CHAPTER ELEVEN
1830, Autumn and Winter
Settled Districts and Northern Front
Men of Justice in Ambush and the Proxy War
While Danvers and Batman stalked about the northeast, Jorgenson’s reconnoitering beyond the frontier was abandoned in favour of defensive patrols in the central and southern midlands. Then the strategic focus gradually again shifted from west to east.
Returning to Oatlands from a patrolling expedition during late April 1830, Jorgenson provided Anstey with a brief update, which gives some information about an otherwise poorly documented period.1 Ranging southwest of Oatlands and staying east of Bothwell, Jorgenson ‘fell in with Peter Scott and his party’. This meeting between parties meant that Jorgenson could report to Anstey that Scott ‘in conformity with your directions had passed through Davis’s bottom, and Michael Howe’s marsh’. Jorgenson also updated Anstey about Scott’s proposed movements, so that orders could be sent if needed, and because ‘some boots will have to be sent to his party’. Anstey annotated the letter before forwarding it to Hobart, letting the Colonial Secretary know that Aboriginal people were moving eastwards towards the ‘Little Swan Port River’ and that he had ordered Scott to go in that direction.
Scott’s movements provided Anstey with strategic and political intelligence. ‘Mr Hone has a sheep hut in Davis’s bottom’, Jorgenson related, ‘where he has placed four men, all well armed, and form a very excellent protection in that part of the country.’ Joseph Hone’s armed men reflected the sort of settler-militancy that the Lieutenant Governor so often advocated, and may have been inspired by Hone’s own economic misfortunes. In early March his hut ‘at the Black Marsh’ had reportedly been robbed and set on fire while the servants were absent.2 As a nearby resident wrote to the Colonial Times: ‘They are hovering close round us. I live in constant anxiety, fearing some murder or other dreadful accident.’3
Jorgenson’s observations about Hone’s servants highlighted that Hone’s men were prepared for a fight and determined to protect their master’s interests. This was useful information for Anstey to relay, not least because Hone was a well-connected part of the Vandemonian ruling establishment.
While his men were fighting in the midlands, Hone served as a Justice of the Peace in Hobart. He also chaired the Committee of Papers in the Van Diemen’s Land Society, and was chair of the Mechanics Institute.4 Hone was demonstrably connected to the Lieutenant Governor, the Colonial Secretary and other significant figures in Vandemonian government and commerce. His armed servants at ‘Davis’s bottom’ therefore offer a peculiar image of the operation of civil law and civil society during the Vandemonian War. Rather than the uncontrolled violence of convict servants and stockmen of the official narrative promoted by the Aborigines Committee, the war was frequently fought by servile proxies.
But while praising this group of private servants, Jorgenson also pointed to problems within the public service. He was ‘not so well acquainted’ with the ‘disposition of John Danvers’ party’ as Anstey, but this was of no real concern. The most pressing matter was that Richard Tyrrell was still missing.
Class, War and Richard Tyrrell
Unlike the gentleman-rovers such as Gilbert Robertson and John Batman, or even the relatively famous and well-connected convict Jorgen Jorgenson, the subordinate rangers attracted relatively little press attention unless their exploits seemed particularly newsworthy. When Hone’s hut was attacked in March 1830, for instance, a letter published in the Colonial Times mentioned that Aboriginal people were ‘closely followed by one of JORGENSON’S parties’.5 This might have been all the information available to the correspondent, but that in itself highlights how press reports tended to reflect class realities. There were noteworthy people, and everyone else. Tyrrell’s disappearance, like most of the roving operations, attracted little public notice.
But Tyrrell’s whereabouts certainly agitated Jorgenson, already concerned about the politicisation of the roving parties. Moreover, Jorgenson was clearly annoyed because Tyrrell ‘left us in the lurch on the Big River’, when Tyrrell was supposed to join with Danvers in sweeping down both sides of the river towards the settled districts.6 Writing on 13 April to Francis Aubin, the Hobart town adjutant, Jorgenson admitted that ‘I have not transmitted his [Tyrrell’s] late reports to His Excellency, nor do I send you the Copy of his requisitions, as his conduct will undergo a most particular investigation by Mr Anstey’. It was an acknowledgement, albeit made in passing, that Jorgenson forwarded his reports knowing they were seen by Arthur. In this instance, at least, Jorgenson also confessed to being selective about the documentation forwarded to the Colonial Secretary and therefore the Lieutenant Governor. It was an admission that the archive was sanitised even as it was produced.
Jorgenson only mentioned the content of Tyrrell’s reports to Aubin in passing, noting that Tyrrell ‘only sent in two or three reports, which bear every stamp of imposition and falsehood’. Because the rangers took rations from settlers, and issued them with receipts, these could be used to track the parties later. These receipts were the subject of Jorgenson’s letter to Aubin, after all. While complaining that Tyrrell claimed unusually large rations, Jorgenson also pointed out that through this supply and accounting mechanism Jorgenson could track Tyrrell’s movements, ‘and sufficiently point out where he has been loitering’:
This man with a party of six men has been prowling about the Country for 10 or 11 weeks, kept himself out of the way, acted in defiance of the most positive instructions, went to a part of the Country as you will see by his receipts, whence he could have no manner of business, and whence for the greater part he has actually been loitering beyond the limits whence martial law does not extend.
This became Jorgenson’s main fixation, telling Aubin about his last intelligence from Tyrrell. In a letter dated 22 March, Tyrrell ‘states that he intends leaving the Western river for Port Davey’, which Jorgenson thought meant that ‘were he to kill a single black, he would be guilty of murder’. Two weeks later Jorgenson informed Anstey that ‘I fear that these men have proceeded to attack some of the peaceable Tribes either on the Western Sea coast, or without the limits where martial law is not in force’.7
Jorgenson had sent word to Launceston and Bothwell to instruct Tyrrell to return to Oatlands, ‘but he always eludes our search’. Aubin passed the letter to Arthur, who ordered the police magistrates to forward Tyrrell to Oatlands if he appeared in their district.8 When Jorgenson communicated with Anstey about Scott’s party and Hone’s servants, he also mentioned that Tyrrell ‘has not been heard of for thirty-eight days’.9 While worried that Tyrrell was engaged in warfare beyond the settled districts, Jorgenson also contemplated the possibility ‘that some fatal dispute or quarrell [sic] may have arisen amongst the men’. He may also have wondered if Tyrrell or his men had absconded to become bushrangers.
Alerting Arthur to Tyrrell’s absence, Anstey declared himself ‘seriously alarmed’. Despite having ‘entertained a good opinion of Tyrrell’, Anstey asserted his ‘determination to put them into Oatlands Gaol’. With access to Tyrrell’s conduct record, Anstey might have known that Tyrrell had absconded once before, prejudicing his opinion.10 Tyrrell, transported for highway robbery like many other rangers, had managed to remain at large for about five months in 1824, getting 50 lashes in return. Moreover, Tyrrell’s disappearance would have been an embarrassment for the master he served for five years, and who advocated his appointment to the field police in August 1829 – Alfred Stephen, a founding member of the Mechanics Institute and the Solicitor General of Van Diemen’s Land.
Venting his frustration, Jorgenson characterised Tyrrell’s party as ‘a dead weight, of no use to the district, and useless altogether’. He stated that this ‘loose and disorderly band is the worst in the country, and of no manner of service to the government’. But Tyrrell had not absconded and had not, as Anstey feared, ‘been Murdered’. Illustrating the centralisation of information, Arthur knew by 12 May that Tyrrell ‘has been heard of to the Westward’, and was acting under instruction from ‘Capn Smith’, police magistrate of Norfolk Plains. Tyrrell’s party, which included the Aboriginal man Jack, was engaged in ranging duties in the northwestern midlands and potentially further west.
Despite the widespread worry about his potential behaviour or misfortune, when Tyrrell returned he was quickly exonerated. The circumstances are a little unclear, but later in the year Anstey endorsed and forwarded a petition from Tyrrell to the Lieutenant Governor, incidentally giving some extra details about Tyrrell’s movements in the process.11 Anstey mentioned that he had made ‘due enquiry’ about Tyrrell’s absence, discovering that Tyrrell ‘went with his Party to Norfolk Plains and the Country to the Westward’, which ‘was occasioned by the Police Magistrate at Norfolk Plains’. Tyrrell himself, writing a lengthy explanation to Anstey after his return, apologised for a false report about having killed an Aboriginal person, and mentioned that part of the cause for his lengthy absence was directed towards the capture of a bushranger.12 While Anstey admitted that Tyrrell’s unexplained departure ‘gave me great offence’, and probably some embarrassment, Anstey nonetheless declared to Arthur that ‘Richard Tyrrell hath zealously exerted himself to the utmost of his ability, in pursuit of the Aborigines’. As so often in the war, the actions of servants reflected upon their masters and patrons, but fortunately scandal and disgrace could often be effaced from the record after the fact.
Hunting and Gathering in the Southern Midlands
While Tyrrell zealously pursued Aboriginal people in the Norfolk Plains district – not long after some reportedly ‘beat to death with their waddies’ a flock of Smith’s sheep – rangers continued to patrol the southern midlands.13 Peter Scott led a party towards Jerusalem, and on 1 May 1830 ‘Crossed the Coal River and ranged round the tiers’, finding ‘several native Huts’ in the process.14
Ten days later Scott’s party was still ranging, and needed to resupply. But on applying for rations at one stock hut, the rangers were rebuffed by Pennington, the overseer, who told Scott ‘that his Master – Mr Hobbs – told him not to give Rations to any party’. In need of supplies, Scott tried to pay for flour and bread, but was again denied food. Despite being under-supplied, with ‘every Reason to believe the Natives were in the neighbourhood’, Scott led his rangers on further.
Yet, not for the first time during the war, the party of rangers were seemingly shadowed. The next day, with Scott’s party away, Hobbs’s hut was attacked. Aboriginal people ‘speared Pennington and one man more slightly, and struck Pennington’s Wife with a waddie’, and then ‘Burned down an unfinished Hut’.
Another party of rangers left Oatlands the day after the attack on Hobbs’s hut, led by George James, with some of Tyrrell’s formerly wayward team, including Jack.15 This young man was, Anstey noted on this mission report, now ‘about 16 or 17 years of age’. Although unaware of the attack at Hobbs’s hut when they left, within a day these rangers were on the assailants’ trail.
Only one day out from Oatlands, the rangers established contact. As James reported:
about eight Oclock we herd [sic] the noise of dogs and the natives rising from their fires[.] Black Jack the guide seemed very pleased and told me the direction they would make[.] we went a bout [sic] four miles and got a head of them[.] we could distinctly here [sic] them a hunting all the way.
Having got ahead of this group, James decided on an ambush. The party hid ‘behind a dead tree’ in the path of the hunt, and waited.
Secreted, the rangers watched a kangaroo getting chased towards them by three dogs. But, detecting the hidden force, the dogs suddenly abandoned their hunt. They ‘went back about two hundred yards and began to bark’. With his opportunity for an ambush slipping away, James ‘wanted Jack to pull off his clothes and go and meet them’. Jack undressed, and started moving forward. The rangers followed, shadowing him from behind, trying to remain hidden. But the young man ‘appeared very frightened and would not keep any distance from us’, James reported, making the new plan of using Jack as a decoy ineffective. The rangers ‘lost all trace of them’ as the Aboriginal people escaped.
The rangers then temporarily abandoned their pursuit, and headed off in search of provisions. Over the next few days they prowled around hills and swamps. Then, as they descended ‘a small rise’ near McGill’s Marsh – in the general area of Hobbs’s hut – the party came ‘close upon the natives as they were hunting’. There was no time to hide and ambush the tribe.
Seeing the rangers, one of the Aboriginal man ‘called out “Riely” to the rest’, a word which Jack explained meant ‘white man’. The group fled, dropping ‘several blankets knives and different articles’ to expedite their escape. The rangers gave chase, ‘but could not overtake them’. The pursuers were also hindered by the ‘kangaroo dogs’, which rounded on the rangers ‘like a pack of Foxhounds’. As James’s men killed 13 of these dogs, the Aboriginal people made their escape.
The rangers gave further chase without effect, so they returned to the scene of the encounter. James hoped that some Aboriginal people might have hidden in the bush rather than run. After a quick search, James took his party to a prominent rock. They climbed up, carefully hid, and then James ‘told Black Jack to call same as the natives do when they are lost’. Jack obliged, cooing and whistling, and within a few minutes, as James described it:
he was answered by a woman and boy which came direct up to the rock that we were laying on the top and I am certain they must have smelt us for they ran back[.] I fired at them but mist [sic] they dropped another pot and Blanket[.] we run them into a creek and all-though the ground was burnt on both sides and we saw them fall behind the logs we could not find either of them[.]
The rangers continued the search, but the woman and child had disappeared. Jack tried calling again, ‘and a dog came to him’ which he killed ‘with a spear’. That night, the party looked for fires but saw none.
In the morning the party ‘proceeded by the lower part of Hobbs Lagoon through some fine hunting ground and stopt in a deep gully’. The following day they ‘came to the pine creek and followed it down’, noting that ‘there are a great number of native huts and it is a fine place for them to make spears’, but they did not encounter any more Aboriginal people. A few days later they returned to Oatlands with news of their contact, and a report that the Penningtons had fled to Hobart.
Vermin Traps and Fresh Appointments
While the Penningtons escaped the war zone, other representatives of the colony continued to contest the region. In late May, two shepherds living ‘at the Swan Port River’ found their hut plundered.16 ‘There was a blanket on the floor, with about 30 lbs. of sugar scattered upon it,’ showing that Aboriginal people had learned how to avoid being maimed by traps, which stockmen and settlers left to inhibit raids on food supplies. In this instance, ‘the man-trap that had been left set, was found let off, showing that the former disaster by the same instrument had been remembered’. A month earlier these shepherds had laid such a trap, and found their ‘large vermin trap’ a little distance from the hut with ‘the hand in it’, which had been crudely amputated by the victim or his companions.17
Finding their trap had failed on this second use, the shepherds ‘then set off towards Mr. HOBBS’S hut, in the Eastern Marshes, to give the alarm’. Along the way they ‘heard two guns fired’ and ‘saw two soldiers and a constable in full pursuit of a large number of the blacks, two of whom it appears were wounded’. While these people escaped, the shepherds reported that the constables and soldiers had another skirmish the next day, where one was speared before the force ‘fired upon the Aborigines, who instantly retreated into some scrub, and were lost sight of’.
While soldiers and constables pursued and harried Aboriginal people, Arthur continued advocating the use of military forces in the police districts for operational support, but also for ‘civil’ administration. Hobart town adjutant Lieutenant Francis Aubin, for instance, was made a Justice of the Peace in early May.18 He was subsequently transferred to Oyster Bay on the east coast to replace Lieutenant Lane as the new police magistrate.
A few weeks later Arthur also appointed Major Sholto Douglas a Justice of the Peace, prior to being sent on duty into the interior.19 Douglas was well known to Arthur, having married a daughter of John Burnett, the Colonial Secretary.20 As with most of Arthur’s appointments – indeed, the civil administration of Van Diemen’s Land more broadly – there were networks of patronage and personal connection at work.
Prior to commissioning Douglas as a Justice of the Peace, Arthur even prepared a memorandum aimed at explaining his decision to the new appointee.21 Douglas, Arthur noted, ‘will necessarily be involved in Duties with the Civil power which will render it highly advantageous to the Service that he should be enabled to discharge the functions of a Magistrate.’ Arthur even made it explicit that Douglas’s objectives were military, instructing the Colonial Secretary that he should:
Notify to Major Douglas that the great alarm which the Inhabitants in the Interior continue to labour under from the sudden attacks of the natives has induced me to order all the Military that can be disposed of to be employed in the Protection of the Settled Districts.
Arthur wanted Douglas to deploy ‘active measures’, but also to act with ‘prudence in their adoption’. The Lieutenant Governor wished Douglas to ensure Aboriginal people were treated with ‘the utmost humanity’ – intimating thereby to avoid killing women and children or mistreating prisoners – but he also told Douglas that ‘he will receive detailed instructions through the Military Department’. This meant that Arthur would relay specific instructions through his capacity as Colonel Commanding rather than Lieutenant Governor. But while the specific operational strategy was not recorded, Arthur added one core detail to the memorandum: ‘I have felt it important,’ Arthur asserted, ‘to place all the outstations generally under his [Douglas’s] command.’ Shortly after making a public show of decentralising the nominally civil roving parties, apparently in accordance with a recommendation of the Aborigines Committee, Arthur discreetly centralised the administration of the military frontier. Once again, this command structure centred on Oatlands, where Douglas was soon stationed.
While Douglas’s instructions passed through military channels, Arthur continued to communicate with his police magistrates via the Colonial Secretary. The correspondence for May 1830 reveals several continuities. Arthur was ‘extremely pleased’ with one of Smith’s servants after an encounter with Aboriginal people, and there was a proposal to Anstey from a convict to ‘take Tyrrell and others’ in search of a bushranger named Bevan.22 A proposal ‘from “John York” of the River Isis’ from Campbell Town was also being considered, highlighting a continued focus on new roving parties, but Arthur wanted more details on the proposal first, ‘stating the number of Natives he would undertake to capture to entitle him to the Land and the men to indulgence &c &c’.23 This expedition was subsequently rejected, because it was ‘not judicious’.24 Moreover, highlighting a growing focus on the northern parts of the settled districts, Arthur informed Smith at Norfolk Plains:
that it is certainly quite within the range of your Duty, as Police Magistrate, to request the Officer commanding, to station the several parties in the situations, which you may deem most eligible.25
Smith was also told that if ‘the Officer Commanding’ had ‘any objection to the arrangement which you propose’, then it had to be put in writing and ‘may be referred for the decision of the Lieut Governor.’ Against all of this was a situation of open warfare between the colony – represented by settlers, servants, field police and soldiers – and any Aboriginal people not obviously engaged on the colonial side.
In this incendiary situation, the bounty system of cash rewards for Aboriginal captives was also beginning to have an effect, and this too came to occupy the Lieutenant Governor’s attention.
A Bountiful Harvest
In the far north of the colony, beyond Launceston and east of George Town, ‘Three Native Black Women and One Boy’ were captured at the farm of William Gee. They were taken to George Town and then forwarded to Launceston, where they were put into the custody of William Jones, overseer of the prisoners’ barracks. These captives were known to authorities, having disappeared from Batman’s indigenous roving party some weeks earlier. Their recapture was noteworthy because, as a memorandum from Jones explained, ‘the Man that took them has made affidavit at the Police Office and Claims a Reward’.26
Although evidence for the northern midlands is less comprehensive than for the southern midlands, Gee’s hut had been a site of previous conflict between settlers and Aboriginal people. In March, a few days before Smith’s sheep were slaughtered, Gee’s hut was raided while being guarded by a single servant, James Spangle.27 When the rest of Gee’s men returned, they ‘found the hut had been robbed of a quantity of flour and sugar, a fowling piece and ammunition, together with a young kangaroo dog’. Finding no sign of Spangle inside, the men searched around the property, finding him ‘lying on his back’ dead. His body had ‘several spear wounds in the neck, one through the hand, and another had entered about the region of the heart.’ The wounds told a story of attempted self-defence, serious wounding, and a killing strike. The men returned with news of the slaying of their companion. Some time after that ‘a cart and four bullocks’ was sent for the body, but by the time they arrived Spangle’s body was ‘so much mutilated by wild animals and so decomposed’ that ‘they buried it where it lay’.
The report in the Launceston Advertiser that detailed this March raid also related the attack on Smith’s sheep. But as the editor quipped: ‘What measures do the Aboriginal Committee recommend on this occasion?’ The newspaper also told of ‘a party of volunteers busily employed man-catching in the neighbourhood,’ as well as the Lieutenant Governor’s imminent arrival in Launceston as part of his tour of the interior. The editor also made comment on the bounty system: ‘Five pounds a head is a tempting sum, but our accommodations in this quarter are rather too limited to furnish board and lodging for these sable gentry.’
A few months later, when the women from the indigenous roving party were captured at Gee’s hut, reports reached Hobart that their excursion was fruitless and that they were badly treated. As one correspondent from Ben Lomond wrote:
One out of the five had died, another had been shot, and the three that came in had been very shamefully treated. During the whole of this time, these poor creatures could not meet with a single individual of their own tribe.28
Another writer reported from Launceston that the Women ‘complain of having met with a different reception to what they expected’.29
The circumstances of the capture, and the condition of the captives, became clearer upon their arrival in Launceston. As Jones the overseer affirmed:
These women and Boy, are of the number that was sent from Hobart Town in the Month of March and were taken away by Mr Batman to Benlomond in April, when His Excellency the Lieutenant Governor was in Launceston[.]30
He also recorded their version of events:
The account the women gives is nearly as follows, That they in Company with two other women that left Launceston with them (one of which they say is dead the second left in the Bush) left Benlomond in quest of their Tribe reached Pipers River and came to the Hut (Gee’s Hut) when three white men took them into a Hut and fastened the Door, beat the women with Muskets, took from them their Native Passes, Knives, Tom hawks three Blankets and destroyed their Dogs, and then took them into George Town.
Batman arrived in Launceston on 24 May, and recorded the story in a letter to the police magistrate of Campbell Town, which was subsequently forwarded to Hobart. The captives were, he asserted, ‘very ill treated’. He was incensed that the lead captor had ‘gone to Hobarton to get the reward for bringing them in’, and wanted an investigation. ‘I understand they were brought in from Pipers River by some settler’s men that live there,’ Batman noted, adding that ‘it appears that one of the women died and another was shot by those men’. ‘The women state to me,’ Batman elaborated, ‘that when they went to the Hut they cryed out The Governor, Mr Batman &c.’
When the news reached Hobart, Arthur ordered an investigation into ‘an outrage committed on the Female Aborigines recently at liberty’.31 He wanted the police magistrate of Launceston to take statements from two of the servants and compare them with each other, while the chief police magistrate in Hobart ‘has been instructed to deal with’ Arthur Maynes, the man heading to Hobart for his reward. Arthur was alerted by the police magistrate at Campbell Town that Maynes was formerly a servant employed by Roderic O’Connor, which might have reminded the Lieutenant Governor of O’Connor’s statement to the Aborigines Committee in March that ‘Stock-men used to hunt them [Aboriginal people] on horseback & shoot them from their horses,’ and his advocacy that ‘every settler should protect himself’.32 Certainly, Maynes was examined once he got to Hobart, but the chief police magistrate found that ‘it was impossible to detain this man in custody’.33
A small note to the Colonial Secretary, dated 10 June, records the substance of the chief police magistrate’s investigation:
I have the honor to report that Arthur Maynes asserted here yesterday, that no one article was taken from the black Native Women by him or his companions, except for protection, but that they were well treated, and their whole property delivered by him to the Gaoler at George Town.34
Further information about the investigation’s outcome – including whether Maynes received his bounty – seems not to have survived. But punishment certainly appears unlikely. The investigating chief police magistrate had formerly been stationed at Launceston, and may have known Maynes and the other men concerned.
Nonetheless, the women and boy remained in the Launceston ‘Penitentiary’ until early June, when Arthur ‘directed’ authorities in Launceston ‘to cause the Aboriginal women … to be delivered into Mr Batman’s charge’.35
Curiously, this episode prompted an unusual note in the book of memoranda and instructions from the Lieutenant Governor to the Colonial Secretary. Lodged between two entries from early June 1830 is a memorandum dated 15 March 1830.36 This detailed the representations made by the Aborigines Committee to Arthur, ‘recommending the native women now in Hobart Town should be allowed to join their Tribe on the North side of the Island’. It seemed that after the indigenous roving party mission failed, someone made sure to formally acknowledge that it was not originally the Lieutenant Governor’s idea by documenting the original suggestion well out of sequence and normal conventions.
Batman’s Plans amid Administrative Nuisances
This was not the only bounty capture that attracted Arthur’s personal attention. Overseer Jones had also reported that ‘two Youths were taken at South Down Beach by Mr Rosvere and Charles Thorp on 12th of May’, who were soon in custody in the Launceston prisoners’ barracks.37
The boys were apparently about 13 and 15 years old. Their captors had allegedly ‘treated them kindly, and supplied them with food and clothing’.38 As one correspondent noted:
one of them is supposed to be a chief’s son; his hair is besmirched with red ochre, and hangs in graceful ringlets down his shoulders. I understand they were alone and without food when captured.
But while they had been forwarded to Launceston, at least one of the boys appears to have been removed back to the place of his capture. ‘Mr Rosvere wishes to have one of the Boys,’ Arthur noted on Jones’s memorandum in late May, ‘to which I have no objection.’
Yet while these boys, like many other Aboriginal captives, passed into relatively obscure custodial situations, the case for the women returned to Batman was clearer, precisely because he was still an active agent in the Vandemonian War. Batman’s own file segment in the Colonial Secretary’s records ends with the women’s recapture, but other correspondence reveals that his and their war continued. On 1 June 1830 Simpson wrote to the Colonial Secretary detailing Batman’s ‘future operations’.39 Batman was ordered to take ‘one of the Native Women’ and some of his own men through the tiers to Pipers River:
and there endeavour to ascertain how the aggression complained of by the Women took place and if possible to discover the body of the woman said to have been shot; then to take an easterly course along the coast to Ringarooma so to proceed to the southward along the coast.
At this stage the investigation was still ongoing, but Simpson was also clearly concerned to know for certain that the woman was indeed dead, and not otherwise still at large. Moreover, his plan for Batman clearly went well beyond the lines of martial law, signalling that the northeast – still technically an area of Aboriginal sanctuary – was now being routinely scoured. The remainder of Batman’s force, in company with the other Aboriginal woman, was directed to travel east and then north along the coast until meeting the other party in a classic pincer movement.
Simpson also had a plan for when the two groups rejoined:
Mr B. shall build a hut to the East of Ben Lomond between the Mountain and George Bay, and there post his party secreting their arms and appearing abroad as little as possible from this hut, the women and Sydney Blacks to make excursions for two or three days together lighting fires to attract the notice of the Tribe and endeavouring to open a communication with it[.]
This prospective communication between Aboriginal rovers and the tribe was still possible, Simpson and Batman thought, because ‘both the Women and the Boy Mungo fully comprehend the wishes of the Government and are anxious to assist in bringing about a friendly intercourse’.
These sentiments, however, differed between tribal groups. Mungo-Jack, for instance, had earlier conveyed his ‘deadly hatred’ for the Big River tribe. But according to Simpson, Mungo-Jack was apparently ‘the Son of the Chief of this [Ben Lomond] Tribe, by one of the Women now with Mr B.’, meaning he was probably more open to the possibility of becoming a negotiator in the northeast with his own people. While noting that Mungo-Jack was then out with Danvers, Simpson wanted to place him under Batman’s charge. It was a notion to which Arthur agreed in the margin of this letter, before then approving the whole of the plan.40
A week after Simpson informed the Colonial Secretary of this scheme, but before receiving his approval from Arthur, Simpson forwarded another report to Hobart.41 Simpson and Batman had met, the latter expressing that he ‘naturally felt much annoyed by the impediments thrown his way by the Commandant’, presumably over the custody of the recaptured women. Moreover, Simpson wished ‘to suggest the propriety of one person being visited with full authority to act in all cases which have reference to the proceedings against the aborigines in this quarter’. Simpson may have hoped to be vested with similar responsibilities to those previously held by Anstey, or perhaps he might have hoped for Anstey to again take charge. Either way, Simpson’s prescient complaint seems to suggest he was unaware of Douglas’s new role in the midlands, set in train in the previous few weeks.
Simpson’s complaints – and his apparent ignorance of a newly centralised military command – reveal how delays in communicating throughout the colony sometimes affected the prosecution of the war. But distance was not the only obstacle to effective communication. Simpson and Batman had both alluded to bureaucratic pedantry, and Jorgensen too had complained of the delays with forming parties and the problems of adequately equipping and rationing them. Fighting a war through civil departments made for convenient politics, but brought its own problems.
Nonetheless, the police magistracies and colonial secretariat were more efficient than their complaints would suggest. Their concerns were real, but they tended to be directed at the Convict Department specifically. In a postscript, for example, Simpson worried about Mungo-Jack’s ill health. Believing the boy was still at ‘Dr Henderson’s Farm on the Coast’, Simpson ‘acquitted Mr Batman to send immediately for him and obtain every possible assistance to further his recovery’. Showing that the police magistrates in the midlands were sharing their intelligence, the following day Anstey wrote to Arthur that ‘Batman will send for him [Mungo-Jack] and atten[d] … to his wants.’ Anstey, Simpson and Batman were clearly coordinating messages and all demonstrably had the same understanding within a day of each other. Such cooperation was important and timely over the following months, because while there were hopes for a winter lull in raids and attacks, the winter of 1830 would be anything but peaceful.