CHAPTER NINE
1830, Summer
Western Front
From Hills to Highlands
During late January 1830, Sam Robinson led his rangers through the southern midlands.1 Departing Oatlands on 18 January, they headed towards the Jordan River, ‘but saw nothing of the Natives’ on their first day out, and nothing again on the second day as they travelled towards the area known as ‘the Hunting Grounds’. The same continued as they moved further south into some hills, scouring as they went, making for ‘the Dromedary Hill’ and then ‘the Black Hill’, tracking the settled areas a little north of Hobart. The party then turned ‘in a Direction of Jerusalem’ to the east, in the Coal River Valley, before heading north again towards Oatlands. It was a typical expedition, crossing ranges and valleys, scouring those areas ‘much frequented by the Natives’.
In the Coal River Valley the party came across a stock hut solely occupied by ‘a Boy about 16 years old’. This lad recently heard that Aboriginal people were in the area. Because ‘the Boy had neither Fire Arms, nor Ammunition and no one but himself’, Sam Robinson explained, the armed rangers spent a day and a night at the hut. Two other servants nominally stationed at the same hut had the only guns, and they were out with the livestock, leaving the boy inadequately protected. Sam Robinson recognised it was the sort of situation when huts were often attacked and therefore hoped to ambush some Aboriginal assailants. But no raid came, so the following day the party continued. As they headed further north they met a man who ‘reported he had been chased by the Natives on Saturday’, but ‘seemed to prevaricate in his Story’ too much for the party to divert its mission. That afternoon, on 25 January, they again reached Oatlands. The report of the expedition was annotated ‘Nothing worth notice’.
Sam Robinson’s return to Oatlands did align with things that were noteworthy. It was the same day that Jorgenson explained Jack’s refusal to go to the Bruny Island Establishment, as well as the renewed push into the highlands. In late January Anstey and Jorgenson planned a coordinated operation beyond the western part of the line of martial law. The neat distinction between settled districts and nominal Aboriginal refuge territory was getting decidedly blurred. Numerous colonial agents were pushing beyond the limits of martial law, increasingly guided by Aboriginal people and with centralised governmental acquiescence and orchestration. As part of this wider strategic push, three parties of Jorgenson’s rangers headed to Lake Fergus.
Operation Lake Fergus
The Lake Fergus operation was designed to address several concerns. It was ostensibly a reaction to Aboriginal incursions. They, Jorgenson asserted, seemed to have ‘changed the system of warfare and depredations which they have for some length of time past carried on against the White Colonists’.2 The regularity with which Aboriginal groups raided huts, rather than just attacking isolated stockmen, might have indicated a new dependence on the provisions of the colony. Citing ‘numerous reports transmitted to Mr Anstey’, which provided ‘strong and decided proofs’, Jorgenson asserted:
instead of resorting to their usual mode for obtaining subsistence, they had closed in upon the settlements, robbing the huts of flour and other provisions, in very large quantities, thus in fact that food which was formerly disregarded by them, had now become to them actual necessaries of life, scarcely to be dispensed with. Flour and Sugar seemed to be the Chief articles sought by them.
It was certainly plausible that ongoing colonial expansion, military harrying and territorial scouring had pushed some Aboriginal people out of their regular hunting grounds, and that raiding was potentially necessary. It is also probable that economic sabotage was a strategy adopted to contest colonial occupation. Either way, Anstey and Jorgenson certainly saw the recent aggressions as a shifting phenomenon, one that matches Batman’s comments about the same time. Aboriginal people had not been seen about the highland lakes in recent weeks, which was very unusual. It was at least worth checking out.
Assessing ‘the number and strength of the Aborigines to the Westward of the River Ouse’, exclusive of ‘Blacks at Cape Grimm, the Western coast, and Port Davy’, was the core mission objective. Jorgenson was clearly frustrated by ‘the delusion kept up by the public prints, limiting the number of the Aborigines of this island to about two hundred or three hundred’. He suspected that attacks, when made long distances apart, were not necessarily the same group, even if they appeared to be in succession. He recognised that the newspaper reportage could create false realities, turning a weird mix of reality, rumour and retrospection into narrative structures. Like Clark’s desire to write in to set the record straight, this was another indicator that the war as it appeared in the newspaper could be quite different from the one fought on the ground.
A related concern was determining a firmer sense of the demographic profile of Aboriginal Van Diemen’s Land. If they had indeed concentrated within the settled districts, it could be a worryingly new development, indicative of wider strategic alignments. That ‘women and children were also carefully concealed out of harms way’ in so many attacks exacerbated the difficulties in coming to sensible population figures, but also highlights that attacks were deliberate acts of warfare, not mere incidental engagements. Taking this logic a step further, Jorgenson wanted to learn whether the tribes ‘have suspended among themselves their mutual jealousies and animosities, and directed all their hostile intentions, movements, and operations, against the white inhabitants’.
Jorgenson and Anstey were concerned that the increased hostilities of the summer may have reflected a new confederation of tribes engaged in coordinated warfare against the colony.
Reconnaissance aside, going to Lake Fergus was also an opportunity to start turning government policy away from partition and containment. The notion of dividing the colony into settled districts and areas of ‘native liberty’ had, Jorgenson intimated, essentially failed to restrain Aboriginal people. Explaining his mission to Anstey – undoubtedly knowing that it would be forwarded to the Colonial Secretary and thereby Arthur – Jorgenson noted that ‘doubts had arisen’ about a policy that provided a secure base for launching ‘murders and depredations’. Whose doubts he did not say, although it was relatively unlikely they were his alone.
The Lake Fergus incursion beyond the line of demarcation was, therefore, an expression of the ‘established principle that an invading enemy may, even in the most legitimate warfare, be attacked and followed into the Country of a neutral power, should the invading enemy seek refuge within such territory’. It was one thing to fight Aboriginal people within the settled districts to discourage their return, but it was another thing for ‘the humanity of Government’ to become an encumbrance to the colony’s combatants.
Three parties were readied. Each was to head to Lake Fergus by a different route, aiming to arrive at the lake on the same day. After meeting up, the parties then intended to shift from reconnaissance to offensive manoeuvres, and ‘fall down along the River Ouse’, which Jorgenson characterised as ‘the greatest stronghold of the Aborigines of this island’. Danvers, ‘the most active Leader in the Colony’, was to take Jorgenson, ‘a Black guide’ and six men. Tyrrell, also ‘accompanied by an able black guide’, and six more men were ‘to penetrate from Mr Espie’s hut’. The third party, led by Peter Scott, was redeployed before the operation to deal with a reported Aboriginal sighting, and an incident where ‘a black woman had been captured’. Nonetheless, in early February, 15 men departed Oatlands in two teams led by Tyrrell and Danvers, intending to regroup on 14 February at Lake Fergus, allowing a few extra days in case of mishap.
A few days after Tyrrell’s party headed out, Danvers’ team headed to Bothwell.3 They arrived in the evening, and ‘learned that Capt Clark’s and Piper’s huts, had on the preceding Thursday been robbed by the Aborigines’. This was particularly remarkable because, as Jorgenson knew, Clark’s property was well defended. He decided to investigate further, especially because Vicary advised that ‘a small Tribe of Aborigines were continually ranging between the Blue Hill, Mr Howell’s hut on the Shannon, and Captain Clark’s farm.’
While Jorgenson gathered rations from the Bothwell storehouse, Mungo explored the town. His reactions to the settlement went unrecorded, excepting for one incident. As Jorgenson wrote:
for the first time in his life [Mungo] saw a monkey, and on seeing it, some indescribable emotions of wonder and disgust, seemed to cross his countenance. Not understanding English perfectly, and not being able to distinguish clearly between the sounds of ‘Mungo’ and ‘Monky’ [sic] – he began to imagine that we compared him to the latter creature, and called him by the name. This gave him great offence, and we avoided calling him Mungo ever since.
To his face they called him Jack, like the other guide, but to make their reports intelligible they persisted in using Mungo. This was likely intended to prevent confusion with the guide attached to Tyrrell’s party, and perhaps also because it was Anstey who had named him Mungo and who read the reports. Nonetheless, it was a remarkably sympathetic act on the part of the rangers.
A Potential Reconciliation
When the rangers finally reached Clark’s, the captain-turned-farmer confirmed the attack happened on Thursday 4 February 1830, a few days before the rangers left Oatlands. As Clark described it to Jorgenson:
a small Tribe attacked Piper’s hut on a farm closely adjoining Capt Clark’s farm, and the huts not above 500 or 600 yards apart, Capt Clark, with two armed men lost no time in proceeding to Piper’s assistance. After Capt Clark had arrived at Piper’s hut, some of the Blacks came to the Captain’s hut, and robbed it. Two or three went up to the principal dwelling [and] forced Mrs Clark and one of the Servant maids to fly across the fields to Piper’s, whilst another servant maid with a child in her arms, came to the outer door near the kitchen. A stout black man appeared, and the woman said ‘Do not kill me and my babe.’ The man replied – ‘No I’ll not kill you, but come along with me.’ The woman said ‘I cannot go with you, for there are four or five gentlemen in that room (pointing to the parlour) who I must attend upon,’ and then she rattled about a parcel of plates, knives, and forks, as if she was very busy in her attendance.
The woman was left unharmed, and became a minor colonial celebrity. When the Hobart Town Courier carried the story a bit over a week after the event, the man had become a ‘chief’:
though at first disposed to be hostile, [he] was pacified by the adroitness of a female servant, who with a child in her arms, came out to him with a curtsey, which induced the black to come forward and shake hands in a friendly manner, and after receiving a few cakes peaceably to retire.4
Jorgenson’s take on the event was that the man was compelled to leave the woman alone by the necessity of raiding quickly, the proximity of armed men, and the apparent nearness of several gentlemen in an adjacent room. He thought the invitation to the woman was suspect at best, and may have led to her death. Either way, he argued that ‘the subsequent outrages perpetrated by the Aborigines sufficiently prove that their hostile determination’ was continuing.
Jorgenson gave this incident particular attention when writing up his report because he knew it had attracted the Lieutenant Governor’s notice and caused a new policy development. With the woman and child ostensibly spared, Clark was ‘inclined strongly to the belief that the Aborigines were not adverse; in future, to pursue towards the whites a system of humanity and conciliation’. Vicary notified Arthur of this ‘conduct of the Natives’, leading the Lieutenant Governor to think ‘that a very favorable opening has presented itself for conciliating that unfortunate race of beings’.5 As Arthur informed Vicary:
with the view of further conciliation, directions have been given to send Twenty five Blankets and some Tea and Sugar to the Commissariat Store at Bothwell for distribution among the Natives. The Above Articles, together with some Flour and Potatoes, would seem to His Excellency to be all that the Natives are likely to wish for.6
Arthur was clearly hoping to use Clark’s farm as a ration station like he had successfully done at Bruny Island.
In his first government order for the year, Arthur officially adopted the view that ‘a reconciliation may be opening’.7 This view was predicated on the ‘moderation … with which a mob of natives have in one instance lately conducted themselves in the neighbourhood of Bothwell’. Arthur promised settlers a ‘handsome reward’ and convicts ‘an immediate pardon’ if they could ‘effect a successful intercourse with any tribe’. But while enjoining the colonists to attempt diplomacy, and treat captive or vulnerable Aboriginal people with ‘tenderness’ – especially ‘women and children’ – the government order was also a realistic reflection of the current situation. ‘No opportunity should be lost to draw any Tribe into terms of conciliation,’ the injunction concluded, ‘and no effort should be spared to expel those who will not be conciliated.’ It was good politics that gave the appearance of change while changing relatively little. If the peace failed, it would not be the government’s fault.
With Mungo-Jack to Lake Fergus
Jorgenson, however, rejected the premise of such passive conciliation. ‘I thought it my duty to afford the settlement some protection for a few days,’ he stated. The rangers went a few miles on from Clark’s farm to ‘Mr Howell’s on the Shannon’. Some of the party guarded the hut ‘in a state of quietude’, hoping to ambush an attack, while Danvers and Jorgenson ‘searched the scrub and gullies’ for signs of the Aboriginal people. On Friday 12 February the rangers continued their advance towards Lake Fergus, hoping to make their rendezvous with Tyrrell’s team. They headed towards Patrick’s Plains, using the ‘unknown and unfrequented paths’ and ‘side creeks’, where they thought they would be more likely to find Aboriginal people.
As they crossed one of these creeks, Mungo-Jack smelled smoke and roasting kangaroo. He alerted the rangers, and told them to hide near the water, because the people making the scent might come to drink after their meal. He also ‘prohibited the use of Tobacco’, warning that Aboriginal people ‘could smell the smoke of it for a considerable distance’. The rangers were taking orders from their guide.
Eventually Mungo-Jack guided the party away from the creek. He led them ‘over stony and rocky mountains’ and then ‘down to a thicket’, instructing the rangers ‘to be on the look out’. It was hard going, but Jorgenson was deeply impressed by Mungo-Jack’s ability:
We should never have thought of roving over these places, and the thicket or scrub would certainly have eluded our search. Although Mungo had never been here before, he forms a perfect conception of the places where the Aborigines are likely to shelter themselves.
Then:
All at once, Mungo ran swiftly round the scrub, three of us followed him, and four remained on the other side with their pieces cocked, and their bayonets fixed. Mungo heard something in the scrub, and presently rushed out a native dog. On entering the scrub we found it to be a place where the natives found woods from which to make their spears and waddies, and from the prints of womens [sic] and children’s feet in the ground, it was clear that this was a place of concealment for the Females and children, when the men went out on their predatory excursions. From the marks of the feet, it could only have been very recently that some Tribe had been here.
With Mungo-Jack on their side, the rangers were learning how to see the landscape in new ways. The tactical imbalances of bush pursuits were shifting, as Aboriginal people began to lose some of the advantages they had previously enjoyed.
In part this shift was not simply about the presence of Mungo-Jack, but rather one of attitude. Jorgenson may have wondered about a tribal confederation, but he also knew about continuing animosities and recognised that Mungo-Jack’s enthusiasm for pursuit was ‘particularly useful to us’:
[he] is at present infected with a deadly hatred and an ardent desire of revenge against the Big River Tribe. He belongs to the Tribe of Limaganny (Ben Lomon [sic] Tribe), and some of Mungo’s nearest relations have been murdered by the Big River Tribe.
After searching the thicket, the rangers spent the night at a stock hut in Patrick’s Plains. The next day they carefully traversed some of the plains, but knowing that they could be easily spotted in the treeless landscape, they stopped and waited until after nightfall. About an hour before midnight, when the moon rose, they continued and ‘crossed the plains in stormy weather, and by an extraordinary and rapid march succeeded in getting in under the northern mountains by daybreak’. Exhausted, they lay beside a clutch of fallen logs for several hours, and were drenched by rain as they slept.
Awaking mid-morning they ‘ascended the heights’ taking in a magnificent view of Van Diemen’s Land’s many peaks. But they were unable to see any signs of fires, which may have provided an early concern, because they were looking for ‘indications that Tyrrell’s party, had arrived at, or was hovering over Lake Fergus’. Still, they proceeded with the mission, circuiting through plains and ‘wooded hillocks’ before making a direct northwesterly line for Lake Fergus. While crossing some of these plains the rangers found ‘a spear greatly decayed’, which seemed perplexing. As Jorgenson wrote:
On asking Mungo what could have brought it there; he explained to us that this was the precise place where all the native Tribes met once every year for the purposes of general deliberation, and at the same time to display their warlike exhibitions in throwing the Spear and the Waddy: Mungo had been here with his Tribe last year, and it was only now that I learned that he had been all round Lake Fergus with his Tribe, but no farther in a Southern direction.
While the information about intertribal gatherings was notable, Jorgenson was not interested in local nomenclature. Closing in on the lake, the rangers encountered a river, and Jorgenson slavishly named it for Anstey. With a thinly veiled compliment, he noted in his report that Anstey River ‘is fierce, rapid, and deep’.
But Lake Fergus proved immediately disappointing. As the rangers reached the lake, which was surrounded by hills and clear territory, they could see all around its shores. There were no Aboriginal people, and no signs of Tyrrell’s team. They walked around it, just to be sure, but the site was deserted of people. Danvers’ team was only one day later than initially planned. Hoping to alert Tyrrell to their location, the party ‘lit a conflagration’ and waited. Tyrrell failed to arrive.
On 16 February, two days after their planned rendezvous, the rangers departed. Guided by Mungo-Jack, the party climbed ‘some very high, and rocky mountains’, towards a fresh water source. He also led them ‘to the native huts’ that were nearby, but these had clearly been abandoned ‘for moons past’. From here the colonial navigators took over, and the party wasted the remainder of the day searching out a lake inscribed on their map, which they failed to find. At the end of their fruitless search, the rangers ‘encamped in a Gulley for the night’.
The next day they reached ‘Mr Espie’s hut’, where the rangers heard of Tyrrell’s team getting ‘rations for ten days’. But they also ‘learned that Twenty of Mr Espie’s sheep had been speared on the preceding day’. Three of Espie’s men ‘were out in pursuit of the Aborigines who had been seen a few hours before over a fire roasting oppossums’. The rangers quickly forgot about Tyrrell:
At daybreak we started and speedily got upon the traces of the natives, and Mungo pursued their tracks with an eagerness which can scarcely be accounted for unless being actuated by the most ardent desire of revenge. He led us over rocky and difficult summits, through Gullies, and on the edges of precipices. We crossed the River Ouse several times in deep places, and had to climb up almost perpendicular places of great height.
Astounded by Mungo-Jack’s capacity to track Aboriginal people by footprints, small tufts of possum fur, or ‘by fires which had dropped on the ground from firesticks’, Jorgenson described how the party was very close behind their targets: ‘We every moment fell in with their fires yet warm; one was still burning, we saw kangaroo speared which had been left hanging on the trees.’ Fleeing fires and dropping their food, these Aboriginal people were clearly in full flight from the rangers.
Hobart’s Humanitarians and an Extermination Debate
With each stock hut the rangers visited they learned of various ‘outrages’ perpetrated by Aboriginal people while they had been away at Lake Fergus. They stopped at Thomson’s hut for a few nights, using it as a base ‘to rove about the heights’. But they were probably also slowed because eventually it was clear that ‘Mungo had fallen ill’. Unable to continue close tracking, and with ‘many alarming accounts of murders’ coming in from various settlers and their servants, Jorgenson had to give up his pursuit. He also wanted to get information to Anstey, and to better orchestrate the movements of multiple parties out in pursuit in this immediate district, so he and Danvers headed to Bothwell.
‘When I arrived at the Police Office,’ Jorgenson later reported, ‘Capt Vicary placed in my hands the Gazette of that day’s date, containing the Lieutenant Governor’s proclamation, promising a reward to any one who should be able, by some means or others to effect a proper understanding and reconciliation.’ His mind immediately strayed to Mungo-Jack, and the propitious coincidence that this reward was being advertised just as the lad was demonstrating such enthusiasm for the colonial cause.
But Vicary also had another piece of news from Hobart, which amused Jorgenson. ‘Capt Vicary also placed in my hands an address to Mr Davies, signed by a number of highly respectable and humane gentlemen in Hobarton.’ The address, signed by Reverend Bedford and other members of the Aborigines Committee, promoted conciliation and prevailed upon ‘resident settlers of similar humane feelings … to adhere to a system of self-defence and not of wanton aggression’.8
Reading these sentiments of well-fed and safe urban gentlemen, Jorgenson admitted that ‘a transient smile crossed the features of my face’. He probably recognised that they were projecting an image of the war at odds with reality, where bad servants caused and perpetuated the conflict, and that the committee itself held out the best hope for its peaceful end.
The address had been printed on page three of the 19 February Colonial Times, the day before Jorgenson and Danvers reached Bothwell. Vicary’s attention may have lingered on this page because it also contained another letter from ‘A Settler’, which detailed a series of attacks by Aboriginal people in the Bothwell district.9 It described an incident where, on Friday 12 February, ‘the whole of Mr HOWELL’s premises and property burned to the ground before his eyes’ after being ignited by an Aboriginal man flinging a firestick upon the thatched roof. ‘The rapidity of conflagration was such,’ the settler wrote, ‘that Mrs Howell and three small children escaped with difficulty from suffocation and destruction.’ The family was apparently reduced to ‘living under a break-wind’, but at the time of writing had not yet received some blankets that Vicary had forwarded to them.
The settler also had another, similar tale. ‘While writing this’, he stated, ‘a messenger from Mr SHERWIN’ arrived with information that Sherwin’s hut had also ‘been burned to the ground’. Pointedly reacting to press reportage of Clark’s female servant, the settler concluded that these events are ‘very unfavourable omens of friendly terms with the blacks, and instead of opening an amicable alliance, in presenting them with sugar and sugar cakes, we would recommend more severe measures than has hitherto been adopted’.
Other news in the same paper described Aboriginal people having ‘killed two men, one a man of colour’, mentioned the remarkable story of Aboriginal people moving by torchlight through the night despite their reportedly traditional fear of darkness, the burial of another young spearing victim, and vague reports about two or three more servants killed in the Clyde district. At least one seven-man party went in pursuit after one of these raids, the newspaper noted, mentioning also that ‘the report of several guns has been heard in the direction they had taken’, conveying the immediacy of the conflict through the sound of gunfire in the hills.
The report about Sherwin’s house proved both wrong and prophetic. Sherwin’s property had not burned down. But, in the middle of the afternoon of Sunday 21 February, Sherwin’s property was attacked. As he described it a few days later:
I was sitting in the front Room when the Servant called out ‘Fire – Fire – the Natives’ – I immediately ran for Water, and to alarm the men who were in the Hut at the time – soon after which a Fire broke out from the back of the Men’s hut – We then endeavoured to save the house, but, seeing this was impossible we began to get what things we could from the house.10
During the crisis, Sherwin saw various Aboriginal figures moving around the perimeter of the property, setting fire to fencing, while others directed the operation from a large rock. From this rock some of them yelled to the settlers: ‘Parrawa Parrawa – Go away you white B__g_rs – What business have you here.’ A series of moves and countermoves followed in a tense confrontation. These Aboriginal people disappeared shortly after Sherwin aimed to shoot.
Sherwin told his story to the Aborigines Committee in Hobart on 23 February, two days after the attack.11 He asserted that the attackers were all young men, and from the ‘Abyssinia Mob’. Arguing that ‘the lives and property of every white inhabitant in the Colony are endangered’, Sherwin suggested the colony deploy ‘Sydney Natives’ and ‘blood hounds’ to capture them. He also commented that he ‘had heard’ that ‘decoy huts’ filled with ‘flour and Sugar strongly impregnated with poison’ could work as a remedy against these sorts of attacks. Sherwin, the scribe noted, ‘Conceives they must be captured or exterminated’.
The committee took evidence from two other settlers that day. George Espie, brother of the settler on the Clyde, described how Aboriginal people slaughtered sheep as a means of harming the colonists: ‘none of the carcasses were used by the Natives for food,’ he noted, ‘nor were the Sheep touched after they had been speared’. They were clearly slaughtering the stock for effect, not for food. Espie too felt the war had reached ‘such a crisis that no other remedy appears to me but their speedy capture or extermination’.12 He recommended the deployment of 150 prisoners given promises of pardons for making certain capture quotas, but he also ‘believes they would shoot more than they would capture’.
After Espie, the committee heard from John Sinclair Brodie, a settler on the upper Clyde who had survived four spear wounds received at the start of February when Aboriginal people raided his hut.13 He survived, he stated, by running for the military hut which was within sight of his own. ‘On a former occasion I gave them bread & to my knowledge my servants never ill treated them.’ They were actuated by desire for ‘our luxuries & comforts’, he felt, ‘not from motives of revenge & retaliation’. But he too argued ‘that some very strong and decisive measures must be adopted either for their capture or extermination’. Like Sherwin, he advocated the deployment of ‘Sydney Blacks’ to assist in their capture. ‘The Country must either belong to the Blacks or the Whites’, he argued, concluding that ‘the assigned servants have become very much afraid of the Natives’.
The minutes were written up in full, although with some details excluded from the official testimony. The decoy huts were included, for instance, but the idea of using poisoned flour and sugar was discreetly omitted from the official record. This doctoring of evidence – most likely by Charles Arthur, the committee’s secretary and the Lieutenant Governor’s nephew – was one of a number of ways by which Arthur seems to have managed the formal record and public perception of the Vandemonian War.
Committee Recommendations and Settlers Militant
Political machinations aside, after hearing from Sherwin, Espie and Brodie on 23 February the Aborigines Committee offered Arthur three strongly recommended ‘measures’:
1st That Sydney Natives be obtained from N.S. Wales to trace the Aborigines & thereby effect their capture. 2nd That pecuniary rewards be offered for each Native captured. 3rd That Tickets of Leave should be granted to Prisoners of good character for the capture of some given number of Natives.14
These suggestions were simply extensions of the systems currently in place with the roving parties. Two days after the committee took evidence from the settlers of the Clyde, Arthur issued a second government order.15 ‘The destruction of the whole of Mr Sherwin’s properties on the Clyde’, ‘threats and vindictive feeling’, and ‘other outrages’ became official facts that ‘demand an instant simultaneous and energetic proceeding on the part of the settlers’.
But the government order also provided for an incentive scheme to get the settlers to act ‘with vigour and perseverance’ for the protection of themselves and the colonial community:
to stimulate them to increased activity, the Lieutenant Governor has directed that a reward of five pounds shall be given for every adult Aboriginal native, and two pounds for every child who shall be captured and delivered alive at any of the Police stations.
Such rewards were a common part of the Vandemonian economy. These bounties for Aboriginal captives had precedents in rewards for the capture of bushrangers and runaway convicts. But while this reflected a new policy initiative, it was not the sum of the government injunction. Arthur also announced that he would soon ‘make a tour’ to examine the implementation of defensive measures which he ‘expects to be universally adopted’. Moreover, the order was transparently addressing a misconception, carried ‘out of the colony’, that Aboriginal people constituted a militarily capable ‘horde of savages’, which Arthur asserted was clearly at odds with the reality of ‘an inconsiderable number of a very feeble race, not possessing physical strength, and quite undistinguished by personal courage’. This sentiment served to modify perceptions of the war abroad, while working as another jab at settlers who left themselves ‘almost defenceless’. He closed the order by reiterating calls for humane treatment of Aboriginal people ‘consistent with the overruling necessity of expelling them from the settled districts’.
Although Arthur had initially delegated oversight of conciliation to a committee, two other government notices helped give a public impression that he was becoming increasingly involved.16 One of them advised that Arthur lent a room at Government House for the Aborigines Committee, and requested future correspondence ‘be addressed to Charles Arthur’. The other announced that the committee would meet ‘every Tuesday at Government-house’.
His close management of conflict operations continued. On 25 February, after writing the government order, Arthur instructed the Colonial Secretary to forward ‘a Circular to all the Police Magistrates’, drawing their attention to the new order.17 As he wrote:
[success] depends upon their exertions in their Districts, by ascertaining at all the remote Stations what measures for defence are taken; whether the Settlers are arming all their Sons who are able to carry a Gun and further, whether any effort is making for surprising and securing the natives.
The Lieutenant Governor was advocating for the settlers of Van Diemen’s Land to become militant: armed, active and ready to turn to paramilitary duties when required. While the bounty was new, Arthur’s tone increasingly echoed his early plans for a local militia.
Further highlighting this growing government-sponsored settler-militarism, the next day Arthur followed up with the Colonial Secretary about sending a specific letter to Vicary. Ordering ‘a working party from Bothwell … to render every possible assistance to Mr Howells in erecting a shelter for his family’, Arthur also took the opportunity to again impress upon the police magistrate the necessity of the settlers becoming militant:
it is in vain for the Settlers to expect that the Government alone can afford them protection, and that the most strenuous efforts must be made by the Colonists themselves.18
Also that day, Arthur instructed the Colonial Secretary to forward a notice to the government printer about a new ‘Act to facilitate the apprehension of felons or other offenders illegally at large’.19 It was a short Act, allowing settlers or their servants to ‘apprehend without a Warrant’ anybody reasonably suspected of being ‘a Transported Felon or other Offender then illegally at Large’. While seemingly directed at convicts, the Act was also applicable to the capture of Aboriginal people.
The timing of the announcement of this new law is also telling. It was included in the Hobart Town Courier along with the government order about bounties for Aboriginal captives, and is another example of the way that the politics of the war infected many other elements of government business.
The publication of these notices is anything but coincidental, and to read them in isolation would be wilfully naive. They were highly collaborative elements of a government agenda to motivate frontier settlers to arm themselves and act with fortitude, while also placating humanitarian qualms in Hobart and beyond. They also serve as hints of a regime focused on the important business of protecting the Lieutenant Governor’s reputation. Arthur steered the committee away from the present to the past, distracting generations of historians in the process.