plausible
in boat
attacked
camp,
stabbed
Truganini’s
mother
N/a Implausible
Stock- Plausible
keepers fight
off attack by
natives
Raided tribe
to abduct
women and
shot men
who resisted
Plausible
Natives
attacked
men in hut
who shot
one
Plausible
After two
stockmen
wounded,
pursuit party
shot natives
Plausible
"m "Tw
Reference and
comments
Hobart Town
Gazette 31
Aug 1816
Calder, Native
Tribes, p 104
Hobart Town
Gazette 20
March 1819
CSO
1/323/7578,
pp 191-3,
Hobart Town
Gazette 17
April 1819
Friendly
Mission, pp
185, 202, 203-
4
Colonial Times
10 Nov 1826
cso
1/316/7578 p
12
RS Qoo lll 7 wat Bs. E
Pen: DEATH TOLL AND DEMISE OF THE ABORIGINAL POPULATION 389
LS
Ios Plac Number Identity of Circumstances Reliability Reference and
claimed killer(s) comments
killed
late Nov Bothwell 2 Stock- Attacked in Plausible Hobart Town
keeper hut and roof Gazette 2 Dec
set on fire, 1826
stockkeeper
shot two
blacks
1827
c. 1827 Eddystone Several Edward Retaliation Plausible Friendly
Point Mansell, by sealers for Mission, pp
John Riddle, ^ natives 192-3, 249,
Thomas killing four 403, 437 n 16
Tucker, Jack others
Williams
12 April Elizabeth ‘a few? Sawyers Sawyers in Plausible Colonial Times
River near hut fight off 4 May 1827
Campbell native attack
Town
late June Western 1 Thomas Surrounded Plausible CSO
Marshes Baker by ‘200 1/316/7578 p
natives', 24
Baker
escaped,
killing one
in pursuit of
him
August Cape Grim 1 VDL Co Stockmen Plausible Friendly
stockmen tried to get Mission pp
women into 175, 181.
hut. Native Plomley
men accepts Charles
objected Chamberlain’s
claim that
‘several’ were
killed, but all
other accounts
said it was only
one, a tribal
chief
1 Dec Ritchie's 3 VDL Co Attacked by Plausible VDL Co 5/1,
stock hut, stockmen natives who Despatch no.
Western they 3, 14 Jan 1828
Marshes 'severely Curr to
handled’ directors
390 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HisTORY
——————————
Date Place Number Identity of Circumstances Reliability Reference and
claimed killer(s) comments
killed
———————MÀ—— —À
1828
c. 1828 Birch's Bay 2 Convicts While Plausible Friendly
Watkin abducting Mission, p 49,
Lowe and Truganini, Rae-Ellis,
Paddy they killed Black Robinson,
Newell two natives p 32, Calder,
trying to Native Tribes,
stop them pp 104-6
28 Feb Cape Grim 6 VDL Co Natives Plausible All sources
stockmen arrived in discussed at
numbers at start of
hut, armed Chapter Eight.
stockmen Plomley says
came out to 30 killed.
meet them
9 April Ben 1 John Batman Pursuit of Implausible Hobart Town
Lomond native Courier 12
killers, one April 1828.
shot but ran Plomley lists ‘1
off nt. killed(?)’
September Mersey 1 Alexander Reprisal for Plausible Plomley,
River Goldie and attack on Clash, p 28,
VDL Co VDL Co lists one dead,
stockmen men at in Friendly
Burleigh Mission p 235
says ‘several’
20 Oct Green Some Pursuit party Pursuit of Implausible Hobart Town
Ponds natives who Courier 25 Oct
attacked 1828 Pursuers
Langford ‘returned
family unsuccessful’;
Tasmanian 31
Oct 1828,
‘fired after
them and
killed and
wounded a
considerable
number’
25 Oct Opposite 1 ,
Mari Island cem "IE Plausible Hobart Town
stockman, oa eee
Walpole
fired
I ee re
I TOLL AND DEMISE OF THE ABORIGINAL POPULATION 391
TEN: DEATI
|
vite Place Number Identity of Circumstances Reliability Reference and
E claimed killer(s) comments
killed
November Western ‘More N/a Aboriginal Highly CSO
River killed’ robbery and implausible — 1/316/7578, p |
arson at 805
Thomas Plomley
Ritchie’s hut misquoted
document,
which said
‘mare killed’
Dec Break 1 N/a Attempt to Implausible Hobart Town
O'Day rob hut Courier 13 Dec
Plains 1828
|
9 Dec near Tooms 10 40^ Party in Plausible Hobart Town
Lake Regiment pursuit of Courier 13 Dec
native killers 1828, p 2 This
shot ten incident not in
Plomley's
survey. See Ch
5 for location.
13 Dec Sugar Loaf 2 Patrick Attacked Plausible Tasmanian 19
Hill McOwen, while Dec 1828
Jonathan droving }
Kenzie sheep to
Hobart.
Shot two
attackers
27 Dec Oyster Bay 1 Meredith’s Pursuing Plausible Hobart Town
men natives who Courier 17 Jan
killed horses. 1829
Shot one
who tried to
spear them.
1829
17 Jan Bothwell 1 Sergeant of While Plausible Colonial Times
regiment guiding 30 Jan 1829,
regiment Friendly
Bruni Island Mission, pp
Jack struck 285, 439, 506
sergeant, was
pursued to
river and
shot
Mu S cc MC MM MEME
392 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
Date Place Number Identity of Circumstances Reliability
St Paul's
River
c. 20 Jan
26 Jan Little Swan
Port
18 Feb Pleasant
Hills, West
Tamar
16 March Launceston
3 May Morven,
Brushy
Plains
South Esk
River,
upper
reaches
11 June
9-14 Aug Jerusalem
and Coal
River
eae EINE o o ililitá — Á JJJ--
claimed
killed
killer(s)
N/a
David
Rayney
Officer of
military
party
Pursuit party
Pursuit party
McLeod's
shepherd
N/a
N/a
N/a
Military
party
attacked by
natives and
responded
Natives
killed three
at farm,
pursuit party
overtook
them and
killed five
Pursued
robbers, shot
one and
wounded
another
Skirmish
with natives,
one woman
shot
N/a
Highly
implausible
Plausible
Implausible
Plausible
Plausible
Plausible
Highly
implausible
Reference and
Comments
Colonial Time;
30 Jan 1829,
Launceston
Advertiser 9
Feb 1829. See
discussion Ch
Five
Colonial Times
30 Jan 1829,
Launceston
Advertiser 9
Feb 1829
Hobart Town
Courier 28 Feb
1829. Other
officers denied
seeing any
blacks at all
Hobart Town
Courier 21 Mar
1829; CSO
1/316/7578 p
230. HTC said
5 killed but
Launceston
police said
total was 6
Hobart Town
Courier 16 May
1829
Diaries of John
Helder Wedge,
pp 56—7
Hobart Town
Courier 15
August 1829.
his report
refers to a
White man
killed and
another
wound
blacks Sdöy
TEN: DEATH TOLL AND DEMISE OF THE ABORIGINAL POPULATION 393
mm
Date Place Number
claimed
killed
21 Aug Emu Bay 1
Early Sept Ben 2
Lomond
18 Sept Sorell 1
20 Dec Onelton 1
1830
18 April Whitefoord 2
Hills, north
of
Deloraine
4 Aug Shannon 2
River
Identity of
killer(s)
Alexander
Goldie and
Richard
Sweetling
John Batman
Shingle
splitter
Shepherd
Stockman
Humphrey
Howells,
settler
Circumstances
Unprovoked
attack on
native
women
Shot dead
his wounded
captives
After
woman
killed by
blacks,
shingle
splitters fired
at them
severely
wounding
one
Two natives
attacked hut
and one shot
Speared by
natives and
retaliated
Rushed
camp,
woman
killed. Man’s
body found
later
Reliability
Plausible
Highly
Plausible
Plausible
Plausible
Wounded
plausible,
killed
implausible
Plausible
Reference and
comments
Friendly
Mission, pp
192, 235 n 133
CSO
1/320/7578
pp 142-5
Colonial Times,
25 September
1829. Plomley
records this as
one native
wounded but
CT said ‘one
of them
[blacks] was
severely
wounded, if
not killed’
CSO
1/316/7578 p
382. Plomley
records this as
one native
wounded but
police report
said ‘a shot was
fired by which
one of them
fell’
CSO
1/316/7578 p
489 ‘we went
in search of
them ... but
could see
nothing of
them dead or
alive’
CSO
1/316/7578
pp 545, 565.
Friendly
Mission, p 522
———— SHHl
€ — a
394 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
Number
Identity of
killer(s)
claimed
killed
Circumstances
Reliability
Reference and
comments
——
27 Aug
September
18 Oct
25 Oct
29 Oct
Bothwell
VDL Co
territory in
northwest
Sorell
North of
Forestier
Peninsula
Break
O'Day
Plains
Several Captain
Patrick
Wood’s
assigned
servants
1 Thomas
John, VDL
Co servant
1 William
Gangell
2 Edward
Walpole
2 Police
Magistrate
James
Simpson and
constables
Attack on Plausible
stockman in
hut, several
natives
killed, one
man
captured
Enticed Plausible
native with
food,
stabbed him
Gangell and Plausible
son
wounded
during
native attack
but stabbed
one with
pitchfork.
Black Line
halted.
Walpole
went ahead
and found
native camp,
captured
two and shot
two
Highly
Plausible
Pursued
natives who
killed
settlers.
Fight at Esk
River where
two shot
dead
Highly
Plausible
Colonial Times,
27 August
1830, 3
September
1830
Friendly
Mission, p 210.
See discussion
of this story
Chapter Eight
CSO
1/316/7578, p
676; CSO
1/316/7578, p
681; Hobart
Town Courier
20 November
1830. Plomley
records this as
a wounding
but body was
later found
nearby
Arthur,
Memorandum,
Sorell Camp,
20 November
1830, British
Parliamentary
Papers,
Colonies,
Australia, 4, P
245
CSO
1/316/7578
Pp 712-3,
Hobart Town
Courier 13
November
1830, Friendly
ission, p
276, 2
PEN: DEATH TOLLAND DEMISE OF THE ABORIGINAL POPULATION
395
——
13 Aug
4 Sept
November
Barrowville,
North Esk
Bashan
Plains
Racecourse,
Surrey Hills
St Mary’s
Plains near
Hampshire
Hills
Identity of
killer(s)
Number
claimed.
killed
|
1
1
3
Shepherd
John Espie's
men
VDL Co
stockman
Alexander
McKay and
two VDL
Co men
Circumstances
Reliability
Menaced by Plausible
natives, who
dared him to
fire,
shepherd
shot one
In attack on Plausible
property,
one native
shot
N/a Plausible
Two shot Plausible
during
attempt at
capture.
One shot
another time
by McKay
Reference and
comments
CSO
1/316/7578 p
881 Plomley
records this as
one native
wounded but
shepherd
‘discharged
two guns at
them and
observed one
of the natives
to fall who was
immediately
carried off by
his
companions’
Hobart Town
Courier 20
August 1831.
Plomley
records native
wounded but
‘a shot was
fired which so
wounded one
of the blacks as
to disable him
from moving’
and comrades
carried him off
into bush
Plomley,
Clash, p 28, no
source given
Friendly
Mission, pp
565, 583.
Original
number
reported killed
was four but
Plomley p 686
n18 shows it
was three
396 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
——
Date
————— CNN
1834
18 August
No date
indicated
Early years
of colony
Place
Hamilton
Recherche
Bay
Woody
Island
Kent Group
islands
Bruny
Island
Oyster Bay
N/a
Huon
River
Near
Hobart
East of
Campbell
Town
Number
claimed
killed
Unspecified
Identity of
killer(s)
Shepherd
Soldier
James
Everitt,
sealer
Bob
Gambell,
sealer
Meredith’s
people
Mr Wade’s
man
Two stock-
keepers
‘white
people’
‘white men
who landed
in a boat’
‘some white
men
Circumstances
In attack on
shepherd,
one native
shot
Conflict
over
kangaroo
hunt
Native
woman
would not
get mutton-
birds for him
N/a
N/a
Saw native
in bush and
shot him
Tied up a
native
woman by
heels and left
her to perish
‘shot the
Natives’
‘shot two
blacks dead’
Attack by
armed
whites on
the native
road
Reliability
Plausible
Plausible
Plausible
Plausible
Plausible
Plausible
Plausible
Plausible
Plausible
Plausible
Reference and
comments
Friendly
Mission, p 925
Friendly
Mission, pp 84,
713, 807
Friendly
Mission, pp
249, 279
Friendly
Mission, p 246
Friendly
Mission, pp
311, 314
Friendly
Mission, p 320
Friendly
Mission, pp
344, 346
Friendly
Mission, p 373
Friendly
Mission, pp
375, 465 n 202
Friendly
Mission, 484
~
a
TEN: DEATH TOLL AND DEMISE OF THE ABORIGINAL POPULATION 397
E ———————————————
De Place Number Identity of Circumstances Reliability Reference and
claimed killer(s) comments
killed
Shannon 3 Mr Howell’s N/a Plausible Friendly
Raver men Mission, p 506
N/a 7 Various Various tales Plausible Friendly
white men of atrocities Mission, p 522
told to
Robinson at
camp
MÁAA————M —— — M M —— M MH ——— ——
Where number of killings is "several', a figure of 5 has been allocated;
where number of killings is ‘a few’ or unspecified, a figure of 3 has been
allocated
Total number of plausible killings = 121
Sources: Historical Records of Australia, Series I and III. Mary Nicholls (ed.)
The Diary of the Reverend Robert Knopwood 1803—1838, Tasmanian His-
torical Research Association, Hobart, 1977. Archives Office of Tasmania:
Colonial Secretary's Office papers 1/316/7578; Van Diemen’s Land
Company papers 5/1, 5/3. Hobart and Launceston newspapers from
1816-1831. N. J. B. Plomley (ed.) Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals
and Papers of George Augustus Robinson 1829-1834, Tasmanian Historical
Research Association, Hobart, 1966. N. J. B. Plomley, The Aborigi-
nal/Settler Clash in Van Diemen’s Land 1803-1831, Queen Victoria Mu-
seum and Art Gallery, Launceston, 1992. Vivienne Rae-Ellis, Black Rob-
inson: Protector of Aborigines, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne,
1988. The Diaries of John Helder Wedge, ed. Justice Crawford, W. F. Ellis
and G. H. Stancombe, Royal Society of Tasmania, Hobart, 1962
^K i ———
e
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The historian as prophet and redeemer
N all of Europe’s colonial encounters with the New Worlds of the
Americas and the Pacific, the colony of Van Diemen’s Land,
according to the statistics produced in this book, was probably the site
where the least indigenous blood of all was deliberately shed. In the
entire period from 1803, when the colonists arrived, to 1834, when
all but one family of Aborigines had been removed to Flinders Island,
the British were responsible for killing 121 of the original inhabitants
— less than four deaths a year. During the so-called ‘Black War’ from
1824 to 1831, the Aborigines killed a total of 187 whites. This com-
pared to seventy-two blacks who died at white hands over the same
period.
To compare these figures to the millions deliberately put to death
in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany is bizarre
and offensive. It trivialises the experience of those peoples who have
suffered genuine attempts at extermination. The full-blood Tasma-
nian Aborigines did die out in the nineteenth century, it is true, but
this was almost entirely a consequence of two factors: the long iso-
lation that had left them vulnerable to introduced diseases, especially
influenza, pneumonia and tuberculosis; and the fact that they traded
and prostituted their women
to such an extent that they lost the
ability to reproduce themselves. Their numbers we
re small to b :
with — less than 2000 people in the whole island — soárdi Ki
ELEVEN: THE HISTORIAN AS PROPHET AND REDEEMER 399
take much for the inevitable arrival of the outside world to cause the
demise of such a fragile population.
Despite its infamous reputation, Van Diemen's Land was host to
nothing that resembled genocide or any attempt at it. The idea would
have appalled the local authorities. The majority of the settlers, even
those who had suffered Aboriginal violence, agreed with them. The
only colonial sentiments openly expressed in favour of extermination
were a handful of public statements made in 1830-31, in the after-
math of particular Aboriginal atrocities. But the historic record clearly
shows this prospect divided the settlers deeply, was always rejected by
government, and was never acted upon.
Nor, on the Aborigines’ side, was there anything that resembled
frontier warfare, patriotic struggle or systematic resistance of any kind.
The Aborigines were nomadic hunter-gatherers who did not have a
concept of possessing territory or of deterring trespassers from it. The
so-called ‘Black War’ was a minor crime wave by two Europeanised
black bushrangers, followed by an outbreak of robbery, assault and
murder by tribal Aborigines. When the colonial government finally
marshalled its resources against them in a determined way by mount-
ing the infamous but commonly misinterpreted Black Line, the per-
petrators quickly abandoned their actions and surrendered.
The ruling ideas of the age, both at home and abroad, favoured the
conciliation of the Aborigines. Van Diemen’s Land was colonized at a
time when British society and politics were strongly influenced by a
revival of Christian Evangelicalism, expressed in the successful cam-
paign to end slavery, and by the philosophy of the English and Scot-
tish Enlightenment, which spoke of the unity of humankind. The
colonial governors and leading settlers not only held these ideas, they
publicly expressed and acted upon them. While they suspected their
convict lower orders of abusing the Aborigines, their main aim was to
prevent this from happening. Even the military action the govern-
ment eventually took was tempered by the humanitarian spirit of the
age. Neither the authorities nor the free settlers hated the Aborigines:
they pitied their savage state and sought ways to ameliorate their con-
dition.
The claim that any of this deserves the label ‘genocide’ is an
anachronistic absurdity. Similarly, the notion that the Aborigines of
the 1820s and 1830s conducted anything resembling the anti-colonial
guerilla warfare of South-east Asia in the 1950s and 1960s is a roman-
tic delusion. Why, then, have historians persisted with such a story?
Why the vast exaggerations, the wilful omissions, and the sheer in-
vention of so many incidents? Why have there been so many people
down the ages — from Las Casas to Robinson to the historians of our
own era — who want to believe these fictions?
400. THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
THE POLITICISATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
l have thought from the beginning of m
was inescapably political — the history
How could I pretend otherwise? Historia
clothing or their person
seeking to hear the wor
y career that historical writing
of race relations especially so,
ns do not shed their ideological
al feelings when they venture back into the past
ds and to enter the minds of their chosen subjects.
— Henry Reynolds, Why Weren’t We Told? 1999 '
Part, but by no means all, of the reason behind the fabrication of this
story lies in the academic politics of the period since the 1960s. The
universities in that turbulent decade were the scene of the revival of
two nineteenth-century ideologies, Marxism and Romanticism,
which supported and fed off one another. Combined with three ma-
jor international political movements, black power and Indian activ-
ism in America and anti-colonialism in the Third World, these ideas
strongly influenced Aboriginal historiography.
This was the time when Australian academic radicals began to take
a substantial body of their political ideas from the United States. In
race relations, they were initially in favour of the American civil
rights movement’s concept of integration. In the 1960s, black activists
and white university students toured the Australian countryside,
emulating their American counterparts in denouncing segregation,
whether it was in the workforce, hotels or municipal swimming
pools, and demanding integration.? At the time, this was a highly
positive and badly needed political campaign. The publicity it at-
tracted did much to end discrimination and to break down the racist
system of reserves and missions to which many Aboriginal people had
been confined since the nineteenth century.
However, by the early 1970s, intellectual circles began to abandon
the concept of integration in favour of the notion that black and
white people had incommensurable interests. Integration or any form
of assimilation was dropped in favour of black autonomy. The fol-
lowers of the Marxist guru Herbert Marcuse argued that just as
capitalism co-opted the working class into accepting capitalist ide-
ology, so whites wanted to co-opt blacks into a form of integration
that would betray black interests and suppress black culture.’ The atti-
tudes of the American black power movement produced similar sen-
timents among Aboriginal activists in this country. At the same time,
! Henry Reynolds, Why Weren’t We Told? A Personal Search
about our History, Viking, Ringwood, 1999, p 244
* Ann Curthoys, Freedom Ride, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2002
* Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: The Ideology of Industrial Society,
Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1964
Jor the Truth
KECY e o—-——————-WRN
P d
Ae AF
ELEVEN: THE HISTORIAN AS PROPHET AND REDEEMER 401
a revival of political activism among American Indians produced a
revisionist movement by historians, culminating in Dee Brown's
popular and influential saga of the Indian wars, Bury My Heart at
Wounded Knee.’ Both these American movements coincided with the
decolonization struggles within Asia and Africa. The emergent
nationalist movements in these regions were anti-imperialist and anti-
European. Influenced by anti-colonialist writers, especially Frantz
Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth? many activists in Aboriginal
politics came to identify Western imperialism as the cause of their
problems.
Among historians, the notion that Aboriginal resistance to British
colonization was a precursor of the guerilla struggles in Vietnam, Laos
and Cambodia derived from their political activism in this period. In
his autobiography, Henry Reynolds describes how, as a young lec-
turer at Townsville University College in the 1960s, he and his wife
became involved with local clergy, Communist Party and trade union
officials in both the anti-Vietnam war campaign and the burgeoning
Aboriginal political movement.’ Some authors had even more direct
inheritance from radical politics. Lyndall Ryan's parents, Jack and
Edna Ryan, were well-known members of the Communist and
Trotskyist political movements from the 1920s to the 1940s." Others
who began to write Aboriginal history at this time either had similar
family connections or else developed a commitment to leftist politics
under the influence of the radical climate of the times. Reynolds
writes:
The sudden emergence of Aborigines on the national political stage came
without warning or prior reflection from historians. All this provided
strong motivation to research and write and explain. There was a sense of
urgency. We were self-appointed missionaries who were required to
enlighten the public.’
These academic ‘missionaries’ not only rejected the conservatism of
their professors and heads of schools, they also became impatient with
the Marxist theory that the leading role in the socialist revolution was
to be played by the blue-collar working class. As a result, they wel-
comed ‘interest group’ politics, in which women, students, gays,
blacks and ethnics were all portrayed as oppressed by the prevailing
4 Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the
American West, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1970
5 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Grove Press, New York, 1963
^ Reynolds, Why Weren’t We Told?, pp 64-79
? Stuart Macintyre, The Reds: The Communist Party of Australia, from Origins to
Illegality, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1998, pp 141-2, 168-72, 229, 388
5 Reynolds, Why Weren’t We Told?, p 95
402 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL History
social structure. The class struggle was replaced by the ‘gender, race
and class’ liberation movements. After the fall of Communism in
1989, most quietly shelved Marxism to focus on their preferred
interest group. Many abandoned the cause of the Workers to take up
the cause of the Aborigines.
The most influential single idea about history that emerged from
the 1960s, however, was not so much the commitment to any par-
ticular interest group but the notion that history was 'inescapably
political’. Without this, there might have been less licence taken with
historical evidence and a greater sense of the historians responsibility
to respect the truth. But the argument that all history was politicised,
that it was impossible for the historian to shed his political interests
and prejudices, and that those who believed they could do so were
only deluding themselves, became the most corrupting influence of
all. It turned the traditional role of the historian, to stand outside
contemporary society in order to seek the truth about the past, on its
head. It allowed historians to write from an overtly partisan position
and to justify this both to themselves and to anyone who dared
challenge them.
There are actually two versions of this argument. The first is that
historians are justified in taking a particular political line because
everyone else is taking a political line too. The second is that the
writing of history is an unavoidably political pursuit, as a matter of
epistemological necessity. The first claim is obviously unacceptable. If
a particular historian’s case is based on false evidence, invented inci-
dents and mistaken interpretations, then it is insupportable, no matter
what political line anyone or even everyone else takes about the same
subject. The second claim is little better. Just because it might be
difficult for historians to shake off their own political prejudices and
preferences, this does not mean it is impossible. It is a well-known
truism that historians are creatures of their time and tend to set
themselves problems that they and their contemporaries want
answered, but this does not entail that their work must be fatally
circumscribed by their politics. Advocates of this position often argue
that because history is necessarily selective, the choices the historian
makes must always be based on value judgements. But while it is true
the historian must be selective, the rest of this argument does not
follow. Bias is contingent, not necessary.” There is a world of
difference between historians who go to the past to investigate the
evidence about their subject and those who go to vindicate a stand
? For an extended discussion see Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History:
How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering Our Past, 4th Sdn, .
Encounter Books, San Francisco, 2000; pp 25557, 329-30 '
ELEVEN: THE HISTORIAN AS PROPHET AND REDEEMER — 403
they have already taken. The former usually begin with an idea of
what they hope to find but are always prepared to change their
expectations and conclusions in the light of what the evidence itself
reveals. The latter, as the sorry example of Aboriginal history in this
country reveals, only select evidence that supports their cause and
either omit, suppress or falsify the rest.
The 1960s notion that historians should have a political agenda was
developed in order to ‘open up’ scholarship so that all those voices
that were allegedly excluded by traditional history could be heard."
Advocates of this idea are happy to legitimize a multiplicity of voices
as long as they all belong to radical interest groups of which they
approve: feminists, ethnics, blacks, gays and the like. However, it is
not difficult to see that the politicisation of history is self-defeating for
the aims of these interest groups themselves. By abandoning truth and
objectivity, they unwittingly validate political positions they might
find less congenial, such as those of white supremacists, ethnic
cleansers, homophobes and misogynists. The result is cultural relativ-
ism in which the beliefs and prejudices of any culture, no matter how
bizarre or anti-humanist, are given their own integrity.
This position is also fatal to the pursuit of history itself. If all history
is political then all perspectives are legitimate. Nothing can ever be
resolved and opposing sides are reduced to talking past one another or
calling each other names. Genuine historical debate comes to an end.
In Australia, this approach has already led to the widespread
corruption of Aboriginal history. This is true not only of the historical
methods exposed in this book but in the beliefs that many Aboriginal
people themselves now hold about their past. As the example of the
Mistake Creek massacre in the introduction to this book demon-
strated, Aboriginal oral history is today riven with wild allegations
that the simplest amount of checking in the archives would immedi-
ately refute. Tales of this kind have now become endemic within
Aboriginal culture. Not only are historians today unwilling to correct
their most obvious falsehoods, they also give uncorroborated oral
history the imprimatur of scholarly respectability. However, it does
not take much foresight to see that the real interests of Aboriginal
people are not served by any of this. These stories generate an un-
warranted sense of bitterness and a debilitating resentment towards
the wider Australian society. They lead many Aborigines to seek
comfort in myth, legend and victimhood. They blame all their social
"^ A recent elaboration of this position is in Gary B. Nash, Charlotte
Crabtree and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of
the Past, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1997, Chapter Five. For a review and
critique see Keith Windschuttle, ‘The problem of democratic history’, New
Criterion, 16, 10, June 1998
404 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
problems on the distant past and thus avoid taking responsibility for
their own lives now and that of their children in the future. This is a
process that is in nobody’s interests except those academics and
politicians, black and white, who have built their careers from the
same shoddy materials.
The idea that historians are free to impose their politics onto their
scholarship is also a corruption of their profession. It is vain and self-
indulgent. Historians once believed they had a higher calling. It is a
measure of the degeneration of standards within our universities that
its perpetrators not only get away with it without reproach but have
no inhibitions about declaring they are perfectly entitled to do so.
MORAL ANACHRONISMS AND CONCEPTUAL INCONGRUITIES
Two further consequences of the politicisation of history are the
anachronisms and incongruities it positively encourages. The most
unseemly example is the orthodox school's claim that the Tasmanian
Aborigines of the early nineteenth century invented the same concept
of guerilla warfare that was practised by very different societies in
vastly dissimilar conflicts in Africa, Asia and South America in the
mid-twentieth century. Reynolds’s comment that the Aborigines
tactics ‘could have come from the manuals of guerilla warfare which
proliferated in the 19605"! tellingly identifies his political inspirations.
He imagines the Tasmanian Aborigine of the 1820s as the indigenous
equivalent of a Che Guevara or Ho Chi Minh. This is not history: it
is Sixties radical romanticism. .
The concept of ‘land rights’, which now dominates both academic
discourse and the Aboriginal political agenda, is also incongruous to
Tasmania. The notion of ‘rights’ derives exclusively from the Euro-
pean political tradition, and has no meaning in traditional Aboriginal
culture. The term ‘land’ is just as alien, having no role in either the
vocabulary or the conceptual apparatus of Tasmanian hunter-gather-
ers.
Similarly, when Reynolds talks of the Black Line of 1830 as an ex-
ample of ‘ethnic cleansing? he is invoking images of atrocities in the
Balkans in the 1990s. Reynolds, of course, is far from being alone in
this. Other authors routinely use such twentieth-century terms as
‘transit camps’ and ‘concentration camps’ to make tacit comparisons
with the Holocaust, as well as overt links between the Aboriginal
" Henry Reynolds, "The Black War: A New Look at an Old Story',
Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Papers and Proceedings, 31, 4,
December 1984, p 2
Henry Reynolds, An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia’s
History, Viking, Ringwood, 2001, p 76
ELEVEN: THE HISTORIAN AS PROPHET AND REDEEMER — 405
seulement at. Flinders Island and the totally different institutions at
Devil's Island in the Caribbean and Alcatraz prison in San Fancisco
harbour. |
Historians once regarded faults of this kind as embarrassments
Dhey were committed by people who failed the professional test uf
being able to locate themselves within the lives and times of their
subjects. The most distinguished historian Australia has ever produced
was Sir Keith Hancock. In a recent assessment by the editors of the
Oxford History of the British Empire, Hancock was judged ‘far and away
the greatest historian of the Empire and Commonwealth’.'* He wrote
in the declining years of the Empire when it had many critics, both in
the metropolis and the peripheries. One of his works was a two-vol-
ume biography of Jan Christian Smuts, the Boer War soldier and
premier of South Africa, which Hancock published in the 1960s
when that country was earning international pariah status for its
policy of apartheid." Responding to some of the English critics of his
second volume, who thought he had not condemned his subject
enough, Hancock said they had violated what he called ‘the rule of
contextual congruity’. He wrote:
According to this rule it is wrong — in every sense of that word — to
measure the thoughts and actions of people in the past by a measuring rod
of knowledge and experience which did not come into existence until
after those people were dead.
It is unfortunate that neither Sharon Morgan nor her editors at
Cambridge University Press were aware of this rule. Otherwise the
following passage might have been edited out of her book on land
settlement in Van Diemen’s Land:
33 Clive Turnbull, ‘Tasmania: the Ultimate Solution’, in F. S. Stevens,
Racism, The Australian Experience, Vol 2 Black versus White, ANZ. Book
Company, Sydney, 1972, p 230, 231; Clive Turnbull, Black War: ‘The
Extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines, (1948), Sun Books, Melbourne
1974, p 224; Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation
of Convicts to Australia 1787-1868, Collins Harvill, London, 1987, p 423;
Ben Kiernan, ‘Australia’s Aboriginal genocides’, Bangkok Post, 10 September
2000, Perspective, p 2
14 Wim. Roger Louis, ‘Introduction’, Oxford History of the British Empire,
Volume V, Historiography, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999, p 30
15 W. K. Hancock, Smuts, Volumes I and H, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1962 and 1968
16 W. K. Hancock, Professing History, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1976,
p 61
406 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
Yet relatively few white women and children became casualties, The
Natives treated them with infinitely more humanity and compassion than
the invaders treated Aboriginal families.”
This statement is not only false — from 1824 to 1831 ten per cent
of those murdered and assaulted by the Aborigines were white
women and children! — but is an ahistorical moral anachronism. To
talk about the Tasmanian Aborigines acting with ‘humanity and
compassion' is to invoke concepts they would have regarded with
complete incomprehension. These terms come not from Aboriginal
but from European culture. It was the European Enlightenment that
founded the idea of the unity of humanity and the Christian religion
that originated the notion of sharing the suffering of others. Neither
was a concept held by hunter-gatherer society, in Tasmania or any-
where else, for whom the idea of loyalties owed and sentiments
shared beyond the boundary of kinship was literally unthinkable.
To put European concepts into the minds of the Tasmanian Abo-
rigines is not only to misunderstand their thinking and their motives,
it is also to break every rule of the ethnographic investigation of other
cultures. Rather than putting in the hard work to research the origi-
nal evidence in order to enter the mentality of the Aborigines, it is so
much easier to write as if they thought like we do today. This pre-
sumption devalues the mental universe the Aborigines actually did
inhabit and reveals that those who make it are not really interested in
their subjects for their own sake at all. Historians who write this way
are arrogant, patronising and lazy.
THE MYTH OF THE GREAT AUSTRALIAN SILENCE
The more I read the clearer it became that between 1900 and the 1960s
the Aborigines were virtually written out of Australian history. "The Great
Australian Silence' settled over the new nation soon after Federation and
was unbroken for over half a century.
— Henry Reynolds, Why Weren't We Told? 19991?
The title of Reynolds’s political autobiography and its central theme
is that an older generation of Australian historians failed their respon-
sibility by completely omitting Aboriginal people from their works. It
fell to his generation, Reynolds maintains, to take up this cause and to
write them into history. Even though he acknowledges that this re-
writing process has now been going on for more than thirty years,
7 Sharon Morgan, Land Settlement in Early Tasmania: Creating and An
Antipodean England, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992, p 158
18 See Chapter Four, p 87
? Reynolds, Why Weren't We Told?, pp 92
ITI: MITT 8
ELEVEN: THE HISTORIAN AS PROPHET AND REDEEMER — 407
Revnolds still gets very angry when he recalls the neglect. He says
dat when he gives public lectures, many people approach him who
«ll tvel the same:
It hasn't mattered where I spoke, what size the audience, what the occa-
sion of the actual topic dealt with. Why didn’t we know? Why were we
never told? ... They believed their education should have provided the
knowledge, the information, and hadn't done so. They felt let down,
cheated, sold short. Why were they never told? Why didn't they know???
Reynolds claims the neglect of the Aboriginal presence was a
twentieth-century phenomenon. In the nineteenth century, books
about Australia invariably gave the Aborigines a prominent place.
However, this changed around the turn of the new century with the
development of an Australian cultural and political identity that coin-
cided with the flowering of Australian nationalism. After the nation
was formed at Federation in 1901, historians wanted to focus on its
virtues and to forget its dark underside. It was not until the genera-
tion of the 1960s emerged impatient with what they saw as a compla-
cent, celebratory story that all this changed:
Like many other young scholars around Australia at the time, I noted the
Aboriginal relegation to obscurity with intense dissatisfaction which often
enough erupted as anger at the cultural condescension and insensitivity it
implied. Australia, we felt, had been badly let down by its historians. They
provided no material, no analysis, no stories which would enable the
community to understand the nature of contemporary relations between
white and black Australians ... If we raised our voices we felt that was
necessary to shatter once and for all the great Australian silence?!
The term ‘the Great Australian Silence’ was coined by the anthro-
pologist W. E. H Stanner, in his 1968 Boyer Lectures for the Austra-
lian Broadcasting Commission.” At the time, Stanner was arguing
against a claim by the Melbourne historian, R. M. Crawford, that
Australia experienced a cultural turning point in the mid-1930s.
Crawford’s evidence for this phenomenon included the expansion of
the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation,
the formation of the Commonwealth Literary Fund and the Contem-
porary Arts Society, the welcoming of Jewish refugees from Europe,
and government implementation of a policy of assimilation for Abo-
rigines in the Northern Territory. Crawford's thesis now seems
quaint and smacks of what Barry Humphries once described as
? Reynolds, Why Weren’t We Told?, pp 1-2
? Reynolds, Why Weren’t We Told?, p 95
2 W/. E. H. Stanner, After the Dreaming, 1968 Boyer Lectures, Australian
Broadcasting Commission, Sydney, 1969, Chapter Two ‘The Great
Australian Silence’
408 Tite FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
‘another one of those cultural renaissances Australia always seems to
be having’. Stanner himself was unimpressed and used the low profile
that Aborigines had in contemporary books as evidence that Craw-
ford had got it wrong. Nonetheless, his case hardly amounted to the
indictment of twentieth-century historians that Reynolds claims.
Stanner acknowledged that his survey deliberately excluded books and
articles written specifically about the Aborigines. He said there was
actually a ‘large array’ of these works including Paul Hasluck’s Our
Southern Half Castes (1938) and Black Australians (1941) as well as E. [?
B. Foxcroft's Australian Native Policy (1941). Stanner then went on to
examine the content of ten more general non-fiction books published
between 1939 and 1962. Rather than works of history, however,
seven of these books were Overviews of contemporary society, such as
Hartley Grattan’s Introducing Australia (1942), George Caiger's. The
Australian Way of Life (1953) and Peter Coleman's Australian Civiliza-
tion (1962). The three history books were H. L. Harris's Australia in
the Making: A History (1948), R. M. Crawford’s Australia (1952) and
Gordon Greenwood’s Australia: A Social and Political History (1955).
Now, this was a small sample on which to build an argument for
something as momentous as ‘the Great Australian Silence’, even if all
the books Stanner mentioned had excluded Aborigines completely.
But not all those he chose to exhibit his case actually did this. Stanner
acknowledged that M. Barnard Eldershaw’s My Australia (1939)
devoted one tenth of its content to the Aborigines, and both Geoftrey
Rawson’s Australia (1948) and Crawford’s Australia each had a chapter
on the Aborigines. He also recorded that most of the other books had
some references to the Aborigines — including one to which Stanner
himself contributed a chapter. In most cases, these discussions were
not to Stanner’s taste but disagreement hardly justifies the charge of
neglect. In some cases he actually approved of their Aboriginal con-
tent. Of Crawford's 1952 book, Stanner acknowledged:
There is a chapter on the Aborigines; not the shortest chapter, and not a
tailpiece, but one full of good information and well moulded general
statements, and — a great novelty, this — a lively awareness of questions
which historians ought to have but apparently had not, asked; for example
What were the relations between the squatters and the aborigines?”
In other words, even on his own very limited evidence, Stanner’s
claim that historians were engaged in ‘a cult of forgetfulness practised
On a national scale’ is not credible. ‘The Great Australian Silence’ is a
dramatic title for a lecture and was obviously created to generate rat-
ings for the broadcast lectures, but as an accurate summary of Austra-
B Stanner, After the Dreaming, p 23
ELEVEN: THE HISTORIAN AS PROPHET AND REDEEMER — 409
han cultural history in the first half of the twentieth century, it is not
onvincing,
Reynolds, however, accepts Stanner's claims uncritically and goes
on to offer his own survey as corroboration of the thesis Re olds
complains most about the book edited by Gordon exis] Aus-
malia: A Social and Political History. He used this as a text at Towns-
ville University College in the 1960s at the behest of Cresuvaod
himself} who was Professor of History and Political Science at the
University of Queensland. ‘Although the Greenwood book,’ Rey-
nolds says, "was the worst example of its kind, the other available
general histories were little better He then shows how they also
contributed to the Great Australian Silence:
Five other major histories of Australia by established scholars published
between 1954 and 1967 showed a collective desire to consider the Abo-
riginal question as something that belonged to the early colonial period
and had no modern sequel. All dealt with the Aboriginal policies of early
governors, the Tasmanian Black War and conflict in the pastoral frontier
in the 1830s. Only one author dealt with the second half of the nine-
teenth century and even he confined his attention to Western Australia.”
But hang on, this is supposed to be an account of how the Abo-
rigines were, in Reynolds’s own words, ‘virtually written out of Aus-
tralian history’. And yet here we are being told that five of the history
books of the day discussed the Aboriginal policies of the early gover-
nors, the Tasmanian Black War and conflict on the pastoral frontier
in the 1830s. But, if they covered all this ground, even if they did cut
the story short in the mid-nineteenth century, why is Reynolds so
angry? What justification could there be for his repetition of the rhe-
torical questions: "Why didn't we know? Why were we never told?”
On his own admission, five of the main textbooks of this allegedly
most reactionary decade told their readers quite a lot about Aboriginal
history. So what if they didn’t tell it all down to the present? Rey-
nolds himself wrote a book on Tasmania, Fate of a Free People, and
yet, except for twenty-two pages at the end, the whole of his text is
devoted to events in the early colonial period. On his own argument,
this should make his own work every bit as culturally condescending
and insensitive as those of the earlier historians he condemns.
The truth is that ‘the Great Australian Silence’ is largely a myth.
Aborigines were not left out of history because of Australian nation-
alism or the desire to tell a celebratory story or any other imaginary
cause. They might not have been treated in the way Reynolds and his
24 Gordon Greenwood (ed.), Australia: A Social and Political History, Angus
and Robertson, Sydney, 1955
2 Reynolds, Why Weren’t We Told?, p 83
410 Tur FABRICA ION OF ADORIGINAL HISTORY
colleagues would have liked, but to claim the omissions of earlier
historians left their readers ‘let down, cheated and sold short’ is a
transparent case of damning, the authors of the past in order to make
their successors appear all the more virtuous,
The Melbourne historian Robert Murray made this clear in 1999
when he reviewed Reynolds’s autobiography. ‘Without leaving the
room where this review is being typed’, Murray wrote, he could find
plenty of counter examples. The 1958 edition of the Australian Ency-
clopaedia devoted 75,000 words, the size of a small book, to the Abo-
rigines. He also found M. H. Ellis's 1955 biography of the pioneer of
the pastoral industry, John Macarthur, with eight index entries on
"Aborigines, troubles of settlers with’, as well as Clive Turnbull's 1948
history of conflict in Van Diemen's Land, Black War, and a reader for
nine-to-ten-year-olds, used in Victorian schools from the 1920s to
the 1970s, which included the historical story, ‘An adventure with
the blacks', on page 2. Murray also spent an hour at La Trobe Library
in Melbourne and, without even going to the stacks, found a number
of other books published between 1924 and 1958, which 'showed
many more contradictions of the “cover up" story???
The one example where Reynolds is reliable is his description of
the 1955 Gordon Greenwood text from which he taught in the
1960s. That book does not have any serious discussion of the
Aborigines. But while it might have been influential within the
confines of the small Queensland higher education sector, where
Greenwood himself controlled the curriculum, further south it had
much less impact. In the history departments of the University of
Sydney and the University of New South Wales at the same time, the
book was regarded as inadequate and out of date and was not
recommended, let alone prescribed, to students. It is also true that,
until 1970, Aboriginal history was not a clearly defined field. That
year, Charles Rowley’s book The Destruction of Aboriginal Society burst
onto the scene and single-handedly created an overarching
Perspective for its subject. Rowley took what previously appeared to
be isolated, unconnected events and constructed a framework or
paradigm that has persisted to this day, providing a narrative of
conflict and incarceration from 1788 to the present. His work was a
sharp contrast to everything that preceded it and immediately won
over almost everyone who read it, including the present writer who,
until he did his own research on the primary sources, thought it one
of the outstanding works of Australian historiography.”
% Robert Murray, ‘Who Wasn’t Told? Quadrant, November 1999, pp 56-9
? For an uncritical appraisal of Rowley’s book see Windschuttle, The Killing
of History, pp 127-9, 273-4
«7^ 07789
— €
» Cove under Aboriginal ownership. The former National Parks and Wildlife Service's 173-acre heritage
mmemorating the first British settlement in Tasmania was ceded to the descendants of the Aborigines in
395 as a gesture of reconciliation. Since then, the once carefully excavated remains of the original buildings
c been eroded and overgrown with weeds. Heritage signs have fallen down and restorations neglected. In
r place, Aboriginal signs warn off visitors from peee the site. (Photos Keith Windschuttle)
"E : ,
More of Risdon Cove under Aboriginal ownership. The reconstructed huts of the D
left to fall into disrepair. Below: This historically inaccurate sign was erected at the Ris En rs bo
2003 in response to this book's critique that the incident in May 1804 took the lives uiia ru 804 bu
not the 50-100 claimed by activists today. The sign relies upon a convict's claim ende eukan Ped oh
years later. In 1978, a metal detector search of the entire National Parks and pum posipa "P
even one musket ball or piece of grapeshot in the fields of this alleged massacre site. (Photos Reg Watsc
a.
On the 3rd of May 1804, Edward White said he saw
300 Aboriginal men, women and children, in circular form,
hunting a flock of kangaroo beyond this site.
Soldiers fired at the Aborigines and
“a great many were slaughtered and wounded'.
The Aborigines had no spears, only waddies,
and were not attacking the soldiers.
This display of racist violence was typical of how Aborigines
were driven from this and other lands they owned.
In an act of reconciliation, this area of land was returned
in ownership to Aboriginal people in 1995 with strings attached.
| ©
—
Et EVEN: THE HISTORIAN AS PROP IET AND REDERMER 411
None of this, however, justifies the histrionics of IL eynolds's
beography. A new interpretation of an historical topic docs tit ie:
eatically nullity the empirical work of previous authors, pre ll
dese who were working with different objectives. Mn J
wating early Australian history is to consult the biographies us
governors of the colonies, especially those who held that ositi »
dotare democratic self-government was instituted in the 1850s. Any
one who does this will find that the relations between the ae
ment and the Aborigines are a topic that almost all Noli ats dis-
cus" Nonetheless, most of these works do not devote a great ded of
space to the issue: five to ten pages are usual in works that total fam
300 to 500 pages. Is this, then, evidence of neglect, tokenism or an
xleologically-inspired silence?
The reality is that, for almost all the governors, any problems they
had with the Aborigines were minor compared to the other issues
with which they had to grapple. This is true even of Lieutenant-Gov-
emor George Arthur of Van Diemen's Land. Despite the drama with
which Aboriginal historians like to surround the so-called Black War
and the Black Line, these issues were by no means the greatest of
Arthur's concerns. His primary responsibility was as supervisor of a
penal colony. Administration and policy for the convicts was a far
more important issue to him than anything to do with the Aborigi-
nes. Other matters that also weighed far more heavily were the legal
and political progress of the colony, the development of land policy,
the growth of commerce, and the construction of roads, bridges and
government buildings. As a result, his biographer, A. G. L. Shaw,
devotes about eleven of his 115 pages on Arthur's career in Van
Diemen's Land to his Aboriginal policy and practice. This is about
the right weight the subject deserved.
3 George Mackaness, Admiral Arthur Phillip: Founder of New South Wales,
1738-1814, Angus and Robertson Sydney, 1937, pp 102-8, 139-40, 155-8,
168-9, 170-4, 187-9, 192-6, 200, 229-31, 289-99, 302-3, 334-5; Alan
Frost, Arthur Phillip 1783-1814: His Voyaging, Oxford University Press,
Melbourne, 1987, pp 144-5, 183-4, 187, 260-1, 309 n 18; George
Mackaness, The Life of Vice-Admiral William Bligh, Angus and Robertson,
Sydney, (1931) rev. ed. 1951, pp 60-4, 243-6; M. H. Ellis, Lachlan
Macquarie: His Life, Adventures and Times, Angus and Robertson, Sydney,
1947, pp 179, 327, 351-8, 507-8; John Ritchie, Lachlan Macquarie: A
Biography, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1986, pp 109-10, 132,
152; Brian H. Fletcher, Ralph Darling: A Governor Maligned, Oxford
University Press, Melbourne, 1984, pp 183—90; A. G. L. Shaw, Sir George
Arthur, Bart 1784—1854, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1980, pp
123-34; Hazel King, Richard Bourke, Oxford University Press, Melbourne,
1971, pp 183-8, 191-5
412 Tur FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
THE DRAMATIC IMPERATIVE IN AUSTRALIAN HISTORY
History is both an art and a science. The historian who can capture
both aspects of the discipline is very often rewarded with popular as
Well as academic acclaim. Historians who can construct grand, dra-
Matic narratives can become as popular and revered as award-winning
novelists. The difficulty in accomplishing this in Australia has always
been that the history of this country has been so uneventful. Chere
were no revolutions, civil wars or struggles for independence. The
campaigns for reforms from which Australian democracy most bene-
fited were all made in England. The great issues that at several times
over the last two centuries shook Europe and America to their
foundations were all resolved here without much fuss. As a result, in
the writing of history the most publicly successful Australian authors
have been those who could cook up something dramatic from the
most meagre ingredients.
For instance, the reality of the Australian convict system was that it
Was a successful program of penal reform that turned a convicted
criminals into useful labourers and law-abiding citizens." However,
by far the most widely read book on the subject has been Robert
Hughes’s The Fatal Shore, which portrayed early Australia as a cess-
pool of sadism and cruelty, the British precursor to Stalin’s gulag ar-
chipelago.” Two of the principal intellectual influences on the early
Australian colonies were Evangelical Christianity and Enlightenment
humanism, both of which were spread through the established church
where, as in America, rationality and religion were not incompatible
but worked in harmony.” But Australia’s most celebrated historian,
Manning Clark, built his reputation by construcüng a story of the
conflict between Enlightenment secularism and the Protestant and
Catholic versions of Christianity.”
Historians of this dramatic bent have enlivened every period of the
Australian past with struggles between contesting social classes: in the
convict era, it was emancipists versus exclusives; in the gold rushes,
diggers versus troopers; in the pastoral economy, squatters versus
selectors; in the industrial economy, labour versus capital. The gold
rush immigrants of the 1850s were actually intent on making them-
? Stephen Nicholas (ed.), Convict Workers: Reinterpreting Australia’s Past,
Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1988
? Robert Hughes, That Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts
to Australia 1787—1868, Collins Harvill, London, 1987
`! John Gascoigne, The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia,
Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2002
? C. M. H. Clark, A History of Australia, Volume I: From the Earliest Times to
the Age of Macquarie, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1962
ELEVEN: THE HISTORIAN AS PROPHET AND REDEEMER 413
selves rich in as little time as possible, but one of the most successful
historical theses of the 1950s and 1960s, Russel Ward's The Australian
Legend, discovered them to be the founders of collectivist values and
participatory democracy." As a result, trade unionists of the far left
today carry their Eureka Stockade flag as a symbol of radical activism.
In late nineteenth century Australia, the ambition of most ‘selectors’
was, like small farmers everywhere, to make a living as independent
proprietors and eventually become large farmers. However, one of
their number, Ned Kelly — in reality a small-time thief and offhand
murderer — has since been apotheosised by historians and award-
winning novelists as an Australian Robin Hood, a ‘social bandit’, and
an icon of Irish independence and Australian republicanism.” In
nineteenth century Australia, women gained legal rights, entered male
professions and graduated from universities much earlier than in most
Western countries. Conservative politicians gave them the vote dec-
ades before their English counterparts, without the need for any cam-
paigning by suffragettes. However, the most successful feminist histo-
rians have adopted a plot that portrays valiant Australian heroines
confronting an unyielding patriarchal hierarchy to reform the most
chauvinist society in the Western world.”
The story constructed by Reynolds, Ryan and other members of
the orthodox school of Aboriginal history has the same motives and
the same veracity. Indeed, according to Reynolds, his story outdoes
all the others in its dramatic appeal:
Twenty thousand blacks were killed before federation. Their burial
mound stands out as a landmark of awesome size on the peaceful plains of
colonial history. If the bodies had been white our histories would have
been heavy with their story, a forest of monuments would celebrate their
sacrifice. The much noted actions of rebel colonists are trifling in com-
parison. The Kellys and their kind, even Eureka diggers and Vinegar Hill
convicts, are diminished when measured against the hundreds of clans
who fought frontier settlers for well over a century.”
3 Russel Ward, The Australian Legend, Oxford University Press, Melbourne,
1958, Chapter V
* John McQuilton, The Kelly Outbreak 1878-1880: The Geographical
Dimension of Social Banditry, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1987:
Ian Jones, Ned Kelly: A Short Life, Lothian, Melbourne, 1995. Peter Carey’s
Booker Prize-winning True History of the Kelly Gang is a work of fiction
deriving largely from these historical interpretations.
? Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God's Police, Penguin, Melbourne,
1975; Miriam Dixson, The Real Matilda: Women and Identity in Australia 1788
to Present, Penguin, Melbourne, 1976; Marilyn Lake, Getting Equal: The
History of Australian Feminism, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1999
** Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the
European Invasion of Australia, Penguin Books, Melbourne, 1982, pp 200-1.
414 Tur FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
Reynolds is also aware
he is buying into the most enduring dra
Matic theme
of the modern era: the struggle of the downtrodden
against the Powerful, and their brilliant triumph or valiant defeat:
There is much in their story that Australians have traditionally adrnired
They were aver
the underdogs, were always outgunned, yet frequently
faced death witho
ut flinching.”
The appeal of such romantic drama, of course, is by no means con.
fined to Australia. It has proven perennially successful in all democ-
ratic societies and in all forms of the entertainment media, from the
novels of Victor Hugo to the toga-and-sandals epics of Hollywood.
Aboriginal history is one more variation on a formula well-proven in
the cultural marketplace. The only problem is that, just like the sto-
ries of Jean Valjean and Spartacus, it derives more from the creative
imagination than the historical record. Reynolds and his colleagues
have constructed a great drama that has swept all before it, but at the
cost of deceiving those readers who came looking for the truth.
HISTORY, SIN AND REDEMPTION
Christianity is historical in another and, perhaps, even deeper sense. The
destiny of humankind, placed between the Fall and the Judgement,
appears to its eyes as a long adventure, of which each life, each individual
pilgrimage, is in its turn a reflection. It is in time and, therefore, in history
that the great drama of Sin and Redemption, the central axis of all
Christian thought, is unfolded.
— Marc Bloch, The Historians Craft, 194138
There is a much deeper dramatic theme at work here as well. Left-
wing politics may be enough to explain the appeal of the Aboriginal
Story in academia, where the left
other sectors of our intellectual and political elites. This is a story that
has attracted some of the most eminent jurists, politicians and clergy
of this country, including several High Court judges and former
Prime Ministers, few of whom would have been so strongly attracted
by the appeal of a political struggle against the established order.
Although we now inhabit a largely secular society, the chords of
Christianity reverberate deeply within our culture, even among those
rules the humanities, but not to
The figure of 20,000 dead is yet another invention: see Keith Windschuttle,
‘The myths of frontier massacres in Australian History, Part II: The
fabrication of the Aboriginal death toll", Quadrant, November 2000
?' Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier, p 201
? Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft: Reflections on the Nature and Uses of
History and the Techniques and Methods of Historical Writing, trans. Peter
Putnam, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1954, p5
ELEVEN: THE HISTORIAN AS PROPHET AND REDEEMER 415
se pode themselves = their rationality or their atheism. It is a
weal known truism that in the modern era, radical politics was a sub-
«wute for rehgion tor many who could not do without it. This was
apeully true tor those intellectual classes attracted to the great uto-
man poorects ot Marxism and socialism. i
Its less appreciated that some of the more recent versions of inter-
at group politics have been a product of the same yearning, for both
che religious and the non-religious alike. As the above quotation from
Xa Bloch s classic work reminds us, the great drama of sin and
cxiempüon is built into our notions of the destiny of humankind.
The idea that we are fallen creatures, racked with sin, is attractive to
large numbers of people.
This is especially so in the prosperous societies of the West, which
readily harbour the guilty suspicion that their success must have been
at the expense of someone else. In the green version of this Christian
drama. we have sinned against the environment and the planet itself.
Such a notion is even more attractive to those who feel they have the
ability to rectify the situation.
For such people, the story of Aboriginal depredation is tailor-made.
Who among them would want to live in a largely benign, uneventful
and moderately successful minor nation? How much more exciting to
inhabit a country fatally flawed by, but oblivious to, its own terrible
dark past. How much more rewarding to give oneself a chief role in
its moral salvation.
In other words, the principal subjects of this great drama have not
been the Aborigines at all. Its real heroes were always intended to be
is authors — the white historians who rescued the blacks from the
Great Australian Silence. These historians have set themselves up as
prophets blessed with a vision hidden from ordinary Australians. They
have also held out the invitation to their readers among the political
and intellectual elites to join them in becoming their nation’s
redeemers.
Since 1996, the persistent demand for Prime Minister John How-
ard to say ‘sorry’ to the Aborigines has been integral to this ritual. So
has been the lobbying for a permanent apology in the form of a
monument to black ‘resistance fighters’ at the Australian War Memo-
al. Sir William Deane’s misguided contrition at Mistake Creek in
2001 was part of the penitence. Those who possess this gospel will
withhold their blessing until the nation recognises and confesses its
mortal sin. Not until it does so, until it apologises, seeks forgiveness
and makes offerings in atonement, will they declare it fit for redemp-
tion.
Aboriginal history, in short, is an exercise in white vanity. Just as
earlier versions of utopian politics were driven by the impulse of men
416 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
to play God, contemporary Aboriginal interest group nd
from the same audacious presumption. But just as M s »
theory underpinning the former utopianism turned out to aw :
and defective, the history behind this successor is all smoke an
mirrors too.
EPILOGUE
Heritage, genealogy and black intellectual
authoritarianism
T Risdon Cove, where the Union Jack was first hoisted in Tas-
mania in 1803, the flagstaff today flies an Aboriginal flag. The
seventy-hectare site of the initial British settlement was transferred to
the descendants of the Tasmanian Aborigines in 1995 in recognition
of land rights and as a gesture of reconciliation. At the time, it was
part of a total transfer of 3800 hectares of what were claimed to be
sites of cultural and historical significance to the Aborigines. Risdon
Cove was on the list ostensibly because of the ‘massacre’ that oc-
curred there in May 1804 but its acquisition was a considerable politi-
cal coup for the activists who demanded it. Although the smallest of
the sites handed over, it was symbolically the most valuable. It had
previously been maintained by the state government to commemo-
rate the founding of British settlement. In the late 1970s it had been a
major project for historians and archaeologists of the ‘Tasmanian
Department of Parks, Wildlife and Heritage. They had uncovered the
foundations of a number of the original buildings, identified the
quarters of soldiers, convicts and settlers, restored the paths and fields,
418 ETHE r :
9o Tur FABRICATION OP ABORIGINAL HISTORY
reconstructed two of the original buildings, and turned it all into a
heritage site for locals and tourists. | :
Today, Risdon Cove under Aboriginal ownership is quite a differ-
ent place, All the restoration work is visibly decaying. The painstak-
ingly excavated ruins and foundations have eroded and are overgrown
With weeds and blackberry. Many of the signs have fallen down and
most of the paths have gone. Only one of the replica huts still stands
and it lies open and disintegrating. Rather than a heritage ashe for
visitors, the whole area is surrounded by intimidating signs painted
with the black, red and yellow Aboriginal flag, declaring: ‘Private
Land: No public access beyond this point.’
Instead of reconciliation, or any other sign of harmony or accord,
the symbolism now exuded by the site is the triumph of the activists
who persuaded the government to hand it over. It not only tells
Tasmanians of British descent that they no longer retain their found-
ing site, but emphasizes they are trespassers. It is a considerable
victory for radical Aboriginal politics, that is, the politics of
victimisation and demonisation. Not having an answer to allegations
about the treatment of Aborigines 170 years ago, governments of
both conservative and social democratic persuasion have caved in and,
without any legal obligation, apologetically handed over large tracts
of land to organizations representing fifth-generation descendants of
the original inhabitants.
Despite the fact that, as Chapter Four argued, the original Tasma-
nian hunter-gatherers did not have the concept of land ownership or
any notion of private property, the appetite for land of their descen-
dants has only grown the more it has been fed. At their instigation,
the Tasmanian government in 2001 introduced a bill to hand over
another 51,000 hectares. Following the bill’s failure in the Opposi-
tion-controlled upper house, the Tasmanian Aboriginal Legal Service
announced that it would launch action in the Supreme Court to
claim land amounting to half the state.”
The Commonwealth government through its Indigenous Land
Corporation has provided the money to buy some frechold acreages
in Tasmania, such as the Murrayfield sheep property on Bruny Island,
even though sheep were introduced by the British and were un-
known to traditional Aboriginal culture. However, most of what the
local activists are now demanding is either Crown land or national
park. So if this process continues, more public sites like Risdon Cove
! Angela McGowan, Archaeological Investigation at Risdon Cove Historic Site,
1978—1980, Tasmanian National Parks and Wildlife Service, Occasional
Paper no. 10, Hobart, April 1985
* See Chapter Seven, pp 236-7
` SUE: SRITAGE, GENE `
EPILOGUE: HERITAGE, GENEALOGY AND BLACK AUTHORITARIANISM 419
s 4
wall be targeted. Eventually, they too will be festooned with si
f `d with signs
"Dei ` r ,
proclaiming Private Land’, although, yet again, such a c }
5 TRA à aim, s à conce ‘
connection to traditional Tasmanian Aboriginal culture, wl eh ene
í e, which never
had the words ‘private’ or ‘land’ in its vocabulary
ARCHAEOLOGY AND BLACK VANDALISM
Archacologists have established that the :
nia is at least 20,000 years old. tap sean re 2 paed
west of the island have been dated as at least this ae E Th ones
srobably much older sites yet to be discovered. Until as ar
the end of the last ice age about 10,000 years agi Tasmania y ia
of the continent of Sahul or Greater Australia and on ales i
the mainland some human remains have beei dated m s das
40,000 years old. The British colonization of Australia ses ided
with the founding of the academic discipline of anthropolo and this
country has always figured prominently in attempts to ee the
sudden explosion of human beings across the globe in the late Pleisto-
cene period. As the anthropologist D. J. Mulvaney has remarked, the
global significance of the Australian findings are great. ‘As Aucaslia
Europe and the New World were colonized by Homo sapiens in vibst
may be a near synchronous surge across the continents, this was one
of the major events of humankind.’
However, in the past decade, the continuation of archaeological
research in Tasmania has faced two major problems. Since the forma-
tion of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Land Council, the Tasmanian gov-
ernment has imposed increasingly stringent time restrictions on the
permits it Issues for research and has insisted that materials excavated
be returned to local Aborigines after a specified period. The Tasma-
nian Aboriginal Land Council now has the right not only to approve
all research and to have all relics returned to it, but to insist its own
consultants oversee excavations, decide what may be retrieved, and
charge hefty consultancy fees for the privilege.
The second problem is far more disturbing. The excavated material
returned to Aborigines is not being kept in storage and properly
? Barry Blain et al, ‘The Australian National University/Tasmanian National
Parks and Wildlife Service Archaeological Expedition to the Franklin and
Gordon Rivers: Summary of Results’, Australian Archaeology, 16, 1983, pp
71-83
$ In 2001 Alan Thorne of the Australian National University dated DNA
sequences from Lake Mungo at 60,000 years old. However, the dating is
controversial, with Chris Stringer of the British Museum of Natural History
arguing the extracted DNA could not be reliable.
5 D. J. Mulvaney, ‘Past regained, future lost: the Kow Swamp Pleistocene
burials’, Antiquity, 65, 246, March 1991, p 14
420 THe FABRICATION OF Any RIGINAL History
identified for future
Scientific Investig
in ways that re
tion, <
nder it unusable in the future 8 reburieq
gether. In a case in 1994 inv
manian south-west by the
sity, even though the site
and were
olving
school of
d by the excavation. Instead,
once the material had been handed back, they threw it into the
waters of a dam at the site.ó Museum collections of skulls and skele_
tons collected in the nineteenth century are now routinely returned
to be burnt or buried. Brian Plomley has complained:
This is a consequence of legislation that has compelled holders of skeletal
material relating to the Tasmanian Aborigines, both full-blooded and hy-
brid, to hand it over to some people in Tasmania calling themselves Tas-
manian Aborigines, who have destroyed it. The museums in Tasmania
have been stripped, and collections elsewhere in Australia have been
handed over to these people as well. They are now trying to gain posses-
sion of collections in Europe, America and elsewhere, and if they succeed
there will be fewer remains of the Tasmanian Aborigines than feathers of
the dodo,’
In 1995, acting on advice from his department that the advantages
of ‘empowering’ the local Aboriginal community outweighed the
scientific loss, the Tasmanian Minister for Environment and Land
Ple with little interest in it’. Allen observed .
MP s that :
would inhibit the future of professi SOUS er this kind
Y and Jim Allen, "The forced lati
t » Antiquity, 69, 1995. ps7 P mation of cultur
N.J. B, Plomley, commentary in Curre
1991, p 16 a
UT
EPILOGUE: HERITAGE, GENEALOGY AND BLACK AUTHC WUATAILIANISM 421
er wholly. The implications of this for the well-being of prehistoric
archaeology in this country are grim." |
The Tasmanian Aboriginal Land Council is by no means the onl
group acting this way. The same policy is being purstied on ind
mainland by Aboriginal activists. A number of them supported their
Tasmanian colleagues in the La Trobe University affair, urging Vic-
tnan Aborigines to cease co-operating with the school. On the
mainland, the worst single act occurred in 1990 when the Museum of
Victoria returned the Kow Swamp skeletons to the Echuca Aborigi-
nal Co-operative, who reburied them in an unknown location. These
were Pleistocene skeletons dated from 9000 to 15,000 years old found
in Victoria in 1967-8 by Alan Thorne of the Australian National
University. At the time of their discovery, the present Aboriginal
community in the district did not exist. The skeletons were of people
several hundred generations removed from modern Aborigines. D. J.
Mulvaney, who made an unsuccessful appeal to the Victorian gov-
ernment to prevent their loss, has argued:
Their kin cannot be presumed to have shared the same cultural values or
religious concepts of this generation. Neither can a few people ‘own’
them, in the sense of being free to destroy them. Indeed, this vast time
factor, combined with their distinctive physical differences, ensure that
any line of descent is to the Aboriginal race everywhere, not to Echuca
people alone. Whatever justifications the local people advance for re-bur-
ial, future generations of Australians of any skin colour will term it van-
dalism.?
Moreover, Mulvaney has argued that not merely the interests of
Aborigines versus archaeologists are at stake. There are universal prin-
ciples involved:
It is worth reflecting that outrage would extend far beyond the ranks of
the ‘heritocracy’ should the French nationalist ‘owners’ re-bury the Cro-
Magnon human remains or overpaint Lascaux, if Ethiopians cremated
‘Lucy’, or the pyramids became a stone quarry and the Taj Mahal was
razed to build apartments. People of all races, creeds and cultures would
appeal to those same universal human values which govern UNESCO
principles.'?
Mulvaney wrote this in 1991. A more recent perspective would
compare the modern Aborigines who buried the Kow Swamp skele-
tons to the Islamic Taliban who dynamited the giant Buddhist statues
of Bamiyan. No matter what religious or ethnic justifications are
5 Jim Allen, ‘A short history of the Tasmanian affair’, Australian Archaeology,
41, 1995, p 48
° Mulvaney, ‘Past regained, future lost: The Kow Swamp reburials’, p 16
10 Mulvaney, ‘Past regained, future lost: The Kow Swamp reburials', p 18
422 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
made for these acts, Mulvaney is right to say their ‘a ins di
the politicians who assisted them, will be recognised by future g
erations as vandals of epic proportion. . n
During his futile behind-the-scenes campaign to p ve
Victorian government to save the Kow Swamp ihi pen ARER
observed that many of his anthropological e PR o vios
being provocative in challenging Aboriginal ownership m
ment that modern. Aboriginal people 'own their past bead
successive conferences of archaeologists and d "pe
since confirmed with resolutions. Those who remain Py cia s eke
responded positively to Aborigines who have claime oa aek in
In 1983, the indigenous perspective on this issue was ae Longibrd
the journal Australian Archaeology. The author was Ros
of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre. She argued:
P in and study
You seek to say that as scientists you have a right to aiaia eget Aue
information about our culture. You seek to say that Piet ‘aa Sted
tralians you have a right to study and explore our vais ban our pati
heritage to be shared by all Australians, white and blac sie eee
of view we say you have come as invaders, you have yor ee ine
culture, you have built your fortunes upon the siesta Vi ama
people and now, having said sorry, want a share in pic m uini
of what you regard as a dead past. We say chat it is wd gs un appl
and heritage, and forms part of our present life. As such it is
trol and it is ours to share on our terms. !!
3 " 7
Even though Most currently pracusing anthropologists eens
accepted this case and try to do research through compromises lá mr
its confines, it is not a good argument. The ‘past’ is neither Le :
Property nor an object of any kind. Indeed, it no longer exists, edic
in its consequences. We can know the past but it is literally ar ue :
to own or control it. Langford's argument is disingenuous. It is nö
the past itself but knowledge about it that she seeks to control. She
wants to do this by claiming ownership and control of the relics or
heritage items from the past, whether they be buried in archaeological
sites or lodged in archives. What radicals like her really want to con-
trol is white interpretations of the past. They want to dictate how
their own interpretation, especially the view expressed in the above
Passage, that the whites Were invaders who tried to destroy black
culture. Claims about Ownership’ of the past are really claims about
the right to interpret the past — about who is to do it and the line
they will be permitted to take.
"B.E Langford, *Our Heritage — Your Playground', Australian
Archaeology, 16, June 1983, p2
EMLOGUE: HERITAGE, GENEALOGY AND BLACK AUTHORITARIANISM 423
It should have been apparent to any self-respecting anthropologist
that this argument is unacceptable. It breaches the fundamental prin-
ciples of Western culture that both thought and speech should be
feee, and that no one has the right to restrict the interpretations of
others, whatever their race or colour. In short, it is profoundly au-
thoritarian. As one might have expected, Langford anticipated this
objection with the assertion that the principles of academic scholar-
ship are simply Western conventions and that Aboriginal culture has
its own, different rules: “Your science of archaeology is white organ-
ized, white dominated, and draws its values and techniques from a
European and Anglo-American culture ... that reality of bias cannot
be used to say our claims are unfair and unscientific.’
If this is so, then no one who values academic freedom and the
autonomy of scholarship should compromise with such claims. It is
depressing to note how many members of the anthropological
community today have crossed this floor and taken sides with those
who want to keep cultural interpretation a closed shop.
Nonetheless, there is one issue that this debate has so far assidu-
ously avoided. When Langford talks about ‘our people’, ‘our past’ and
‘our culture’, who are the people she is referring to? Apart from her
own assertions, which are not infallible, how is anyone to ascertain
who the modern members of this people and this culture really are?
How can anyone tell that the platform from which Langford and her
colleagues speak is legitimate? As the next section reveals, in Tasma-
nia this is a question that has some unexpected answers.
GENEALOGY AND BLACK CENSORSHIP
In March 1996, the state secretary of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Cen-
tre Inc., Rosalind Langford wrote to all the major libraries in Austra-
lia, asking them to remove from their shelves a publication about the
history and genealogy of the Tasmanian Aborigines. She hoped that
the libraries would co-operate voluntarily but backed her request
with a veiled threat to take legal action.
The publication in question was entitled The Tasmanian Aborigines
and Their Descendants (Chronology, Genealogies and Social Data). Its au-
thor was the academic Bill Mollison, assisted by Coral Everitt. It was
published in 1978 by their employer, the University of Tasmania in
Hobart. An earlier version of the data it contained had appeared in
separate volumes in 1974 but in 1978 the contents were revised and
edited by Phil Hackett into a combined edition. The research project
behind the publication had been funded by two Commonwealth
government bodies, the Institute of Aboriginal Studies and the
12 Langford, ‘Our Heritage — Your Playground’, p 2
424 "Tur FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HIStory
Department of Aboriginal Affairs, Part of its method was to examine
five earlier studies of Tasmanian Aboriginal family historie, and te;
resolve some of their errors and inconsistencies.” The Project aho
questioned a number of members of the local Aboriginal community
about their own genealogical knowledge and family records. It even-
tually published a chronology of the history of ah Nar a a
Tasmania, and their genealogy in the form of the family trees of t i"
descendants of the various Bass Strait sealers and their cia in
Wives, from the first generation who lived from soe ee ins the
1830s, down to the fifth generation, born between 1918 Mr ] »
The authors were closely connected to the loea Ar uiia
munity, whose support they acknowledged. Mee! a 2d AER mA
been the state secretary of Abschol, a Commonwealt va Casi
Provide scholarships for Aboriginal students. His indios famil of
Everitt, bore the surname of a well-known hi e ex di
Aboriginal descent. The project was primarily onie k^ ird to
quest and on behalf of the local Aboriginal community ie ticity of
establish their links with the past and to confirm the p b
their identity. The 1970s, of course, was a period when " pasa in
Only a matter of some pride to discover some Aborigina ! rograms
one’s background but, through the number of naa 3 s aveli:
that then became available, an issue of financial relevance - con-
Everything about the project seemed to confirm that B bien dier
ducted by academics with Aboriginal interests at heart and wi
full support. 1
This i "t however, how the Tasmanian Aboriginal is n ond
in 1996, Langford told the libraries the publication involved a brea *
of confidence’. Those who supplied the information had given :
privately and never imagined it would be made public. Moreover,
was full of errors. Langford wrote:
None of the Aboriginal people who supplied the information to red
would have contemplated the information being made as public aS HE ania
rently is. Much of the material supplied to Mollison was confidential. The
exposing in the Mollison genealogies of private family matters, whether
accurate or not, to public curiosity highlights the breach of that confi-
dence. 4
" Bill Mollison and Coral Everitt, The Tasmanian Abongines and Their
Descendants (Chronology, Genealogies and Social Data), Vols 1 and 2 (edited as a
Stephens, J. B. Bladon and R. A. Littlewood,
* Letter to Various librarians, 19 March 1996, by Ros Langford, state
Secretary, Tasmanian Abonginal Centre Inc., Hobart
EMLOGUE: HERITAGE, GENEALOGY AND BLACK AUTHORITARIANISM 425
Langtord did not identify any specific inaccuracies or particular
breaches of privacy. Nor did she enclose any supporting documents
of complaint from the Aboriginal families who helped with its pro-
duction, She expected the libraries to take her word on trust. She
warned that, although current copyright laws did not permit her to
onder them to withdraw the publication, legal action could possibly
follow. "The only protection for the Aboriginal community would
rest in litigation for breach of trust, confidentiality or breach of a
fiduciary duty.’ She added:
The Aboriginal community intends to apply its mind to the issue of the
future use of the Mollison genealogies. In order that it may do so, we
request you remove the Mollison genealogies from public scrutiny.
Now, the presumption of this organisation to speak for all Tasma-
nian Aborigines, when the local community was at the time riven by
warring factions, was bad enough. But its audacity in claiming the
right to decide the future of a work lodged in a public library simply
because it contained information that was inaccurate or about private
family matters is much more disturbing.
It is true there are occasions when some private documents in
libraries do have restricted access. Some authors or donors give papers
under certain conditions, such as a time embargo for public release or
a stipulation than only bona fide researchers be given access. These
are conditions imposed by the documents’ owners when they are
deposited, and libraries are free to accept or reject them, along with
the papers concerned. What the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre
sought, however, was something quite different. It wanted a publica-
tion it had neither owned, authored or produced removed because it
disapproved of its contents. Of course, if inaccuracy or privacy ever
became an accepted criterion for book removal from libraries, then
vast quantities would have to be taken from the shelves. In this case,
there was a particular agenda behind the request, which Langford
avoided mentioning. Before looking at this, however, the principles
involved are worth considering because the issue goes much further
than the Mollison genealogies.
This is one more example of black activists attempting to control
knowledge of the past. It is an extension of the assumptions that now
pervade anthropology and archaeology to historical documents and
publications. The fact that this was done by an Aboriginal organisa-
tion that had no role in producing this publication is a direct attack
on freedom of information. However, what is far more disturbing
than the demand itself are the principles under which it was made and
the positive response it received from some major libraries. Indeed,
420 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
the current policies of the profession of librarianship now give
demands of this kind their sanction. —
Since 1994, an organisation called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Library and Information Resource Network has been hold-
ing conferences to lay down policies for libraries and archives. It has
since endorsed a document entitled Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
Protocols for Libraries, Archives and Information Services. The professional
body, the Australian Library and Information Association, has pub-
lished and circulated these protocols, which are guidelines not only
for interacting with Aboriginal people and for handling matena with
Aboriginal content, but also for a much more radical agenda. à They
propose reforms of indexing terminology, subject headings and classi-
fication systems, declaring: ‘there needs to be nothing less than a total
paradigm shift away from Eurocentric approaches to categorisation
and description’. The most contentious part of the protocols concerns
intellectual property issues. The relevant section begins with a quota-
tion from Marcia Langton, Professor of Indigenous Studies at the
University of Melbourne, who asserts:
We can and ought to demand restricted access to some records. But in
respect of any particular item, it must be the indigenous people with
authority in the particular group who own the information who advise on
research and curatorial practices.
Sentiments of this kind would once have been completely unac-
ceptable to librarians, whose whole profession was dedicated to
disseminating information as freely and widely as possible. However,
the Aboriginal protocols not only endorse these comments but go on
to propose new forms of restrictive categories in the form of ‘cultural’
and ‘moral’ ownership:
The interests of the authors and publishers of records, books and other
documentary material are protected by copyright law but the interests of
those whose culture is described are not. The primary rights of the owners
of a culture must be recognised.
The protocols recommend that librarians develop ways of protect-
ing indigenous cultural and intellectual property, "including the rec-
ognition of moral rights'. In other words, the Australian Library and
Information Association is also proposing that, when it comes to
Aboriginal holdings, libraries should abandon the traditional freedom
of information, research and publication that prevails within Western
culture.
The rationale for this cannot be based on any discrimination or ex-
ploitation suffered by Aboriginal authors or artists. Their rights are
? Available at www.ntu.edu.au/library/protocol.html
EPILOGUE: HERITAGE, GENEALOGY AND BLACK AUTHORITARIANISM — 427
cted by copyright laws, which ensure they own their
aid its sale or hire. Aborigines and white authors alike
have their interests recognised by these laws. But the Aboriginal
lobby in librarianship now wants to introduce collective ownership
md ‘moral rights’ to information. It wants access to indigenous cul-
ture to be determined by ‘people with authority in the particular
group who own the information’. If this recommendation were
widely implemented it would mean that only approved authors
would be allowed to access information to write about Aboriginal
society and Aboriginal history. /
The outcome of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre's request for the
removal of the Mollison genealogies demonstrates that some librarians
are now prepared to go along with these demands. Being a university
publication, Mollison's work should be held by most university
libraries in Australia, especially those with departments of anthropol-
ogy or history. A search of their catalogues, however, shows that it is
only available in the following university libraries: University of Tas-
mania, University of New South Wales, La Trobe University, RMIT
University and Swinburne University of Technology. I do not know
if other university libraries originally held the publication and with-
drew it as requested, or whether they simply never acquired it. How-
ever, with the major state libraries, the issue is clearer. The State
Library of Victoria originally acquired the publication but now lists it
as ‘missing’. The Mitchell Library, Sydney, still holds it but has placed
it under restricted access. The Mitchell catalogue says: ‘Not available
for public access. Refer to Indigenous Services Librarian’. The publi-
cation in the Mitchell stack is itself labelled: ‘Not to be issued. Item
not available for public access. Refer to Indigenous Services Librar-
ian. Of all the major government libraries, only the Tasmanian
State Library and the Northern Territory Library have the publication
on unrestricted access.
The National Library of Australia in Canberra does not list the
publication in its catalogue at all. When I initially asked National
Library staff, I was told it had once been listed on its national data
base but the record had since been altered and it was no longer avail-
able. After I explained my intention to write about this subject, a staff
member called me back to say the National Library had not with-
drawn the publication since it had never actually acquired it. This was
a surprise. Under the Copyright Act, a legal deposit copy of every
already. prote
work and get p
16 At the Mitchell, researchers who do insist on seeing the publication are
referred to the Indigenous Services Librarian, who will retrieve it for them.
Most readers, however, would be deterred by the advice in the catalogue
and presume it is now completely inaccessible. The Mitchell based its
decision to restrict access on the ALIA protocols.
428 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL His RY
Australian publication must be given to the National Library, pul
lishers who neglect to do this receive a letter reminding dini es
obligation. It would have been very unusual for a university publisher
who provided copies to the st
ate libraries in New South Wales and
Victoria to have omitted the National Library in the fir
st place, It
would have been even more unusual for it to ignore the reminder
letters as well.
The library of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander Studies in Canberra has put the genealogy under the
following restriction: ‘Closed access — Principal’s permission. Closed
copying and quotation — Principal’s permission’. The ‘principal’ in
this case is the head of the institute. AIATSIS informs me that,
despite these restrictions, any bona fide researchers would be given
ready access.
To their credit, both the University of Tasmania library and the
Tasmanian State Library in Hobart refused to go along with the
demand. They kept the publication on their shelves, fully available.
This might have been because they had some local knowledge of
what actually lay behind the request. For the real reason had little to
do with privacy, the ownership of Aboriginal culture, or the moral
rights of indigenous communities. o
Anyone familiar with contemporary Aboriginal politics who
accesses the publication and reads it through will soon see why Ms
Langford wanted it withdrawn. The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre
Inc. is an organisation founded by the lawyer Michael Mansell, who
has been a prominent figure on the left of Aboriginal politics since
the 1970s. He was also the founding secretary of the Aboriginal Pro-
visional Government, an organization that wants to secede from Aus-
tralia and establish an Aboriginal state. In 1987, Mansell attracted
considerable publicity by going to Libya to attend the World Confer-
ence Against Zionism, Racism and Imperialism and seeking thirty
million dollars from the Libyan dictator, Colonel Gaddafi, to fund his
organization. He has staged a number of media stunts to promote his
secessionist movement, which calls for a separate Aboriginal nation
owning all unalienated Crown land.” Throughout the 1980s and
1990s, organizations connected to Mansell and his relatives became
the major recipients of Aboriginal funding and land grants made by
successive Tasmanian state governments.
When the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre sought to suppress the
Mollison genealogies in 1996, its control of Aboriginal resources in
the state had come under challenge. The year before, the centre be-
17 Michael Mansell, ‘Seekin
g Real Rights for the Aboriginal People of
Australia’, Aboriginal Provi
sional Government, Hobart, February 1994 p12
TR ee enn
EPILOGUE: HERITAGE, GENEALOGY AND BLACK AUTHORITARIANISM , 429
gan demanding that many other people calling themselves Aborigines
provide a family tree to prove it. This was to keep those of whom it
did not approve from voting in elections for the Tasmanian Aborigi-
nal Land Council, an organization run by Michael Mansell's cousin,
Clvde, and the recipient of all the land grants the government had so
far made. The Australian census taken that year showed that the local
Aboriginal population had apparently grown from about six hundred
in 1971 to a total of 14,600.'® The Mansell faction, however, wanted
to disenfranchise most of those who had recently discovered their
Aboriginality, labelling them ‘frauds’ and ‘impostors’. Some of them
had organized a rival faction that threatened to break Mansell s mo-
nopoly of Aboriginal resources. At stake was the $5 million a year the
state government provides to the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre.
Mansell’s law firm has a retainer from the centre to provide legal ser-
vices, a business that grosses it about one million dollars a year.
The rival group argues its own members are descended not, like
that of the Mansell faction, from the nineteenth-century Bass Strait
sealing community but from those Tasmanian Aborigines who inte-
grated into colonial society during the twenty-five years prior to
Robinson’s round-up. They call the Mansell faction the ‘Pallawah’
people, and themselves the ‘Lia Pootah’. An ‘elder’ of the latter
group, Kaye McPherson, says: ‘In 2002, Lia Pootah acknowledge
eight communities who have Aboriginal people with a two-century
history of integration, acknowledge their Aboriginal ancestry from
family and oral histories'.?
In 1997, this dispute turned litigious when the Tasmanian Aborigi-
nal Centre launched a case in the Federal Court to prevent eleven
candidates from Tasmania standing for elections to the board of the
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, claiming that they
did not have Aboriginal ancestry. The Mansell faction largely lost that
case. After a two-year hearing, which cost taxpayers $1.2 million and
took 1000 pages of affidavits, only two of the eleven candidates were
barred by Justice Ron Merkel. But the issue has remained a matter of
fierce contention. In 2002, one of Mansell’s colleagues, Gary May-
nard, was still publicly denouncing the inability of their opponents to
produce an authenticated family tree. “The only people who can
legitimately do that are the Bass Strait island families,’ he said. The
!8 Australian Bureau of Statistics, Population Distribution, Indigenous Australians,
1996, Cat. no. 4705.0, Table 2: Estimated Resident Population, Indigenous
Population — 30 June 1996, p 13. The 2001 Census revised the 1996 figure
to 13,873.
; Kaye McPherson, ‘Message from Tasmania’, Koori Mail, 17 April 2002, p
1
430. THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
others could only rely on what he calls ‘loose unsubstantiated ora]
evidence [that] is dangerous, unreliable and open to misuse’ 7"
There are two heavy ironies involved in all of this. In most of
Australia, Aboriginal groups who claim to be entitled to land rights
do so on the basis of little more than the same kind of ‘loose, unsub-
stantiated oral evidence’ that Maynard here condemns. The applica-
tion of the Tasmanian logic to the mainland would see the land rights
industry in serious trouble.
The other irony stems from the content of the Mollison genealo-
gies themselves. The publication provides exhaustive documentation
of up to five generations of fifty-five Tasmanian Aboriginal families,
most of whom are descended from the Bass Strait sealers and their
Aboriginal women. One of the biggest genealogies is of the Mansell
family, extending back to the English sealer Edward (Sydney)
Mansell, and his three Aboriginal wives who lived in Bass Strait in the
1820s and 1830s. However, the name of Michael Mansell does not
appear in the family tree. Nor is there any reference to a Rosalind
Langford. There is no genealogy of any Langford family at all, and the
first name of Rosalind was never given to any of the children born to
any of the other families.
The reasons for this are as follows. Michael Mansell was the son of
a part-Aboriginal woman, Furlie Doreen Beeton, and one of her two
white husbands. Furlie herself was the daughter of another white man
Alfred Landon ‘Pipey’ Woods and Clydia Robena Beeton. Clydia
later married Clarence Alexander Mansell and then adopted two of
Furlie’s sons, Michael and Brian, rearing them with her then hus-
band’s surname. Michael Mansell is actually recorded in the Mollison
genealogies, but not with that name. He is listed under the Beeton
family tree.” Ros Langford, however, is not descended from the Tas-
manian Aborigines at all. She is a part-Aboriginal woman from Vic-
toria. She has recently taken up painting and, in a story advertising
her work in 2003, she said her ‘home country’ was near Echuca.” In
the Hobart Magistrate’s Court in April 1998, Langford was sentenced
to nine months in prison after admitting to 306 charges of embezzle-
ment from the Tasmanian Aboriginal Education Council. Between
? Gary Maynard, ‘Sorting out “genuine blackfellas” from the rest’, Mercury,
Hobart, 25 May 2002, p 23. The best recent account of these factional
conflicts is: Richard Guilliatt, ‘A whiter shade of black?’, Good Weekend
supplement, Sydney Moming Herald, 15 June 2002, pp 18—23. See also Carol
Altmann, ‘When Black and White Turns Grey’, Australian, 15 July 2002 pp
1,4 f
?! Mollison and Everitt, Tasmanian Aborigines and their Descendants, Vol.2
EM 1.2.6—1.2.6.6. I am indebted to Bruce Patmore for tracking this dow E
2 Art Mob, May 2003 Newsletter, Hobart "s
E — X D P
EPILOGUE: HERITAGE, GENEALOGY AND BLACK AUTHORITARIANISM 431
1992 and 1995, she stole more than $74,000 of the council's money
while she was its chair. Such are the loyalties within left-wing
Tasmanian politics, however, that this criminal conviction was no bar
to her later being appointed by the Bacon Labor government to offi-
cial positions. She was appointed to the government's organizing
committee for the Tasmanian Bicentenary in 2003.”
The sordid politics of this dispute are bad enough. But there is a
more important issue at stake. The whole notion endorsed by the
Australian Library and Information Association that Aboriginal groups
have cultural or collective rights to suppress or restrict information is
alien to the Western scholarly tradition. This is especially true of the
institution of the library. The free dissemination of publications in
libraries is something most of us take for granted but it deserves to be
regarded as a rare and precious legacy. It derives from two great
concepts that distinguish Western culture. One of these is the
principle that the received learning and the new discoveries of science
and the humanities should be public knowledge. The other is that the
repositories of this knowledge, the libraries, ensure the pursuit of
learning is not limited to some but is available to all.
By caving in to the demands of radical Aboriginal activists, the
Australian Library and Information Association has departed from
these principles. To put the most charitable interpretation on it, the
association was apparently acting in the mistaken belief it would
somehow respect the cultural sensitivities of indigenous people.
However, the genuine interests of Aborigines, just like everyone else,
will always be served by open access to all that human ingenuity has
to offer. Freedom of information might be a cultural artefact born in
the West, but it belongs to all of humanity. Indigenous cultures that
reject this principle only diminish themselves. The only people to
benefit from the suppression of information are those with something
to hide.
Moreover, the threat the Aboriginal library protocols pose to the
freedom of historians to pursue their subject should be seen as a real
one. The partial success of the Tasmanian case will only encourage
23 Mercury, Hobart, 7 April 1998, p 3
24 The resulting commemorations revealed how little the orthodox version
of history contributes to reconciliation. Instead of a celebration to mark the
arrival of the British two hundred years earlier, the Bicentenary committee
decided to hold an official church service to mourn the occasion. Michael
Mansell held a symbolic protest at Risdon Cove to liken British colonization
to ‘an invasion by the Nazis’. Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre chairman, Philip
Beeton, described the first settlers as a ‘bunch of terrorists’ and said their
arrival was worse than the attacks on New York and Washington on 11
September 2001: Mercury, Hobart, 9, 12 and 13 September 2003
432. THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
radical activists to extend their demands from libraries to the archive;
Australian history could potentially end up in the same sorry state as
Australian archacology.^
THE INVENTION OF ABORIGINALITY
The political movement among Tasmanian Aborigines is a product of
the 1970s and largely of the activism of Michael Mansell himself. Af-
ter the Whitlam Labor government began funding Tasmanian Abo-
riginal legal services in 1973, he built its organizations largely from
scratch. Mansell was born and grew up in the city of Launceston but
his modern urban background was no inhibition to identifying with
the ancient hunter-gatherers. He became the chief spokesman for
Aboriginal land rights and proved very adept at publicising his de-
mands. In 1977 he gate-crashed a reception in Hobart to presea a
land rights petition to the Queen. He subsequently set up = mee
riginal embassy’ outside the Tasmanian Parliament in Hobart.’
One of the unexpected stunts of this kind was the protest Mansell |
and his colleagues organized in 1978 against the premiere 1n Hobart
of the film by Rhys Jones and Tom Haydon, The Last Tasmanian. To
most cinema-goers, the film appears to tell a strictly orthodox story
about the demise of the Aborigines after 1803, including, as Chapter
Two noted, some of the most transparently fabricated atrocities
claimed by any members of the school. Nonetheless, Mansell and
other activists staged a vehement demonstration outside the premiere
and defaced the film’s posters with the slogan: ‘RACIST! This film
denies Tasmanian Aborigines their LAND RIGHTS.’ Lyndall Ryan
reproduces the defaced poster in her book and gives a brief disposer
of the protests, but she fails to mention the real bone of contention.”
This was the fact that two people interviewed in the film from the
Bass Strait islander community both denied they were Aborigines.
One of them, a woman engaged in the traditional islander occupation
^^ This situation has, in fact, already arrived as far as the reproduction of
historic illustrations held by the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery is
concerned. Publishers who want to reproduce paintings that depict
Aborigines in any way are now told by the museum that ‘clearance is
required from the Tasmanian Aboriginal Community via our Curator of
Indigenous Cultures’. To gain reproduction rights, publishers have to submit
for approval ‘details of context of use of images’, even for paintings by well-
known nineteenth-century British artists such as John Glover and Benjamin
Duterrau.
^ Lyndall Ryan glowingly chronicles these events in the second edition of
The Aboriginal Tasmanians, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1996, pp 263-75
?' Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, includes an illustration of the posters and
comments on the film, pp 254-5.
ae. 2 —— ODE =
EPILOGUE: HERITAGE, GENEALOGY AND BLACK AUTHORITARIANISM 433
of muttonbirding, was quite emphatic. She acknowledged that some
of the old people of the community in the past had some partial
descent from the Aborigines but stated: ‘Pm not an Aborigine
There are no Aborigines now.’ [n an article denouncing the film in
the Melbourne Marxist journal Arena in 1978, Mansell focused on
these particular comments, which he labelled a ‘misrepresentation to
make a more dramatic story' ^^
They were actually much more than that. They were prima facie
evidence that, when the interviews for the film were recorded in the
1970s, members of the Bass Strait island community did not identify
themselves as Aborigines. Despite recent claims that the only
authentic Tasmanian Aborigines are descended from that community,
the film revealed that one of the crucial components of Aboriginality,
identification as an Aboriginal, was absent at that time.
The author Patsy Adam Smith had made the same point in the
1960s, well before the current political movement emerged. She vis-
ited the Furneaux Islands many times over a twelve-year period and
got to know most of the inhabitants for her very sympathetic book
Moonbird People (1965). She said that while those she interviewed
were well aware they were the descendants of the English sealers and
their Tasmanian Aboriginal wives, they considered their own mixed
blood community a distinct breed of people. They called themselves
'straitsmen' and ‘islanders’ and regarded themselves as neither Euro-
pean nor Aboriginal. They had formed a tightly-knit community in
the nineteenth century but by the 1960s were abandoning the islands.
As soon as their children were old enough, they were sending them
to Launceston to become mainstream Australians. Smith concluded:
The race that began only a hundred and fifty years ago on the Furneaux is
already dissolving into this pattern of life change, losing its identity, melt-
ing into the main stream of Australian community life.”
The loss of Aboriginal identity and the passing of Aboriginal cul-
ture was subsequently confirmed by the most scrupulous scholar of
the subject, Brian Plomley. In 1987, in the introduction to his history
of the demise of the Aborigines on Flinders Island, Weep in Silence, he
wrote:
As a result of this [British] invasion, the Tasmanian Aborigines ceased to
exist as a natural society, and their numbers were reduced within three-
quarters of a century to a few individuals of mixed blood, the majority of
?5 Michael Mansell, ‘Black Tasmanians Now’, Arena, 51, 1978, p7
* Patsy Adam Smith, Moonbird People, Rigby, Adelaide, 1965, p 220. During
her visits, the last ‘quarter-caste’ Tasmanian, Walter Beeton, died.
434 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
whom had formed a special community on the Furneaux Islands. All these
ei : pen 10114 = rs)
people of mixed blood lost most of their original Aboriginal culture.
As noted earlier in this chapter, in the conflict over the preserva-
tion of Aboriginal skeletal remains, Plomley refused to acknowledge
the current activists as genuine representatives of the original inhabi-
tants, sarcastically labelling them ‘some people in Tasmania calling
themselves Tasmanian Aborigines’. o l
All this suggests that, rather than Aboriginal culture and iiid
surviving down the generations through the island community, it has
a more modern source. It was not a product of any continuous cul-
tural link to the ancient people at all. Instead, it was an invention in
the 1970s by modern urban political activists. — Vm
Since then, the movement to promote this interest group
At the 1971 Census,
'own well beyond its founders’ expectations.
ee were 668 people in Tasmania who identified queen aiia I:
Aboriginal descent. At the 2001 Census, the same category p E. da
no fewer than 15,773 people.?' Part of the reason would pp Aes
that Aboriginality is no longer a badge of inferiority and g at Ros
people are now willing to declare it. But it 1s equally clear t at i
incentive is access to the more generous welfare payments available 5s
Aborigines than to whites. Aboriginal descent provides benefits suc
as cheap housing, health care, legal aid and education grants In par-
ticular, a full-time university student in Tasmania who claims to be an
Aborigine gets much more money than a white student.
As noted above, this has become an issue of considerable conten-
tion. In the 1997 Federal Court case in which the Tasmanian Abo-
riginal Centre challenged the right of its rivals to stand for ATSIC
elections, the white historian Cassandra Pybus provided evidence for
the Mansell faction. She claimed that most of those currently clamping
to be Tasmanian Aborigines did not have an indigenous ancestor."
Pybus, who says she has traced the genealogies of all the non-whites
in the early colony, noted what she thought was the sad irony of this
case. None of Mansell’s opponents, she claimed, were authentic.
? N. J. B. Plomley, Weep In Silence: A Flistory of the Flinders Island Aboriginal
Settlement, Blubber Head Press, Hobart, 1987, p 1
*' For 1971 Census: Mollison and Everitt, The Tasmanian Aborigines and their
Descendants, p 2.4. Of these, some 562 had been born in Tasmania. The rest
were born interstate. For 2001 Census: Table 4, Selected Ethnic
Characteristics, Census of Population and Housing, Selected Social and Housing
Characteristics, Australia, 2001, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Cat. No.
2015.0, Canberra 2002, p 31
* Federal Court of Australia, Edwina Shaw and Another v Wolf and Others
Merkel J, Tasmania District Registry, 4-8, 12, 19 August, 24-25 September
1997; 20 April 1998, Federal Court Reports, 1998, 83 FCR, pp 113-38
EPILOGUE: HERITAGE, GENEALOGY AND BLACK AUTHORITARIANISM 435
They were merely white people identifying themselves as Aborigines
in order to gain access to greater welfare benefits and to make claims
for land rights. Hence, the descendants of those who killed the
Aborigines and took their land now also wanted to receive benefits
allocated to Aborigines as compensation.”
There are two responses that can be made to this. First, the Lia
Pootah might be an even more recently invented Aboriginal com-
munity than its rivals, and the smoking ceremonies it conducts and
the ochre it daubs on the faces of initiates may well be culturally
bogus, but this does not mean its members are entirely the frauds and
impostors claimed by the Mansell faction. The genealogical lineages
identified by Pybus were not exhaustive. The existence of several
other indigenous lineages besides the Bass Strait islanders is highly
plausible. As Chapter Two recorded, at least twenty-six Aboriginal
children living with white families were christened in Hobart be-
tween 1804 and 1819. There is also plenty of documentation about
other Aborigines who assimilated into the early colony. Some of
these people would have left progeny. DNA testing could possibly
confirm the authenticity of some who claim to be their descendants.
However, when this was proposed during the 1997 Federal Court
action, the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre objected, claiming a DNA
test would be ‘discriminatory, insensitive and stupid?
Today, most of the fifth-generation descendants of these alternative
lineages would have no greater Aboriginal connection than to one of
their thirty-two great great great grandparents, but this is true of a
number of their factional rivals as well. Of course, anyone with such a
slender link who seriously claims to be 'Aboriginal' can only be
°° Cassandra Pybus, evidence to Legislative Council Select Committee on
Aboriginal Lands, Parliament House, Hobart, 10 April 2000; John Hirst,
*Aborigine and Migrants: Diversity and Unity in Multicultural Australia’,
Australian Book Review, February/March 2001, pp 34—5
?* As well as the Aboriginal farmers listed in Chapter Four, n 123, there was
the English stockman Punch in the Western Marshes who had a half-caste
Aboriginal wife, by whom he had two children: Robinson, Friendly Mission,
p 219. Not all the Aborigines placed on Flinders Island remained there until
shipped as a group to Oyster Cove in 1847. The best known was Fanny
Cochrane who left in the early 1840s and figures in most of the published
genealogies. There was also the half-caste girl Mary Ann Thompson who
accompanied Rev. Thomas Dove and his wife when they left Flinders Island
in 1839. She last figured in the documentary record in 1848 when in the
service of Mrs Roope of Macquarie St, Hobart. It is possible she married and
changed her name: Plomley, Weep in Silence, pp 194, 865. See also Plomley,
Friendly Mission, p 42 n 39
35 Australian, 15 July 2002, p 4
436 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
regarded with cynicism by outsiders. But as long as government
ligesse is available, the charade is sure to continue.
Second, there is an irony in Pybus’s complaint that cuts the other
way. The members of the Mansell faction are actually faced with 4
more acute dilemma than their opponents, once their British rather
than their Aboriginal origin is considered. According to the diaries of
George Augustus Robinson, the English scaler Edward Mansell had
one of the worst records of all those in Bass Strait for atrocities against
the Aborigines. In 1827 at Eddystone Point on the north-east coast,
Mansell was a member of a four-man party who, in Telimen for
earlier killings of sealers, shot dead several Aborigines." In 1832 on
Flinders Island, Mansell shot and wounded two other Aborigines.
Mansell was arrested for this last action and sent to Hobart. There is
no known record of whether he was tried for the crime,” but he later
returned to Bass Strait. Similarly, the sealer Jem Everitt, from whom
the Mollison genealogy records Michael Mansell (Beeton) is des-
cended on his mothers side, shot dead a native woman,
Worethmaleyerpodeyer, on Woody Island after she refused to collect
muttonbirds for him. Robinson recorded that other sealers Hogged
their women, beat them with sticks and cut them with knives.
If only a proportion of the stories Robinson told about the sealers
were true, then most of those who today trace their ancestry to the
Bass Strait community must be the descendants not only of Aborigi-
nes but also of people who committed atrocities against Aborigines.
Hence the current crop of political activists must have just as much
Aboriginal blood on their hands as the descendants of the other white
colonists could possibly have, five and six generations later. In short,
the Tasmanian ‘Aboriginal community’ today embodies both the in-
vaders and the invaded. Such a dilemma renders the current political
movement’s appeal to historical injustice an absurdity. The descen-
dants of whites who killed Aborigines now want compensation in-
tended for their Aboriginal victims. It also makes a mockery of their
claim to the exclusive ‘ownership’ of Aboriginal culture and Aborigi-
nal history. The descendants of those whites who had a direct role in
the destruction of Aboriginal society now want to control how histo-
rians interpret their past.
% Friendly Mission pp 192-3, 249, 403, 437 n 16, 591, 593, 681-2 n 8, 685 n
15. Mansell’s accomplices in these murders were John Riddle, Thomas
Tucker and Jack Williams. None of the latter appear to have c
that survive to the present.
” Plomley, Weep in Silence, pp 40, 42
? Robinson, diary, 15 October 1830, 10 November 1830, Friendly Mission
pp 249, 270, 1013. Both this killing and those at Eddy: 2
are recorded in Table Ten.
reated lineages
stone Point in 1827
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS: ARCHIVE SOURCES
Archives Office of Tasmania, Hobart, Colonial Secretary's Office papers:!
CSO 1/316/7578 Reports of the murders and other outrages
committed by the Aborigines upon the settlers and reports of
sightings of the natives in the settled districts.
CSO 1/317/7578 Minutes of the Lieutenant-Governor. Colonial
secretary's letters, present orders and proclamations. Reports from Mr
G. A. Robinson whilst in command of the different establishments
formed for the Aborigines.
CSO 1/318/7578 Reports of Mr G. A. Robinson whilst in pursuit of
the natives.
! The seventeen volumes from 1/316 to 1/332 in file 7578 of the papers of
the Colonial Secretary's Office during the regime of Lieutenant-Governor
George Arthur were compiled on the instructions of Arthur to bring
together all government documents relevant to Aboriginal policy. Within
each volume there are further divisions designated by additional numerical
suffixes. For example 1/317/7578 contains 1/317/7578/2 and
1/317/7578/3. However, because there is another, alternative set of suffixes
to these volumes, they are too confusing to use in a bibliography. They are
of no help to researchers anyway, since volume, file and page numbers are all
that is needed to find a source in the microfilmed copies of the original
documents. None of this, however, excuses the misleading bibliography in
Henry Reynolds’s Fate of a Free People, pp 240-1. Reynolds purports to list
the seventeen volumes but anyone using him as a guide will find there are
actually only fifteen volumes in his bibliography, with 1/318 listed twice and
1/319 and 1/330 omitted altogether. His descriptions of the volumes are also
sloppy and misleading. Several of what he claims to be the contents of one
volume are actually to be found in another.
538 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
CSO 1/319/7578 P
formed for the pu
Aborigines.
apers relating to, ;
CSO 1/320/7578 Reports of police Magistrates Concerning the
roving parties and other matters from 1827. Batman’s RU
1829-30. Cottrell's reports 183 1-3. Jorgenson's reports 1828-34
Danvers’s reports. Reports and j l
ournals of various roving parties
CSO 1/321/7578 Applications of and offers of servi
individuals to be em
Aboriginal services
CSO 1/322/7578 A
Applications for r
ces from
ployed in search of Aborigines and other
pplications to go in pursuit of the Aborigines.
ewards for capture and requisitions for supplies.
CSO 1/323/7578 Mr Jackson’s of the cutter Charlotte reports
respecting the islands in the straits. Suggestions from settlers about
the capture of natives. Answers given by settlers to certain
questions submitted to them by the Aborigines Committee
CSO 1/324/7578 Papers relative to the campaign after the natives in
1830. Proceedings of and letters written by the Lieutenant-
Governor. Major Douglass’s reports. Reports etc of the
commissioned officers. Names etc of different parties out on the
line. Miscellaneous letters and reports.
CSO 1/325/7578 Correspondence etc concerning the Flinders Island
establishment.
CSO 1/326/7578 Correspondence chiefly concerning the roving
parties.
CSO 1/327/7578 Papers relative to the Sydney natives used in the
capture of the Aborigines. The eligibility of Bruny Island for the
Aboriginal Establishment. Two native boys held by Batman at Ben
Lomond
CSO 1/328/7578 Lieutenant-Governor’s minutes. Government
orders and proclamations. Correspondence concerning the issue of
stores.
CSO 1/329/7578 Corres
Black Line.
CSO 1/330/7578 Miscellaneous papers including Major Abbott’s
various reports. Charles Sterling's reports. Mr Curr's and other
reports respecting the death of an Aboriginal female at E
Reports of killings and captures, Some Flinders Island p
pondence relating to roving parties and the
mu Bay,
apers.
A
BIBLIOGRAPHY $39
CSO 1/331/7578 Letters and reports in connection with Gilbert
Robertson's expedition in pursuit of Aborigines. Journals of roving
parties under Gilbert Robertson.
CSO 1/332/7578 Minutes of the Aborigines Committee
CSO 8/109 Letter from Gordon to Burnett
Archives Office of Tasmania, Hobart, other papers:
CBE/1 Minutes of the Committee for the care and treatment of the
captured Aborigines
VDL Company papers 5/1, 5/3, 23/4
Governor’s Office papers, Duplicate despatches received by the
Colonial Office, GO 33/7
Convict Department papers, Conduct registers of male convicts
arriving in the period of the assignment system CON 31/6
Alexander Laing Story, The: District Police Constable Pitt Water
Tasmania 1819-1838 NS 1116/1
Mitchell Library, Sydney:
Tasmanian Aborigines, Robinson’s Reports etc, A612
Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1818-1849, A7022-7084
Robinson, George Augustus, Periodical Report, 24 June 1837,
A7044
Report of a Board of Enquiry, Flinders Island, 25 March 1839, in
George Augustus Robinson, Correspondence and Other Papers,
Jan-April 1839, Miscellaneous, A7071, A 7072
Despatches of Lieutenant-Governor William Sorell, 1819, ML 1352
Diaries of ‘Pioneer’ George Hobler, unpublished
ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS: PRINTED SOURCES
British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, Correspondence and
Papers Relating to the Government and Affairs of the Australian Colonies,
1830-36, Irish University Press Series
440. THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
Historical Records of Australia, Series I, Governors’ despatches to and
from England, 1788 1840, Volumes I-XX; Series IIT, Despatches
and papers aep to the settlement of the states 1803—1827,
Volumes I-VI, Libr: ary Committee of the C ommonwealth
Parliament, 1914—1925
Historical Records of Victoria, Volume 2a, The Aborigines of Port Phillip
1835-1839, ed. Michael Cannon, Victorian Government Printing
Office, Melbourne, 1982
EARLY NEWSPAPERS
Derwent Star and Van Diemen's Land Intelligencer
Hobart Town Gazette
Hobart Town Courier
Colonial Times
The Tasmanian and Austral—Asiatic Review
Launceston Advertiser
The Independent
BOOKS AND ARTICLES
Allen, H. R., ‘Left Out in the Cold: Why the Tasmanians Stopped
Eating Fish’, The Artefact, 4, 1979
Allen, Jim, ‘A short history of the Tasmanian affair’, Australian
Archaeology, 41, 1995
Altmann, Carol, ‘When Black and White Turns Grey’, The
Australian, 15 July 2002
Attwood, Bain, ‘Attack on Reynolds Scholarship Lacks Bite’, The
Australian, 20 September 2000
Backhouse, James, A Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies,
Hamilton Adams, London, 1843
Barbeliuk, Anne, ‘Aborigines set to claim half the state’, The Mercury,
Hobart, 7 September 2001
Bartlett, Richard H. (ed.) The Mabo Decision, Butterworths, Sydney
1993
BIBLIOGRAPHY 441
Beaglehole, J. C., The Life of Captain James Cook, Stanford University
Press, Stanford, 1974 i
Blain, Barry, and eight others, “The Australian National University-
Tasmanian National Parks and Wildlife Service Archaeological
Expedition to the Franklin and Gordon Rivers, 1983: A Summary
of Results’, Australian Archaeology, 16, June 1983
Blainey, Geoffrey, Triumph of the Nomads: A History of Ancient
Australia, (1975), 3rd edn., Sun Books, Melbourne, 1997
Bloch, Marc, The Historian’s Craft: Reflections on the Nature and Uses of
History and the Techniques and Methods of Historical Writing, trans.
Peter Putnam, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1954
Bonwick, James, Daily Life and Origin of the Tasmanians, Sampson
Low, Son, and Marston, London, 1870
Bonwick, James, The Last of the Tasmanians: or the Black War of Van
Diemen’s Land, Sampson Low, Son and Marston, London, 1870
Bowdler, Sandra, ‘Fish and culture: a Tasmanian polemic’, Mankind,
12, 4, 1980
Boyce, James, God’s Own Country? The Anglican Church and the
Tasmanian Aborigines, Anglicare Tasmania, Hobart, 2001
Brading, David, Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763—1810,
Cambridge, 1971
Brading, David, The First America: the Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots
and the Liberal State, 1492-1867, Cambridge, 1991
Brooks, Geraldine, and Tony Horwitz, ‘As Olympics loom,
Australians agonize over Aborigine issues’, Wall Street Journal, 21
August 2000
Brown, Dee, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the
American West, Holt Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1970
Brown, Joan C., Poverty is not a Crime: The Development of Social
Services in Tasmania 1803—1900, Tasmanian Historical Research
Association, Hobart, 1972
Brunton, Ron, ‘Theories on black massacres don’t add up’, Courier-
Mail, 16 March 2002
Buckby, Pauline, Around Circular Head, Denbar Publishers, Stanley,
1984
Butlin, N. G., Economics and the Dreamtime: A Hypothetical History,
Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1993
442 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
Cain, P. J., and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and
Expansion 1688-1914, Longman, London, 1993
Cameron, Patsy, and Vicki Matson-Green, ‘Pallawah Women: Their
Historical Contribution to our Survival’, Tasmanian Historical
Research Association Papers and Proceedings, 41, 2, June 1994
Cassrels, Deborah, ‘History of Manne’, Courier-
2001
Mail, Brisbane, 2 June
Churchill, Ward, ‘Genocide: Towards a Functional Definition’,
Alternatives, XI, 1986
Clark, C. M. H., A History of Australia, Volume I, Melbourne
University Press, Melbourne, 1962
Clark, Julia, in The Aboriginal People of Tasmania, Tasmanian Museum
and Art Gallery, Hobart, 1983
Clement, Cathie, Historical Notes Relevant to Impact Stories of the East
Kimberley, East Kimberley Impact Assessment Project Paper no 29,
Canberra, 1989
Clendinnen, Inga, True Stories, Boyer Lectures 1999, ABC Books,
1999
Cocker, Mark, Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe’s Conflict with
Tribal Peoples, Jonathan Cape, London, 1998
Commager, Henry Steele, (ed.) Documents of American History, 8th
edn., Appleton—Century—Crofts, New York, 1968
Connor, John, The Australian Frontier Wars 1788-
1838, University of
NSW Press, Sydney, 2002
Curr, Edward, An account of the colony of Van Di
emen’s Land, principally
designed for the use of emigrants, London, 1824
Curthoys, Ann, Freedom Ride: A Freedom Rider Remembers, Allen and
Unwin, Sydney, 2002
Davies, David, The Last of the Tasmanians, Shakespeare Head Press
Sydney, 1973 i
Davies, R. H., ‘On the Aborigines of Van Diemen’s
Lang’,
Tasmanian Journal of Science, II, 1846
Davison, Graeme, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre, (eds.) Oxford
Companion to Australian History, Oxford University Press,
Melbourne, 1998
accu. WE. E S a v Á EM 3
BIBLIOGRAPHY 443
Deane, Sir William, Governor-General, Australia Day message, 26
January 1998
Deane, Sir William, ‘A Few Instances of Reconciliation’, address to
the Millennium Dinner, Southern Queensland Theology Library,
Toowoomba, 5 November 1999
Deane, Sir William, 2001 Sydney Peace Prize lecture, University of
Sydney, 8 November 2001
Deane, Sir William, Directions: A Vision for Australia, St Pauls
Publications, Sydney, 2002
Denholm, David, The Colonial Australians, Penguin, Ringwood, 1979
Diamond, Jared, ‘In Black and White’, Natural History, October 1988
Dobyns, Henry F., ‘Estimating Aboriginal American Population: An
Appraisal of Techniques with a New Hemispheric Estimate’,
Current Anthropology, 7, 4, 1966
Dobyns, Henry F., Their Numbers Became Thinned: Native American
Population Dynamics in Eastern North America, University of
Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1983
Dow, Gwyneth and Hume, Landfall in Van Diemen's Land: The Steels’
Quest for Greener Pastures, Footprint, Footscray, 1990
Duncombe, Kathy, Excursion: North Bruny Island, Irene Schaffer,
Hobart, 1996
Dunnett, Gary, ‘Diving for Dinner: Some Implications from
Holocene Middens of the Role of Coasts in the late Pleistocene of
Tasmania’, in M. A. Smith, M. Spriggs and B. Fankhauser (eds.)
Sahul in Review, Department of Prehistory, Australian National
University, 1993
Edgerton, Robert B. , Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive
Harmony, Free Press, New York, 1992
Elder, Bruce, Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatment of
Aboriginal Australians since 1788, New Holland Publishers, Sydney,
1998
Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, Grove Press, New York,
1963
Featherstone, Donald, Weapons and Equipment of the Victorian Soldier,
Blandford Press, Poole, 1978
Fein, H., Genocide: A Sociological Perspective, Sage Publications,
London, 1990
444 THE FABRIK ATION OF ABORIGINAL HSTORS
y
Fels fun pues . " , f ~ :
pt Maric, Culture Contact in the € ;ounty of Buckinghamshire,
an Diemen s Land 1803 ELE, Tasmanian Historical Research
ecMsoctation Papers and Proceedings, 29, 2. June 1982
Fenton, James, A History of Tasmania [rom its Discovery in 1642 to the
Present ‘Time, J. Walch, Hobart, 1884
Pletcher, Brian H., Ralph Darling: A Governor A Taligned, Oxford
University Press, Melbourne, 1984
Fredrickson, George M., White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in
American and South African History, Oxford University Press, New
York, 1981
Frost, Alan, Arthur Phillip 1783—1814: His Voyaging, Oxford
University Press, Melbourne, 1987
Frost, Alan, Botany Bay Mirages: Illusions of Australia’s Convict
Beginnings, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1994
Gascoigne, John, The Enlightenment and the Origins of European
Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2002
Gould, Bob, “McGuinness, Windschuttle and Quadrant: The Revisionist
attack on Australian history about British conquest and Aboriginal
resistance’, Gould’s Book Arcade, Newtown, 11 November 2000,
http://members.optushome.com. au/spainter/ Windschuttleblack.html
Grafton, Anthony, The Footnote: A Curious History, Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, 1997
Greener, William, The Science of Gunnery, as Applied to the Use and
Construction of Fire Arms, London, 1846
Greener, W., The Gun and Its Development, London, 1910
Greenwood, Gordon, (ed.) Australia: A Social and Political History,
Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1955
Guilliatt, Richard, ‘A Whiter Shade of Black?, Good Weekend
supplement, Sydney Moming Herald, 15 June 2002
Hakluyt, Richard, The Original Writings and Correspondence of the two
Richard Hakluyts, ed. E. G. R. Taylor, Vol I, Hakluyt Society,
London, 1935
Hall, Richard, “Windschuttle’s Myths’ in Peter Craven (ed.) The Best
Australian Essays 2001, Schwartz Publishing, Melbourne, 2002
Hancock, Keith, Discovering Monaro, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1972
BIBLIOGRAPHY 445
Hancock, W. K., Professing History, Sydney University Press, Sydney,
1970
Hanson, Victor Davis, The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in
Classical Greece, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1989
Hare, Rosalie, The Voyage of the Caroline from England to Van Diemen's
Land and Batavia in 1827—28, ed. Ida Lee, Longmans, Green,
London, 1927
Harris, Stewart, "It's Coming Yet ...' An Aboriginal Treaty within
Australia Between Australians, Aboriginal Treaty Committee,
Canberra, 1979
Hartwell, R. M., The Economic Development of Van Diemen’s Land
1820-1850, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1954
Hasluck, Paul, Black Australians: A Survey of Native Policy in Western
Australia 1829-1897, (1942) 2nd edition, Melbourne University
Press, Melbourne, 1970
Headley, John M., "The Universalizing Principle and Process: On
the West's Intrinsic Commitment to a Global Context’, Journal of
World History, 13/2 (2002), pp 291—321
Heeres, J. E., (ed.) Abel Janszoon Tasman’s journal of his discovery of Van
Diemen's Land and New Zealand in 1642, Amsterdam 1898
Henige, David, Numbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact
Population Debate, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1998
Himmelfarb, Gertude, On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on
Culture and Society, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1994
Hirst, John, ‘Aborigine and Migrants: Diversity and Unity in
Multicultural Australia’, Australian Book Review, February/March
2001
Hobart Town Almanack for the year 1830, James Ross, Hobart, 1830
Horton, D. R., ‘Tasmanian Adaptation’, Mankind, 12, 1, 1979
Hughes, Robert, The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of
Convicts to Australia 1787—1868, Harvill Collins, London, 1987
Idriess, lon L., Tracks of Destiny, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1961
Jeffreys, Lieutenant Charles R. N., Van Diemen’s Land. Geographical
and Descriptive Delineations of the Island of Van Diemen’s Land, J. M.
Richardson, Cornhill, London, 1820
Jones, Ian, Ned Kelly: A Short Life, Lothian, Melbourne, 1995
446 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
a
V g£
Jones, Rhys, “Tasmanian Aborigines and Dogs’, Mankind, 7, 1970 L
Jones, Rhys, "The demography of hunters and farmers in Tasmania’, A
in D. J. Mulvaney and J. Golson (eds.) Aboriginal Man and ;
Environment in Australia, Australian National University Press,
Canberra, 1971
Jones, Rhys, ‘Tasmanian Tribes’, appendix to Norman Tindale,
Aboriginal Tribes of Australia: Their terrain, Environmental Controls,
Distribution, Limits and Proper Names, Australian National University
Press, Canberra 1974
Jones, Rhys, ‘The Tasmanian Paradox’, in R. V. S. Wright (ed.)
Stone Tools as Cultural Markers: Change, Evolution and Complexity,
Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra, and :
Humanities Press, New Jersey, 1977
Jones, Rhys, ‘Why Did the Tasmanians Stop Eating Fish?’, in R. A.
Gould (ed.) Explorations in Ethnoarchaeology, University of New f
Mexico Press, Santa Fe, 1978
Jones, Rhys, and Tom Haydon, The Last Tasmanian, produced and
directed by Tom Haydon, Artis Film Productions, Sydney, 1978
Josephus, Flavius, The Wars of the Jews, (75-79 AD) J. M. Dent and
Sons, London, 1915
Keegan, John, A History of Warfare, Hutchinson, London, 1993
Keeley, Lawrence H., War Before Civilization, Oxford University
Press, New York 1996
Kiernan, Ben, ‘Australia’s Abori
ginal Genocides’, Bangkok Post, 10
September 2000
King, Hazel, Richard Bourke, Oxford University Press, Melbourne
1971
Knightley, Phillip, The First Casualty: The War Correspond,
‘ t
and Myth Maker from the Crimea to Ko eel
sovo, (1975) Revi
Prion, London, 2000 ) Revised edn.,
Knightley, Phillip, Australia: A Biography ofa Nation
London, 2000, p. 107 » Jonathan Cape,
Kupperman, Karen Ordahl, Settling with the Indians: The Meer:
English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580-1640, Baas of
Littlefield, Totowa, 1980 n and
Langford, Rosalind, ‘Our Heritage —
Your Playground’, 4, trali
Archaeology, 16, June 1983 tstralian
BIBLIOGRAPHY 447
Las Casas, Bartolomé de, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies,
ed. Anthony Pagden, Penguin Books, London, 1992
Lehman, Greg , ‘Our story of Risdon Cove’, Pugganna News, 34,
April 1992
Lennox, Geoff, ‘The Van Diemen’s Land Company and the
Tasmanian Aborigines: a reappraisal’, Papers and Proceedings of the
Tasmanian. Historical Research Association, December 1990
Lippmann, Lorna, Generations of Resistance: The Aboriginal Struggle for
Justice, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1981
Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett, Mentor,
New York, 1965
Louis, Wm. Roger, (ed. in chief), The Oxford History of the British
Empire, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, Vols 1—
11, 1998, Vols II-V, 1999
Macintyre, Stuart, The Reds: The Communist Party of Australia, from
Origins to Illegality, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1998
Manne, Robert, In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right,
Australian Quarterly Essay, Schwartz Publishing, Melbourne, 1,
2001
Mansell, Michael, ‘Black Tasmanians Now’, Arena, 51, 1978
Mansell, Michael, ‘Seeking Real Rights for the Aboriginal People of
Australia’, Aboriginal Provisional Government, Hobart, February
1994
Marcuse, Herbert, One Dimensional Man: The Ideology of Industrial
Society, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1964
Mazian, Florence, Why Genocide? Iowa State University Press, Des
Moines, 1990
McGowan, Angela, Archaeological Investigation at Risdon Cove Historic
Site, 1978-1980, Tasmanian National Parks and Wildlife Service,
Occasional Paper no. 10, Hobart, April 1885
McKay, Anne (ed.), Journals of the Land Commissioners for Van
Diemen’s Land 1826-28, University of Tasmania and Tasmanian
Historical Research Association, Hobart, 1962
McMahon, Anne, “Tasmanian Aboriginal Women as Slaves’,
Tasmanian Historical Research Association Papers and Proceedings, 23, 2,
June 1976
448 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL History
McQueen, Humphrey, Aborigines, Race and Racism, Penguin,
Ringwood, 1974
McQuilton, John, The Kelly Outbreak 1878-1880: The Ge
Dimension of Social Banditry, Melbourne University Press
Melbourne, 1987
ographical
J
McRae, M. D., ‘Port Davey and the South West’, Tasmanian
Historical Research Association Papers and Proceedings, 8, 3, May 1960
Melville, Henry, The History of Van Diemen’s Land from the year 1824
to 1835, inclusive, During the Administration of Lieutenant- Governor
George Arthur, ed. George Mackaness, Horwitz-Grahame, Sydney,
1965
'Memoranda relating to Van Diemen's Land', transmitted to England
by a resident upon the Island, June 1819, The Asiatic Journal,
September 1820
Meston, A. L., The Van Diemen’s Land Company 1825-1842, Queen
Victoria Museum, Launceston, 1958
Meston, Archibald, Queensland Aboriginals: Proposed System for their
Improvement and Preservation, Government Printer, Brisbane, 1895
Miller, E. Morris, ‘The Early Tasmanian Press and its Writers’, in
Charles Barrett (ed.), Across the Years: The Lure of Early Australian
Books, N. H. Seward, Melbourne, 1948
Miller, E. Morris, Pressmen and Governors: Australian Editors and Writers
in Early Tasmania, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1952
Miller, E. Morris, ‘A Historical Summary of Tasmanian Newspapers’,
Parts 1 and II, Tasmanian Historical Research Association Papers and
Proceedings, 2, 1, November 1952 and 2, 2, March 1953
Mollison, Bill, and Coral Everitt, The Tasmanian Aborigines and their
descendants (chronology, genealogies and social data), Vols 1 and 2
(edited as a combined edition by Phil Hackett), University of
Tasmania, Hobart, 1978
Montgomery, Bruce, ‘The First Patriots’, The Australian, 3 April 1995
Moran, Rod, ‘Mistaken Identity: The Massacre of A
borigines at
Mistake Creek’, Quadrant, May 2002
Morgan, Sharon, Land Settlement in Early Tasmania: Creating an
Antipodean England, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992
v
BIBLIOGRAPHY 449
Morris, James, “The Final Solution Down Under’ (1972), in F. Chalk
and K, Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide: analyses and
case studies, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1990
Mulvaney, D. J., Encounters in Place: Outsiders and Aboriginal Australians
1606-1985, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1989
Mulvaney, D. J., “Past regained, future lost: the Kow Swamp
Pleistocene burials’, Antiquity, 65, 246, March 1991
Murray, Robert, ‘Who Wasn't Told? Quadrant, November 1999
Murray, Tim, and Jim Allen, "The forced repatriation of cultural
properties to Tasmania’, Antiquity, 69, 1995
Nash, Gary B., Charlotte Crabtree and Ross E. Dunn, History on
Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past, Alfred A. Knopf,
New York, 1997
Nicholas, Stephen, (ed.), Convict Workers: Reinterpreting Australia’s
Past, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1988
Nicholls, Mary, (ed.) The Diary of the Reverend Robert Knopwood
1803—1838, Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Hobart,
1977
Nyman, Lois, The East Coasters: the Early Pioneering History of the East
Coast of Tasmania, Regal Publications, Launceston, 1990
Osborne, Lawrence, ‘The Numbers Game’, Lingua Franca, September
1998
Pagden, Anthony, Lords of all the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain,
Britain and France, 1500—1800, Yale University Press, New Haven,
1995
Péron, Francois, and Louis Freycinet, Voyage de Découvertes aux Terres
Australes ... le Géographe, et le Casuarina, 2 vols., Paris, 1807—1816
Piggin, Stuart, Evangelical Christianity in Australia: Spirit, Word and
World, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1996
Pike, Douglas (ed.) Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume I: 1788—
1850 A-H, Volume II: 1788-1850 I-Z, Melbourne University
Press, Melbourne, 1966, 1967
Pink, Kerry, "The Woolnorth “Massacre”, Circular Head History
Journal, 2, 4, November 1986
Pink, Kerry, and Annette Ebdon, Beyond the Ramparts: A Bicentennial
History of Circular Head, Tasmania, Mercury—Walch, Hobart, 1988
450. THE FABRICATION OF ALK MUGINAL HISTORY
Plomley, N. J. B., Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Paper;
Tasmanian Historica]
of George Augustus Robinson 1929-1834,
Research Association, Hobart, 1966
Plomley, N. J. B., (ed.), Friendly Mission, A Supplement, Tasm
anian
Historical Research Association, Hobart, 1971
Plomley, N. J. B., (ed.), Weep in Silence: A History of the Flinders
Island Aboriginal Settlement, Blubber Head Press, Hobart, 1987
Plomley, N. J. B., ‘Disease among the Tasmanian Aborigines’, Medical
Journal of Australia, 151, December 4-18 1989
Plomley, N. J. B., (ed.) Jorgen Jorgenson and the Aborigines of Van
Diemen’s Land, Blubber Head Press, Hobart, 1991
Plomley, N. J. B., commentary in Current Anthropology, 32, 1,
February 1991
Plomley, N. J. B., The Aboriginal/Settler Clash in Van Diemen’s Land,
Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston, 1992
Plomley, N. J. B., The Tasmanian Tribes and Cicatrices as Tribal
Indicators among the Tasmanian Aborigines, Occasional Paper 5,
Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston, 1992
Plomley, N. J. B., The Tasmanian Aborigines, Plomley Foundation,
Launceston, 1993
Pybus, Cassandra, Community of Thieves, Minerva, Melbourne, 1992
Rae Ellis, Vivienne, Trucanini:
Queen or Traitor, Aboriginal Studies
Press, Canberra, 1981
Rae-Ellis, Vivienne, Black Robinson: Protector of Aborigines, Melbourne
University Press, Melbourne, 1988
Rentis, Rex and Thea, ‘Some n
Rev. Robert Knopwood’, Pa
pers and Proceedings Tasmanian
Historical Research Association, 12, 1964—5
Reynolds, Henry, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to
the European Invasion of Australia, (1981) Penguin, Ringwood, 1982
Reynolds, Henry, ‘The Black War: A New Look
Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Papers a
4, December 1984
otes on the ancestry and life of the
at an Old Story’,
nd Proceedings, 31 ;
Reynolds, Henry, ‘Blainey and Abori
Markus and M. C. Rickleß (eds
Blainey and Asian Immigration, G
1985
ginal History’, in Andrew
.) Surrender Australia? Geoffrey
eorge Allen and Unwin, Sydney
S o LS
BIBLIOGRAPHY 451
Revnolds, Henry, Fate of a Free People, Penguin Books, R ingwood,
1995
Reynolds, Henry, ‘A War to Remember’, The Weekend Australian, 1-
3 April 1995
Reynolds, Henry, Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers and the Land, Allen and
Unwin, Sydney, 1996
Reynolds, Henry, Frontier, ABC Television, 1997
Reynolds, Henry, This Whispering in Our Hearts, Allen and Unwin,
Sydney, 1998
Reynolds, Henry, Why Weren’t We Told? A Personal Search for the
Truth about Our History, Viking, Ringwood, 1999
Reynolds, Henry, ‘From armband to blindfold’, The Australian’s
Review of Books, March 2001
Reynolds, Henry, An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in
Australia’s History, Viking, Melbourne, 2001
Ritchie, John, Lachlan Macquarie: A Biography, Melbourne University
Press, Melbourne, 1986
Roberts, Jan, Massacres to Mining: The Colonization of Aboriginal
Australia, Dove Communications, Blackburn, 1981
Robertson, George, The Discovery of Tahiti: A Journal of the Second
Voyage of HMS Dolphin Round the World 1766-1768, ed. H.
Carrington, Hakluyt Society, London, 1948
Robson, Lloyd, A History of Tasmania, Volume 1, Oxford University
Press, Melbourne, 1983
Roth, H. Ling, The Aborigines of Tasmania, F. King and Sons, Halifax,
1899
Rowley, C. D., The Destruction of Aboriginal Society: Aboriginal Policy
and Practice — Volume I, Australian National University Press,
Canberra, 1970
Ryan, Lyndall The Aboriginal Tasmanians, (1981), 2nd edn., Allen and
Unwin, Sydney, 1996
Scheding, Stephen, The National Picture, Vintage, Sydney, 2002
Shaw, A. G. L., Convicts and the Colonies, Faber and Faber, London,
1966
Shaw, A. G. L., Sir George Arthur, Bart 1784-1854, Melbourne
University Press, Melbourne, 1980
452. THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAI HisTORY
Shaw, G. P., Patriarch and Patriot: William Grant Broughton 1788.
1853, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1978
Stanner, W. E. H., After the Dreaming, 1968 Boyer Lectures,
Australian Broadcasting Commission, Sydney, 1969
Tasmanian Aboriginal Land Council, Land Rights in Tasmania,
Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, Hobart, 1986
Tindale, Norman, “Tasmanian Aborigines on Kangaroo Island’,
] ; Wha qi
Records of the South Australian Museum, Adelaide, 1937
Tindale, Norman, Aboriginal Tribes of Australia: Their terrain,
Environmental Controls, Distribution, Limits and Proper Names,
Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1974
Todorov, Tzvetan, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other,
Harper Collins, New York, 1985
Turnbull, Clive, Black War: The Extermination of the Tasmanian
Aborigines, (1948), Sun Books, Melbourne, 1974
Turnbull, Clive, ‘Tasmania: the Ultimate Solution’, in F. S. Stevens,
Racism, The Australian Experience, Vol 2 Black versus White, ANZ
Book Company, Sydney, 1972
Turner, Henry Gyles, A History of the Colony of Victoria, Vol I,
Longmans Green and Co, London, 1904
Vamplew, Wray (ed.), Australians: Historical Statistics, in Australians: A
Historical Library, Fairfax, Syme and Weldon, Sydney, 1987
von Stieglitz, K. R., A Short History of Circular Head and its Pioneers,
Circular Head Historical Society, Smithton, 1952
Walker, James Backhouse, Early
Society of Tasmania during the
Printer, Hobart, 1950
Tasmania: Papers read before the Royal
years 1888 to 1899, Government
Walker, Peter Benson, All That We
Diemen’s Land, J. Walch and Sons
Ward, Russel, The Australian Legend, Oxford University Press
Melbourne, 1958, ,
Inherit: The Walkers in Van
» Hobart, 1968
Wedge, John Helder, The Diaries of John Helder Wedge, ed. Justice
Crawford, W. F. Ellis and G. H
Stancombe, Royal Soc;
Tasmania, Hobart, 1962 Oclety of
Wentworth, William Charles, Statistical, Historical and
Description of the colony of New South Wales
1819
Political
s Whittaker, London
ay
Q;
p
BIBLIOGRAPHY 453
West, John, The History of Tasmania, (1852), ed. A. G. L. Shaw,
Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1971
Windschuttle, Elizabeth, Taste and Sctence: The Women of the Macleay
Family 1790-1850, Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales,
Sydney, 1988
Windschuttle, Keith, The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and
Social Theorists are Murdering Our Past, (1994), Encounter Books,
San Francisco, 2000
Windschuttle, Keith, ‘The problem of democratic history’, The New
Criterion, 16, 10, June 1998
Windschuttle, Keith, ‘Rewriting the history of the British Empire’,
The New Criterion, May 2000
Windschuttle, Keith, ‘The myths of frontier massacres in Australian
History, Part I: The invention of massacre stories’, Quadrant,
October 2000
Windschuttle, Keith, ‘The myths of frontier massacres in Australian
History, Part II: The fabrication of the Aboriginal death toll’,
Quadrant, November 2000
Windschuttle, Keith, ‘The myths of frontier massacres in Australian
History, Part III: Massacre stories and the policy of separatism’,
Quadrant, December 2000
Windschuttle, Keith, "Wrong on Mistake Creek’, Australian Financial
Review, 18 June 2001
Windschuttle, Keith, ‘History, Anthropology and the Politics of
Aboriginal Sovereignty’, Proceedings of the Thirteenth Conference of the
Samuel Griffith Society, Volume 13, Sydney, 2001
Windschuttle, Keith, ‘The Fabrication of Aboriginal History’, The
New Criterion, September 2001
Wright, Ronald, ‘Living on haunted land’, Times Literary Supplement,
9 February 2001
ACADEMIC THESES
Desailly, Bronwyn, The Mechanics of Genocide: Colonial Policies
and Attitudes towards the Tasmanian Aborigines 1824—1836,
Master of Arts thesis, Department of History, University of
Tasmania, 1977
454 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL History
Kemp, Susan M., John Leake 1780-1865: e
thesis, St John’s College, York, 196
Tasmania
arly settler in Tasmania,
9, held by Archives Office of
Jones, Rhys, Rocky Cape and the P
roblem of the Tasmanians, PhD
thesis, University of Sydney, 1971
Ryan, Lyndall, The Aborigines in Tasmania, 1800-1974 and their
problems with the Europeans, PhD thesis, School of Historical,
Philosophical and Political Studies, Macquarie University, 1975
Abbott, Edward 211, 213, 306
abduction of Aboriginal children
53-7
abduction of Aboriginal women
47, 53, 57—9, 383-6
Aboriginal Affairs Committee
inquiry 15, 19, 20, 42, 136,
146-8, 169, 182, 216, 265, 268,
299—300; findings 116—22;
proclamation 1830 324—5;
survey 1830 326-42; survey
conclusions 340—2; on starvation
thesis 89—90, 94—5
Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Commission 429, 434
Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Library and Information
Resource Network 426
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
Protocols for Libraries, Archives and
Information Services 426—7
Aboriginal access to territory 109—
10; attitudes to British soldiers
96—8; babies’ heads kicked off
41—2; bands, alliances for
fighting 107; casualties from
Black Line 178; casualties
immediately before Black Line
170; children baptized 56;
children, abduction of 53-7;
conflicts, reasons 108; courtship
380-1; cremation 374—5;
culture and land 103-111, 115.
404; death toll 351-64, 387-97.
deaths from disease 223-4, 226,
229, 247; delayed response to
British arrival 111-3;
destruction of crops and
livestock 94-5; disease
contracted from sealers 375;
disease on Bruny Island 204,
206; education on Flinders
Island 243-4, 245; embassy 432;
enjoyment of killing 128;
evidence before courts 220;
explanation of violence 129;
guerilla warfare thesis 64—5;
internment, rationale for 216;
killings of colonists 49, 65-75;
land ownership and trespass
103-11; land rights 404, 432;
language, vocabularies 110;
language, concept of land 110,
419; numerical ability 262;
perspective on frontier conflict
269—70, 282; perspective on
theft 332-3; pleasure in suffering
of others 109; plunder and
guerilla warfare thesis 122-9;
plunder, table of incidents 124;
policy derived from Flinders
Island 237-44; policy in.
Queensland 237-8; politics,
modern 41-2, 429-32;
456 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
population and starvation thesis
89: population decline 52-3,
58-60, 359; population decline
and disease 372—5; population of
Flinders Island 227; population
pre-colonial 364-72; resistance
thesis 61, 65; revenge as motive
for violence 120—2; separatist
policy 238—9; sovereignty, lack
of 185; starvation as cause of
Black War 87—95; taste for
flour, tea and sugar 125-6; tribes
targeted by Black Line 172;
vandalism 419—23; violence,
provoked by whites 330
Aboriginal women and sealers 57,
212-4, 247-8, 352, 432-3;
abduction of 47, 53, 57-9, 383-
6; conflict between bands over,
108; numbers with sealers 385;
preference for sealers 384;
prostitution 383-5; traded for
supplies and dogs 383; treatment
of 379-86
Aboriginal Lands Bill 2001
Aboriginal Legal Service 236
Aboriginal Provisional
Government 428
Aboriginal Studies Press 199—200
Aboriginal Tasmanians, The 27, 41,
131-2, 200
Aboriginal/Settler Clash in Van
Diemen’s Land 362, 363
Aboriginality, invention of 431-5
Aborigines, ability to count 157,
262; alcohol use 53;
anthropological studies of 105;
attitudes to British troops 96-7;
Big River tribe movements,
106; Bruny Island movements,
106; camp sites 377; captured by
Robinson at gunpoint 223;
clothing, lack of 125, 377;
Colonial Office attitude towards
194-5; coming in to white
settlements 328; deaths soon
after captured 223-4;
dependence on charity 127; diet
377-8; coming in to settlements
71; disease 53, 60; dogs 92-4;
fighting skills 353-8; genealogies
423-40; housed at Robinson’s
place 206; internecine warfare
381; lack of military
organization 102-3; lack of
patriotic sentiment 99-101: lack
of political skills 101-2; level of
violence towards settlers 331—4;
mutilation of victims 342; no
ability to make fire 377;
nomadic life 377; north coast,
movements, 106; north-west
bands movements, 106; Oyster
Bay tribe movements, 106;
peaceful relations with 61—2;
petition to Queen Victoria 1847
233; pleasure in violence 127-8;
Port Davey band movement,
106; quality of care on Flinders
Island 228—9; rationed at
Kangaroo Point 72; settlers"
attitudes towards 337—42; slow
strangulation of the mind 378;
from Sydney 152; version of
history 253; technology 377-8;
treachery 329; treaty with
British 232-7; unrecorded
killings of 358-61; white leader,
myth of 319-21; whites charged
with assault of 190—2
Aborigines Protection Society 242
Aborigines, Race and Racism 5
Abyssinia 65, 69, 74, 135, 137,
141, 170
Adventure Bay 203, 373, 376
Alcatraz 226, 405
alcohol and Aborigines 53
Allen, H. R., 379
Allen, James 240, 243
Allen, Jim 420-1
Allenvale 137-9, 388
Altmann, Carol 430
American population, pre—
colonial 364—6
American War of Independence
29
An Indelible Stain? 27, 302, 327,
347-8, 358-9
anachronisms, moral 404-6
Anson River 91, 92, 179, 212
Anstey, George 169
Ec "Thomas 72-3 141-2, 151,
os 171, 327, 330, 331, 333,
anthropological Studies of
Aborigines 105
anthropology and hi
‘ t:
anti-colonialism 103 ory 115
Anzac Day 83-4
Apache, destruction of 12
archacology 419-23
Archives Office of Tasmania 4,
10, 42, 85
Arena 432
Armenian genocide 4, 14
Arthur, Elizabeth 323
Arthur, George 4, 9, 15, 34, 35,
45, 47, 50, 52, 63, 71, 116, 129,
134, 152, 323; on Aboriginal
separation policy 239; on
Aboriginal threats to the colony
168-9; on Aborigines’ fighting
skills 354; administrative career
47, 187, 194—5; administrative
problems 411; anti-Spanish
sentiments 47; attitude to care of
Aborigines on Flinders Island
228-9; attitude towards a treaty
234—6; belief whites responsible
for black violence 192-3; in
Belize 187; motives for the
Black Line 181—4; Black Tom
interview 100-1; and Cape
Grim massacre 256, 266;
commandant at Belize 47;
commander of Black Line 174;
criticized by colonial press 310,
313; declaration of martial law
November 1828 150-1, 170,
202; Evangelicalism 47; family
background 194; funds
Robinson NE expedition 211;
military career 95—6; policy
towards Aborigines 169-74;
proclamation April 1828 149;
proclamation November 1826
134—5, 138—9; religious views
187; reward for capture of
Aborigines 154, 170-1, 194,
208—9; on Robinson’s methods
222-3; reputation salvaged by
Robinson 214; applauds and
rewards Robinson 214-5;
rewards Robinson for Big River
tribe capture 222; establishes
roving parties 151; opinion of
roving parties 153
Arthur, Walter George 233-4,
238
Asiatic Journal 94
Attwood, Bain 5, 360
Aubin, Francis 97
INDEX 457
Auschwitz concentration camp
232
Austral-Asiatic Review 313
Australia 408
Australia in the Making: A History
408
Australia; A Biography of a Nation 2
Australia: A Social and Political
History 408-10
Australian Archaeology 422
Australian Broadcasting
Corporation 88, 407
Australian Civilization 408
Australian Encyclopedia 410
Australian history, dramatic
imperative 412-4; feminism 413
Australian Institute of Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander
Studies 199, 428
Australian Legend 413
Australian Library and Information
Association 426-7, 430-1
Australian National War
Memorial 83-4, 415
Australian Native Policy 408
Australian Way of Life 408
Auxiliary Bible Society 202, 299
Avoca 327
Ayrton R. M. 35, 104
Backhouse, James 366-7, 377,
383, 384
Bacon, Jim 236
Bagdad 75, 314
Baker, Thomas 278, 389
Bamber, Mr 69
Bamiyan Buddhist statues 421
Bangkok Post 11, 21
Barnes, William 304, 306, 327,
329, 331, 334, 337, 338
Barrowville 395
Bashan Plains 292, 395
Bass, George 251
Bath 201
Bathurst, Earl 187
Batman, John 93, 127, 151-2,
156-8, 176, 180, 215, 317, 390;
killing of two Aborigines 157
Baudin, Nicolas 368
Baudin-Péron expedition 74
Bedford, William 324
Beeton, Clydia 430
Beeton, Furlie 430
10 ee € bo ee
458 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL I I STORY
Begent, Eli 68-9, 319
Belgian Congo 14, 37
Bell, Major Thomas 279
Ben Lomond 151, 157-8, 173,
176-7, 218, 390
Ben Lomond clan 176
Benfield, John 193
bias-free writing 269
Bible 39—40
Big Lagoon 160
Big River 90, 94, 303, 341
Big River tribe 44, 61, 65, 69, 70,
75, 76, 93, 100, 126, 128, 135,
137, 151, 172, 175, 176, 180,
224, 238, 284, 303, 312, 352,
353, 368-9: capture of 221-2;
movements 106
Bigge, J. T. 78, 79
Bilko, Sergeant Ernie 155
biographies of colonial governors
411
Birch, Mrs Thomas 136
Birch, Thomas 68, 74, 101, 260
Birch, Tom, see Black Tom
Birch's Bay 72, 203, 390
Birt, William 17, 22, 24, 25
Black Australians 7, 408
Black Jack 68, 70, 71, 72, 75, 134,
319
Black Legend of Spanish brutality
32-3, 47
Black Line 97, 164, 167-84, 211—
2, 214, 216, 306, 31 1-2, 313,
318, 320, 342-3, 349, 350, 354,
356, 404, 411; Aboriginal
casualties from 178; Aboriginal
casualties immediately before
170; ‘after operations’ 173;
announcement of 172; course of
174-5; dispersed 175; myths
about 167-9; objectives of 195—
6; outcomes 178-81; reasons for
decision 171; tactical plan 172—
3; and tactic of ‘decisive action’
197-8
Black Marsh 317
black power 400
Black Robinson 199-200
Black Robinson name earned 215;
the making of 211-5
Black Tom 68, 70, 73-7, 100-1,
129, 134-7, 154, 181, 207, 260,
319
Black War 13, 410
Black War 4, 13, 357, 411;
Aboriginal casualties 364; British
military casualties 97; caused by
fences 78—82; death toll 85, 352,
364; as guerilla warfare 83—130;
origins of the term 196; starving
natives thesis 87-95; summary
129—30, 398—9; was it really a
war? 196—8; white casualties 85;
white women and children
casualties 86—7
Blackmans River 176—7
Blain, Barry 419
Blainey, Geoffrey 6—7, 372, 382
Blessington 327
Bloch, Marc 414—5
bloodhounds 326, 339
Blue Hill 68
Boer War 405
Bolivar, Simon 312
Bonwick, James 20, 25, 26, 27,
41, 43, 54, 149, 175—6, 228,
229-30, 251, 281, 284, 375, 376
Boomer Creek 97
Boomer or Bruni Jack 134
Border Settler, A 35, 104
Bothwell 169, 87, 92, 26, 129,
138-9, 164, 170-1, 174, 292,
314, 316, 324, 327, 335, 389,
391, 394
Bowden, Matthew 16
Bowdler, Sandra 379
Bowen, John 22-3
Boyer lectures, ABC 88, 407
Brading, David 31
Brady, Matthew 70
Brayhelukequonne Aboriginal
band 109
Break o’Day Plains 157, 162, 176,
290, 391, 394
Brighton 150
British and Foreign Bible Society
202, 299
British Empire 29-34
British Parliamentary Papers 42, 145
British troops’ fighting ability
355-6
Broca, Dr 37
Brodie, James 126
Brodribb, William 94, 164
ei e 11
roughton, Willi
89, 169, 265, 299. 305. ed
726 findings of inquiry 11627
Brown Bess 261
Brown Mountain 74
Brown, Dee 401
Brown, James 66
Brown, Joan 56
Brown, John 51, 387
Browne, F. D. G., 377
Browne, William 306-7
Browning, J. 74
Brumby Creek 139-43
Bruni Island Jack 134, 391
Brunton, Ron 360
Bruny Island 134, 173, 193, 202-
4, 206, 210, 290-1, 368, 371,
372, 373, 383, 384-5, 388, 396
Bruny Island Aboriginal mission
216, 299
Bruny Island Aborigines 106, 216
Brushy Plains 145, 155, 392
Buchenwald concentration camp
14
Buckby, Pauline 250
Burnett, John 349
Burundi massacres 14
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
401
bushrangers 48, 51—2, 58-9, 68—9,
71, 118
Butlin, Noel 353, 366
Caiger, George 408
Cain, P. J. 30
Calder, James Erskine 35, 36, 37,
222, 355, 366—6, 67, 93, 104,
215, 249, 251, 287, 351, 357-8
Cambodian genocide 14
Cambridge University Press 405
Cameron, Patsy 267
Campbell Town 157, 159, 174,
176, 292, 308, 341, 389, 396
Campbell Town massacre 1828
146-9
Cape Grim 100, 207, 288, 371,
389, 390
Cape Grim ‘massacre’ 249-69,
332, 362
Cape Grim tribe 262
Cape Portland 91
Carey, Peter 413
Carlton 155-6
Carrotts (James Carrett) 43, 148
Cassidy, John 68
Cassrels, Deborah 14
INDEX | 459
cattle, as Aboriginal food 94
census, Australia 429, 434
Cerus 325
Chaffey, Zachariah 320
Chamberlain, Charles 251, 256-8,
261, 262-3, 267
Charlotte 229
Christianity 406, 414-6:
converting indigenous people to
30; as restraint on killings 360
Church Missionary Society 202
cicatrices 379
Circular Head 208, 210, 266
City of London 30
Clarendon 327
Clark, Julia 268
Clark, Manning 412
Clark, Richard 22, 25
Clark, Robert 233, 240, 243, 244,
246, 375
Clark, William 327, 329, 333,
335, 336, 338
Clendinnen, Inga 88
Clyde police district 172
Clyde River 65, 69, 90, 97, 129,
134, 137, 141, 171-2, 174, 297,
325-6, 327, 341,
Coal River 54, 74, 90, 392
Cochrane, Fanny 435
Cocker, Mark 12, 20-1, 26, 40,
152, 167
Coleman, Peter 408
Collins, David 16, 19, 20, 51,
118, 188-90
Colley, Thomas 73
colonial press, attitudes towards
Aborigines 308-22
Colonial Office, London, attitude
to Aborigines 194—5
colonial rule, attitudes to indigines
188-9, legitimization of 184-6
Colonial Times 35, 65, 75, 129,
136, 138, 159, 164, 301, 308,
309-11, 313, 315-22, 342-3
Columbus, Christopher 364
Commonwealth Department of
Aboriginal Affairs 424
Commonwealth Literary Fund
407
Commonwealth Scientific and
Industrial Research
Organization 407
communism, fall of 402
Communist Party of Australia 401
——————— er 08 BÓ d
4600 Tur FABRICATION OF Alx JUGINAL HISTORY
Community of Thieves 27, 250
Compassion 406
Conciliation, The 215
Connor, John 152
Constitution Hill 156
Contemporary Arts Society 407
convict transportation 34
convicts absconding in early
colony 48
Cook, James 112, 185
Copperfield, David 201
Cortés, Hernand 167
Cottrell, Anthony 224
Court House, Hobart 342, 346
Cox, James 327, 333, 337, 339
342, 349
Coyne Hill 97
Crawford, R. M. 407-8
Cressy 312
Crook, John 127
Cross Marsh 74
Cuningham, Mrs 85, 219-20
Curr, Edward 80, 192, 249-50,
255-6, 262-3, 264-8, 296, 301—
3, 310, 327, 328, 330, 332-3,
334, 338-9, 356
Curthoys, Ann 400
,
D'Entrecasteaux, Bruny 368
D'Entrecasteaux Channel 72
Dalrymple, Captain Patrick 140
Dalrymple, Dolly 127
Daniels, Mary 87, 171
Danvers, John 325
Das Voltas Bay 184
Davey, Thomas 54—5, 58, 79118,
145, 189; declaration of martial
law 58—9
Davies, David 26, 149, 168—9,
175-6, 366
Davis, William 202
Davison, Graeme 168
Deane, Sir William 1-3, 7-8, 415
Dee Hills 317
Dee River 316-7
Deloraine 140, 275, 278, 398
Den Hill 283
Denholm, David 261
Dennistoun 87, 171, 327
Derwent Star and Van Diemen’s
Land Intelligencer 51, 54
Desailly, Bronwyn 250
Destruction of Aboriginal Society 410
Devil's Island 226, 405
Diamond, Jared 14, 227
Dick 73, 311
Dickens, Charles 201
Dickinson, Loftus 243
Dilthey, Wilhelm 104
disease, and Aboriginal population
decline 372—5; and deaths of
captured Aborigines 223-4; and
deaths on Flinders Island 226,
247, 229, 230-1
Dixson, Miriam 413
DNA testing 435
Dobyns, Henry 364—5
dogs 330, 336; acquired by
Aborigines for hunting 92-4; at
Aboriginal camps 156; eating
natives 38—9, 43
Dominican order of Spain 32-3
Donaldson, Captain Vance 306-7
Doughboys 252, 254, 257, 259,
268
Dove, Thomas 244, 435
Dowsett, Samuel 315
Doyle, James 70
dramatic imperative in Australian
history 412-4
Dray 376
Drew, Robert 306
Dromedary Mountain 74
Dry, Richard 35, 63-4, 78-9,
104, 327, 328, 331, 333, 335,
337, 340
Dugdale, Mr 147
Dunnett, Gary 379
Duterrau, Benjamin 215, 432
Eaglehawk Neck 172-3
East Bay Neck 172
East Pakistan genocide 14
Eastern Marshes 70, 72, 91, 151—
2, 154, 155, 159, 161, 162, 164,
292,
Ebdon, Annette 250
Echuca Abori
421
Economic development of Van
Diemen's Land 53
Eddystone Point 288, 389, 435
Edgerton, Robert 382
Elder, Bruce 20-1, 25, 149
Eldershaw, M. Barnard
Elizabeth River 389 is
ginal Co-operative
Emu Bay band 267
enclosure of landed property 79
82
encomienda 31, 32
Enlightenment 398, 406, 412;
humanism of 298-30
Epping Forest 289
Espie, George 94, 303, 307
Espie, John 395
ethnic cleansing 168, 173-4, 404—
5
ethnographical studies of
Aborigines 105
Eumarrah, see Umarrah
Eureka Stockade 413
Evangelicalism 33, 187, 242, 297—
300, 398, 412; and English poor
201; Hobart societies 202
Evans, Robert 21, 67
Everitt, Coral 423-4
Everitt, James 290, 396
Everitt, Jem 435-6
Executive Council of Van
Diemen’s Land 98, 120, 171
192, 225, 236, 349
extermination thesis 340—2
Fanny 252
Fanon, Frantz 401
Fatal Shore, 12, 351, 412
Fate of a Free People 27, 83-4, 101,
120, 222, 227, 232, 236-7, 327,
359, 366, 386, 409
Fawkner, John 315
Federal Court 430, 436
Fein, Helen 14
Fels, Marie 43, 50-2
feminist historians 413
feminist interpretations of
Aboriginal women 267-8
fences 78-82
fences, ‘American manner' 80
Fenton, James 251
Field, William 81
57th Regiment 1
Fingal 160
First Fleet 141
i 9
Flavius Josephus 3
Flinders Island 222, 321, 352, due
374, 376; and Aboriginal poucy
60, 162-3, 357
INDEX 461
237-44; Aboriginal population
227; Aboriginal settlement 4,
13, 44, 217, 226-32; board of
inquiry 1839 245-7; climate
230; medical care 231; work
done by Aborigines 231
Flinders, Matthew 251
flour, poisoned 270, 274
footnotes 132-3
Forestier Peninsula 123, 172, 175,
394
40th Regiment 71, 74, 97, 140,
142, 146-8, 159-63, 270, 276—
7, 279-80, 290, 355, 357, 363,
391
48th Regiment 144-6
Fossey, Joseph 256
Foxcroft, E. J. B. 408
Frankland, George 304, 305-6,
323
Franklin, Lady Jane 233, 241
Franklin, Sir John 246-7; appoints
inquiry into Flinders Island 245;
endorses Robinson 241-2; visits
Flinders Island 240-1
Franks, Edward 327, 328, 331,
332, 334, 336, 339
Frederick Henry Bay 49, 387
Fredrickson, George M. 300
Freedom rides 400
Friend, Matthew 245
Friendly Mission 27, 282, 285
Friendly Mission, first expedition
207
Friendship 208-9
Frontier 301
Frontier ABC-TV 88
frontier warfare, lack of 196-8
Furneaux Islands 45, 212-4, 248,
375
Gaddafi, Colonel 428
Gambell, Bob 290, 396
Gambia River 184
Gangell, William 85, 97, 175, 394
Gascoigne, John 298, 300, 412
Gatehouse, Silas 320
Gaudron ME ——
eary, Anne 86, d
aer pen] Joseph 191, 304, 305-
6, 313, 343-4, 345, 346-8
genealogies of sealers and
Aboriginal women 42.
462 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
genocide 2, 4, 13-14, 399; at
Cape Grim 250; discussed by
settlers 303-8
gentlemanly capitalism 30
George Town 211, 291, 384
George's River 154
German South-West Africa 12, 37
Getley, George 51, 54
Gibson, David 81, 276, 278
Glenelg, Lord 242
Glorious Revolution of 1688 30
Glover, Captain William 160, 293
Glover, John 432
Goldie, Alexander 255-6, 263,
264, 288, 390, 392
gonorrhea 376
Gordon, James 135-6, 138
Gough, Esther 85, 86, 150, 342
Gould, Bob 88
governors, colonial, biographies
411
Grafton, Anthony 132-3
Grant, Mr 147
Grattan, Hartley 408
Gray, William 176, 327, 328, 334,
337, 338
Great Australian Silence 406-11,
415
great debate Hobart 1830 342-9
Great Island, see Flinders Island
Great Lake 162
Great Lake band 107
Great Swan Port 327
Great Swan Port band 176
Great Swan Port correspondent
159—65, 162-3, 165, 321
Greek city states, military strategy
197
Green Ponds 73, 86, 156, 164,
320, 327, 341, 390
Greenwood, Gordon 408-10
Grindstone Bay 68
Groom, Ray 15, 28
Guardian, The 12, 20
guerilla warfare thesis 64-5, 75-6,
95-116, 353-8, 404; and
plunder motive 122-4
Guevara, Che 404
Guidelines for Bias- Free Writing 269
Guilliatt, Richard 430
Gulliver’s Travels 41
Gun Carriage Island 45, 216, 238
Gunn, Mr 90
guns, and capture of Aborigines
by Robinson 223; less deadly
than spears 355-6; limitations of
260-1; of little use to
Aborigines 125; swivel type
272-3
Gunshannon, William 256, 258,
261, 267
Hackett, James 346-7
Hackett, Phil 423-4
Hakluyt, Richard 30
Hall, Ben 51
Hall, Richard 360
Hallpike, C. R. 382
Hamilton 137, 174, 396
Hampshire Hills 258, 271, 395
Hancock, Keith 82, 405
hand in the trap 283-4
Hanskey, Gotfried 71
Hanson, Victor Davis 197
Harling, John 140
Harris, H. L. 408
Harris, Stewart 41
Hartwell, R. M. 79
Hasluck, Paul 7, 408
hawthorn hedges 80
Haydon, Tom 13, 14, 27, 42, 65,
432
Headley, John 33
Heagon, Paddy 271-2, 288
Heatherlie 202
hedgerows 78, 80, 82
Hellyer, Henry 271, 280
Henderson, John 323
Henige, David 365
High Court of Australia 414;
Mabo decision 6; Wik decision
6, 200
Himmelfarb, Gertrude 132
Hirst, John 168, 434
Hispaniola atrocities 38
Historical Records of Australia 145
History Department, University of
Melbourne 143
History of Tasmania (Robson) 27,
44, 132, 143, 250
History of Tasmania (West) 79
History of Van Diemen’s Land 35,
310
history, footnotes 132-3
Hitler, Adolf 9, 13
Ho Chi Minh 404
lobart Hospital bodies 19, 21
Heat settlement limits 1811 52
Sut Town Almanack 281
Hobart Town Courier 90, 123, 136
138, 141, 150, 154, 160, 161 i
164, 281, 284; 308, 315-22
323, 325, 347-8
ise Town Gazette 62, 69, 92
36, 138, | 2 |
s 41, 203, 214, 313,
Hobbs, James 43-4, 70, 72,90
156, 383; on Oyster Bay
Massacre 1815 144-6
Hobler, George 76, 355
Hodgson Mrs Edmund 68, 76
Holocaust 404
Hone, Joseph 191, 323-4, 343
Hooper, Corporal 97
Hooper, James 171, 317, 349
Hopkins, A. G. 30
Horne, Benjamin 343-4, 347
Horton, D. R. 378
Horwitz, Tony 11
Houyhnhnms 41
Howard, John 415
Howe, Michael 59, 67, 69, 319
Howells, Humphrey 169, 292,
393, 397
Hoxton 202
Hudspeth, John 327, 330, 331,
332, 333, 334, 336, 338, 340,
342
Hughes Robert 12, 226, 351, 405,
412
Huguenot massacre 14
Hull, George 306
humanitarianism 298—300, 406
Humphries, Barry 407-8
Hunter Island 374
hunting of kangaroos 48—50
Huon River 291, 396
D
Idriess, Ion, 8
Incas 14
incongruities, conceptual 404-6
Independent 311, 315, 322
Independent 322
influenza 372, 374
Institute of Aboriginal Studies 423
integration 400
Inter Caetera 31
interest group politics 401, 403
Introducing Australia 408
INDEX 463
Isis 150
islanders 248, 433
Islington 201
Jack 73, 311
Jackson, Captain George 286
Jeanneret, Henry 233
Jeffreys, Charles 20, 24, 334, 381
Jemmie 151
Jenny 128
Jericho 61, 65, 67, 68, 71, 317,
319, 329
Jerusalem 74, 392
Jewish Museum, Berlin 2
Jews, destruction of by Romans
39
John, Thomas 251, 289, 394
Johnstone, Archibald 202
Jones, Ian 413
Jones, Rhys 13, 14, 20, 26, 27,
40-4, 45, 47, 65, 378, 432; on
Aboriginal land ownership and
trespass 105-9; on Aboriginal
population 366-71
Jones, Robert 69, 73, 260
Jordan River 69, 137, 174
Jorgenson, Jorgen 76, 89, 125,
151, 153-5, 180, 225, 251, 325
Journals of the Land Commissioners
141
jumbo 383
kangaroo hunt 48-50, 88-9, 93
Kangaroo Point 72, 73, 76, 134
kangaroos consuming crops 90
Kearney's bog 154
Keegan, John 197
Keeley, Lawrence 382
Kelly Basin 207
Kelly, David 306
Kelly, James 19, 21, 24, 383
Kelly, Ned 413
Kelly, Ned 51
Kemp, Anthony Fenn 343, 344,
347
Kemp, Susan M. 260
Kent Group islands 290, 396
Kenzie, Jonathan 391
Khan, Genghis 198
Kickerterpoller, see Black Tom
Kiernan, Ben 11, 21, 26, 405
Kija people 2, 7
464 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
Kimball, Roger, 10
King, George 278
King Island 309, 318
King, Philip Gidley 19
King’s Orphan school, Hobart 56
Kinsey, Jonathan 72
Knight, William 140, 143, 276-7,
279
Knightley, Phillip 2, 9
Knopwood Robert 16, 18-19, 20,
21, 48-50, 55, 56, 67, 127, 145,
210
Kow Swamp skeletons 421—2
Kubmanner 219, 268
Kupperman, Karen 30
La Trobe University 421, 427
LaBarre, Weston 382
Labillardiére, Jacques de 105
Lagoons, The 217
Laing, Alexander 74, 135
Lairmairrener band 110
Lake Echo 75, 92, 126, 174—5,
178, 180, 222
Lake River 96, 139-43, 174, 312
Lake Sorell 65, 164, 174
Lake, Marilyn 413
Lambe, David 279
land grants to settlers 77-8
land in Aboriginal vocabulary 110,
419
land in Aboriginal culture 103-
111, 404
land rights 323, 404, 432
land settlement 1815 145-6
Land Settlement in Early Tasmania
27,82
Langford family assault and killing
86
Langford, Rosalind 422-5, 430-1
Langton, Marcia 426
Lanne, William 127
Las Casas, Bartolomé de 32-40,
47, 237, 398
Lascaux cave paintings 421
Lascelles, Thomas 137
. Last of the Tasmanians 20, 37, 168,
176, 228, 281
Last Tasmanian 13, 20, 27, 42, 432
Launceston 63, 150, 295, 306-7,
392
Launceston Advertiser 36, 104, 159,
164, 315, 318
Launceston Road 218, 290;
killings on 176-7
Laycock’s Falls 277
Leake, John 260
Legislative Council 327, 349
Lehman, Greg 12, 21
Leith 202
Lelli Bay 202, 204
Lemkin, Raphael 14
Lemon, Richard 51, 319, 387
Lennox, Geoff 256, 263, 266-7
Lia Pootah community 429, 434
Limogana 176—7
Linenerrinneker 208
Lipmann, Lorna 41
Little Swan Port 68, 159, 283,
293, 392
Locke, John 31, 186
Lockyer, Ensign 163
Long Swamp 275-6, 289
Longford 139
Lord, David 80
Lord, Edward 66, 81
Louis, William Roger 29, 405
Lovely Banks 317
Low Rocky Point 223
Lowe, Watkin 390
Lucy 421
Luggernemenener 180
Lyne, William 159
Lyttleton, William 306
Mabo judgement of High Court
2,6
Macintyre Stuart 168, 401
Macquarie Harbour 71, 113, 134,
150, 207, 222, 223, 370-1, 374,
383
Macquarie, Lachlan 58, 72, 346
Macquarie Plains 74, 75, 137
Macquarie River 72, 174
Macquarie University 191
Madagascar 184
Mannalargenna
(Mannerlelargenner )176—7, 380
Manne, Robert 360
Mansell, Clyde 429
Mansell, Edward 288, 389, 430,
435
Mansell, Michael 428—432, 436
Maoris 112
Marcuse, Herbert 400
Maria Island 390
martial law declaration in 1815
SN-9
Martial law declaration in 1828
150-1, 170, 361
Mary Ann, alias Walyer 381
Mary, Michael Howe's mistress 59
Mary, traded for bag of flour 383
Massachusetts Bay Company 31
Mather, Cotton 37
Matson-Green, Vicki 267
Mauritius 66, 127
Maynard, Gary 429-30
Maynard, Ricky 236-7
Mazian, Florence 14
McCarthy, Patrick 70, 71
McCasker, Mary 128
McCasker, Patrick 128
McGuinness, Paddy 10, 88
McKay, Alexander 36, 208, 215
257, 285, 292, 395
McMinn, Thomas 67
McNeill, William 365
McOwen, Patrick 391
McPherson, Kaye 429
McQueen, Humphrey 5-6, 67
McQuilton, John 413
Mead's Bottom 314
Meander River 139, 140, 174
Melbourne University Press 199
Melville, Henry 26, 35, 37, 64,
67, 101, 104, 126, 129, 190,
251, 310, 315-6, 322, 366-7
Merchant of Venice, The 44
Mercury, Hobart 28
Meredith, George 69, 97, 145-6,
291; 327, 330, 340, 342, 391,
396
Merkel, Ron 429
Mersey River 390
Meston, A. L. 251-3
Meston, Archibald 237-8
Michael Howe's Marsh 69
military posts 1828 150
Millers Bluff 74
Milligan, Joseph 366-7
Mills Plains 342
Missionary Bay 202, 204, 373
Mistake Creek massacre 2, 7-8,
403, 415
Mitchell Library 10, 427
Mollison, Bill 423—30
Monaghan, Mrs 355
Montagu, Algernon 220
Montagu, Captain John 140
>
INDEX 465
Montgomery, Bruce 4, 84
Montpeliatter 380
Moonnirremener band 12
Moonbird People 432.
Moore, William 16-19, 20-1, 24,
25, 41
Moran, Rod, 8
Morgan, Sharon 77-8, 80—2, 87,
95; 27; 100, 122, 146, 181-2.
191-2, 318, 355, 405-6; on
Aboriginal land ownership 110;
on extirpation thesis 341; on
white supremacy 296—7, 300,
348
Moriarty, Captain William 279,
286
Morley, Mr 147
Morris, James (Jan) 4
Morven 392
Mosquito Coast 187, 202
Moulteherlargener 220
Moulting Lagoon 151-2, 159-63
Mount Cameron west 207, 289,
371, 388
Mount Victory 249, 253, 254,
256, 258-9, 265
Mountgarrett, Jacob 16, 17, 19,
20, 24, 25
Muddy Plains 67
Mulgrave, Peter 139—40
Mulvaney, D. J. 254, 255, 259,
419-22
Munro, James 45-6
Murderers Plains 80
Murray, Robert 410
Murray, Robert Lathrop 182,
313-4, 315, 346-8
Murray, Sir George 195, 235
Murray, Tim 420
Murrayfield 202, 418
Museum of Victoria 421
muskets, see guns
Musquito 65—72, 75, 129, 154,
181, 260, 319, 329, 336
My Australia 408
My Lai massacre 14
Napoleonic wars 62, 64-5, 95-6
Narrucker 208
Nash, Gary 403
National Library of Australia 427—
8
National Museum of Australia 2, 8
we Qr 06 06 06 | 1)
466. THE FAMUCATION OF Ann MUGINAL ENS TORY
Nati Tribes of Tasmania 36, 351,
357
Nazi Germany 2, 8, 13, 398
Ned the sealer 306
New Granada atrocities 38
New Nortolk 52, 53, 55, 59. 69,
137, 150, 327, 387, 388
New Norfolk police district 172
New Zealand 112, 127
Newell, Paddy 389
Newspaper reports, credibility
164—5
newspapers, attitudes towards
Aborigines 308-22
Nicaragua 202
Nicermenic 208
Nicholas, Stephen 412
Nicholson, Richard 256
Nickolls, Henry 231
Nile River 293, 342
Ninenee band 380
Noland Bay 180, 219
Nootka Sound 184
Norfolk Island 57, 226
Norfolk Island convicts and
settlers 53
Norfolk Plains 53, 97, 139, 141,
142, 143, 150
north coast aboriginal bands 106,
107-8
North Esk River 395
north midlands tribe 77, 139
north people 270-1
Northern Territory Library 427
Northover, Thomas 201-2
North-west aboriginal bands 106
Norwood 69
Numbers from Nowhere 365
numerical ability of Aborigines
262
O’Connor, Roderic 96, 126, 299
Oatlands 65, 68, 69, 70, 72, 91,
92, 150, 160, 171, 327, 341,
342, 384
Oatlands correspondent 161, 162
Oatlands police district 172
Obeyesekere, Gananath 114
Officer, Robert 245
Old Beach 68
Olympic Games, Sydney 11
102nd Regiment 16, 343, 387
Orielton 393
Orphan School 56, 224, 22h,
233-4, 244
orthodox school of Aboriginal
history, assumptions 165,
defined 26-8, standards 166
Osborne, Lawrence 68, 69, 71,
319, 329, 365
Other Side of the Frontier 6
Our Southern Half Castes 40%
Ouse River, see Big River
Owen, Sir John 91
Oxford Companion to Australian
History 143-4, 168, 178, 254,
366
Oxford History of the British Empire
405
Oyster Bay 43, 50, 73, 97, 142,
150, 151, 157, 161, 174, 291,
341, 352, 388, 391, 396
Oyster Bay massacre 1815 144—6
Oyster Bay tribe 65, 71, 74, 75,
93, 76, 77, 100, 135-6, 159,
172, 175, 176, 180, 210, 222,
283-4, 319, 368—9;
movements, 106
Oyster Cove 227, 233, 376
Pagden, Anthony 31, 33, 186
Pagerly 376
Pallawah people 429
Pallawah women 267
Pallitore group 280-1
Palm Island 238
Parish, James 213
Parker, James 97, 220, 312
Parkes, Mr 69
Partridge Island 134
pastoralism 53, 78; and conflict
with Aborigines 62-3
Paterson, William 187
Patmore, Bruce 430
Pauline 44
Payne Bay 207
Pea Jacket Point 217
Pearson, Temple 304—5, 327, 335,
338
Pedder, John 349
Peevay 207, 262
Pendowtewer 208
Penguin Island 381
Peninsula War 64, 95-6
Penn, William 32
Pennemukeer people 254
Penny Royal Creck 74
Peron, Francois 105, 379
Phillip, Arthur 188
Philosophical Society 323
Pieman River 223, 293
Pieman River band 107
Piguin, Stuart 297-8
Pink, Kerry 250, 263-4
Piper River 290
Pitcairn, Thomas 317
Pitt Water 74, 75, 67, 123, 135-6,
155
Pizarro, Francisco 167
Pleasant Hills 392
Plomley, N. J. B. 21, 25, 27, 46,
58, 62, 63, 65, 74, 85, 100, 111,
143, 152, 161, 191, 227, 307;
on Aboriginal culture and
attitudes to land 115; on loss of
Aboriginal culture 433; on
Aboriginal death toll 361—4; on
Aboriginal killings 360-1; on
Aboriginal population 366-71;
on Black Line 178; on Cape
Grim massacre 253, 254; edition
of Robinson’s diaries 269; on
extirpationists 296; on
extirpation thesis 341, 348; on
guerilla warfare thesis and
plunder motive 122-4; on hand
in the trap 284; on number of
Aborigines captured 224—5; on
petition to Queen Victoria 233;
on Quamby the resistance leader
281; on Robinson’s deception
220; on starving natives thesis
87, 91; on skeletal material
return 420
plunder thesis of Aboriginal
violence 116—29
pneumonia 374
Point Hibbs 223-4
Point Hibbs band 370
poisoned flour 270, 274
Pol Pot 4, 398
politicisation of history 5-7, 400,
402-4
Ponsonby, William 127
population, Aboriginal 52-3, 58-
60, 364—72
population decline and starvation
thesis 89
population of Americas pre-
colonial 364—6
INDEX 467
population, sheep 62
Population, white 62
Port Dalrym les
: Ple 51, 111, 21¢
387 », 383,
Port D; ` b;
on ilrymple band 139, 143,
Port Davey 205, 293, 373
Port Davey band 107, 205-6, 210
221, 370-1; movements, 106;
murder of settlers 113-4;
Robinson’s expedition to 207
Port Phillip Protectorate for
Aborigines 242, 244, 247
Port Sorell 93. 312
Present State of Van Diemen's Land
81
Preservation Island 45
press, colonial 308-22
Press reports, credibility of 164-5
proofs of killings, standards 165
Prosser Bay 123, 174, 179
Prosser Plains 356
Prosser River 145
prostitution of native women 203,
206
Psalm no. 137 39
Punch the stock-keeper 275-80,
435
Punt South Esk 150
Pybus, Cassandra 27, 28, 226-7,
250, 254, 264, 434-5
Pyne, James Baker 201
Quadrant 359-60
Quamby Bluff 143, 280, 289
Quamby Plains 327, 331
Quamby the resistance leader
280-1
Queen Adelaide 44
Queen Victoria, petition to 233
Racecourse 395
Radford, John 68
Rae-Ellis, Vivienne 35, 116, 199-
201, 203, 228, 376; on Flinders
Island settlement 239-42
Raggatt, Howard 2, 9
Rawson, Geoffrey ae
ney, David 159, 392
a Bay 207, 288, 373,
396
STORY
468 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINA! ri
red coats and British troops
fighting ability 355
Rentis, Rex and Thea 56
res nullius 185-6
Retreat, The 271—2, 288
Reynolds, Henry 3, 4, 6, 14, 27
8, 34, 61-2, 63, 78 168: on
Aboriginal death toll 352, 358-
9: on Aboriginal killing of white
women and children 86-7; on
Aboriginal population 364, 366;
autobiography 401, 411; on
Broughton inquiry 117; on
Cape Grim massacre 254; on
colonial press 308-14; on
Edward Curr 301-3; on disease
and Aboriginal population
decline 372: on dispersal of
military 279; extirpation thesis
301-14; 341; fencing thesis, 77—
82; on Flinders Island settlement
227-32; on genocide 195, 296;
On Great Australian Silence
406-11; guerilla warfare thesis
83-103, 353-8; on motives for
the Black Line 181—2; opinion
of Black Line 178-9; on petition
to Queen Victoria 233; on
politicization of history 5-7,
400, 402-4: on George
Augustus Robinson 200, 222-3;
on roving parties 166; on
Lyndall Ryan 131—2; on treaty
232-6, on war memorial for
black resistance fighters 84
Richmond 155
Richmond police 136, 172
Riddle, John 288, 389, 436
Riley, Alexander 111
Ringarooma Bay 91
Risdon Cove 11-26, 118, 119,
137, 268, 330, 334, 343, 362,
387, 417-8
Ritchie, Thomas 81, 140, 278,
389
Ritchie’s Sugarloaf 275, 289
Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold 12,
167
RMIT University 427
Robbins Island 173, 207-9, 210,
256, 257, 262, 380
Robbins Island tribe 208-9, 262
Roberts, Jan 42
Robertson, Gilbert 35, 64, 07,77,
100, 104, 151-6, 162, 205, 207,
210, 325; on Richmond
massacre 136-7; on Campbell
Town massacre 146-9
Robertson, William 147-8
Robinson, George Augustus, 4,
27, 35-7, 101, 104, 357, 398.
435; on Aboriginal death toll
284—94; on Aborigines desire
for flour, tea and sugar 125-6;
on Aborigines’ fighting skills
354; on Aboriginal patriotism
99—100; on Aboriginal
perspectives 269-70, 282; on
Aboriginal revenge 120; on
Aboriginal vocabulary 205; ships
Aborigines for rewards 208;
advice on treaty 235; Big River
tribe capture 221—2; brings Dig
River tribe into Hobart 93; his
biography 199—202; and Black
Line 179-81; Bruny Island
mission 193, 202—6; on Cape
Grim massacre 253-64, 267-9;
captives at Noland Bay 218-9;
captures aborigines at gunpoint
223; commandant of Flinders
Island 217, 226—7; departs
Flinders Island 244; deception
over murders by blacks 221;
deception over Port Davey mob
205-6; deception over Umarrah
219-20; detecting Aborigines by
camp fires 123—4; estimates of
Aboriginal numbers 211, 225; as
ethnographer 105; and
Evangelicalism 299; first
expedition to Port Davey 205,
207; first expedition ends 211;
first genuine captives at Anson
River 212, 218; and native
game supply 90—4; houses
Aborigines in Hobart 206;
accused of failure by board of
inquiry 245—7; on Launceston
extirpationists, 295, 306—7; on
Launceston Road killings 177;
meets Arthur at Ross 211;
number of Aborigines captured
224-6; numbers of Aboriginal
bands 367-8; offered Port
Phillip Protectorate 242; report
on Flinders Island 227-8, 241—
470 "THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
Secretary of State for Colonies
194—5
Settlement Point 217, 226
Settlers, attitudes towards
Aborigines 295—308, 322-49;
political influence of 349-50
Shannon River 75, 1 69, 174, 178,
292, 345, 388, 393, 397
Sharland, William 172
Shaw, A. G. L. 411
Shaw, Edwina 434
sheep, as Aboriginal food 94; meat
breeds 78; Merino breed 78;
population 62
Sherwin, John 297, 314
Shiners, Corporal John 140, 277,
279, 355
Short Account of the Destruction of
the Indies, A 32
Shylock 44
Simpson, James 81, 157, 159, 276,
394
Simpsons Plains 276
6th Regiment of Foot 25
63rd Regiment 97, 160, 357
slavery, abolition of 187, 298-9
smallpox 365, 372
Smith, Henry 140
Smith, John 30
Smith, John, kangaroo hunter 142
Smith, Malcolm Laing 140, 275,
277-8, 331
Smith, no record 139-40
Smith, Patsy Adam 432-3
Smuts, Jan Christian 405
Sorell 63, 74, 168, 176, 179, 182,
196, 392, 394
Sorell Plains 71
Sorell, William 55-6, 118, 119,
189
South East Cape 113
South Esk River 174, 176, 180,
327
Spanish conquest of Mexico 12
30
Spanish Empire 30-1
Spartacus 414
Spott 49
Spring Hill 171, 317
St James Church, Sydney 117
St John's Church, Launceston 318
St Mary's Plains 292, 395
St Patrick's Head 91, 163, 174
St Paul's Plains 150
St Paul's River 159, 162-4, 392
St Valentine's Peak 271
Stalin, Joseph 398
Stannard, David 365
Stanner, W. E. H. 407-9
starving natives thesis 87—95
State Library of Victoria 427
Stephen, Alfred 303, 307, 344-5,
347-8
Stewart, John 127
Stocker, William 21, 81, 276-7
Stocker’s Tier 388
Stoney Creek band 77, 151, 176,
219
straitsmen 248, 433
Stringer, Chris 419
Sugar Loaf Hill 391
Suicide Bay 254—5, 258
Sullivan's Cove 16
Summers, Anne 413
Surrey Hills 91, 330, 395
survey of settler opinion 1830
326-42
Swan Island 180, 212-3, 215,
216-8, 380-1
Swan Port 69
Swan, Oliver 306
Sweetling, Richard 256, 392
Swift, Jonathan 41
Swinburne University of
Technology 427
swivel gun massacre 271—3
Sydney Morning Herald 20
Tahiti 112
Taj Mahal 421
Talbot, William 146, 162
Taliban, Islamic 421
Tamar 222, 374
Tamar River 306, 327, 363
Tamburlaine 198
tame mobs 67, 71, 112, 134, 328,
336
Tasman Peninsula 172-3, 216,
318
Tasman, Abel 112
Tasmanian 35, 313-4, 321-2, 325,
346, 348
Tasmanian and Austral—Asiatic
Review 315
Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre Inc
422-5, 427-31, 434-5
e)
aumaman Aboriginal Land
Council 419-21
avmanian. Aboriginal Legal
Nervive 417
Taverantan Aborigines and Their
Deseenidants 423
awmanian Department of Parks,
Wildlite and Heritage 417
"asmanian Minister for
Environment and Land
Management 420
‘asmanian Museum and Art
Gallery 431
Tasmanian State Library 427-8
Taylor, James 68
Tea Tree Bush 75
Teague 71
Tencotemainner 380
This Whispering in our Hearts 200
Thomas, Bartholemew 97, 220,
311-2
Thomas, Jocelyn 312, 349
Thompson, George 345, 347
Thomspon, Mary Ann 435
Thorne, Alan 419, 421
Thylacine 81, 94
Tibbs, William 191
ugers, Tasmanian 81, 94
Tillarbunner 218
Times Literary Supplement 12
Tindale, Norman 13
Titus Vespasianus 39
Todorov, Tzvetan 39
Tongerlongerter 283-4
Toogee band 380
Tooms Lake killings 160-2, 279—
80, 363, 391
town versus countryside 322-6
treaty between British and
Tasmanian Aborigines 200,
232-7; Aboriginal Legal Service
opinion 236—7; Arthur's attitude
towards 234—6; Robinson’s
advice 235—6; non-existence of
232-7
Trinca, Helen 7
Triton 202
Truganini 13, 199—200, 203, 205,
376, 384; as 'guerilla warrior
102-3
Trumpeter Bay 202
tuberculosis 374
Tucker, Thomas 288, 389, 456
Tuffett, Mr 69
-A
~
~
-—
INDEX 471
Tullochgorum 162
l'unbridge 141
Tunnerminnerwait 262
‘urnbull Adam 147 5
, Ad; 47-8, 3 =
6, 347 denis
I urnbull, Clive 13, 20-1, 26, 40
67, 149, 178, 226, 228, 230,
251, 405, 410
Turner, Henry Gyles 237
Uganda massacres 14
Ukrainian famine 1932 14
Umarrah 77, 151, 155, 156, 207,
219-20; death of 221
University of New South Wales
427
University of Tasmania 423, 427—
8
unrecorded killings on frontier
358-61
Urghart, Mr 141
Valjean, Jean 414
Van Diemen, George 55
Van Diemen's Land Company
207—10, 215, 249-59, 264-8,
288-9, 292, 301, 328, 332, 356,
362, 389, 390, 394, 395
Van Diemen’s Land Mechanics
Institute 202
Van Diemen’s Land Society 323
Vansittart 374
Vansittart Island, see Gun Carnage
Island
venereal disease among Aborigines
375-6, 383
verstehen 104
vigilantes 139, 143
Vinegar Hill 413
Von Stieglitz, K. R. 250
Walker, George Washington 283,
366-7
Walker, James Backhouse 251,
367, 372
Wall Street Journal 11, 15
Wallis, Samuel 112
Walpole, Edward 123, 174-5,
390, 394
Walsh, Matthew 244
Walyer 267, 381, 384
372. THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY
Ward, Russel 413
Waring, Robert 387
Waterhouse Island 219-20, 223
Weavis, John 256
Weep in Silence 27, 224, 282, 285,
433
Wells, Thomas 137-8
Wentworth, William Charles 15,
18
Wesleyan Missionary Society 202
West Point band 107
West, John 51, 54, 67, 79, 82, 93,
136, 229, 251
Westbury 140, 272, 275, 327
Western Lagoon 139, 143
Western Marshes 140, 142-3,
270-4, 289, 290, 356, 359, 389;
massacres on 275-80
Western River 140, 391
Whitcomb, George 306-7
white leader of Aborigines 319-21
White, Edward 19, 22-4
Whitefoord Hills 193, 278, 393
Whitlam government 432
Why Weren’t We Told? 400, 406
Widowson, H. 81
Wik judgement of High Court 6,
200
Wilberforce, William 187, 298
Williams, Jack 288, 389, 436
Williams, John 381
Williams, Thomas 279
Wilmot River 91
Wilson, Thomas 25
Windschuttle, Elizabeth 10, 298
Windschuttle, Keith 8, 29, 115,
402-3, 410, 414; on Aboriginal
death toll 359; on Christianity
360
Wood, Patrick 69, 90, 129, 141,
171, 327, 330, 336, 337, 340,
394
Woodburn 155
Woody Island 290, 396, 436
Woolnorth 207, 251-2, 255, 257,
266, 287
Woorrady 109, 287, 380-1
Worethmaleyerpodeyer 436
World Conference Against
Zionism, Racism and
Imperialism 428
World War One 83-4
World War Two 83-6
Wretched of the Earth 401
Wright, Robert 12
Wybalenna 226—32, 352, 374
Wyllie, Diana 127
Yahoos 41, 47
York Plains 65, 80
Yucatan atrocities 38
Zeno 35, 104