CHAPTER FIFTEEN
1830, Spring
South, West and North
Arthur’s Campaign
The General Movement began, but few of the hundreds of participants recorded it. There are also curious gaps among the many letters in volume CSO1/1/320 (7578). For instance, there is practically no inbound correspondence from police magistrates between late August and late November 1830. Batman’s and Danvers’ reports had already ceased being filed with the others, and there is nothing from the usually prolific Jorgenson for the entirety of October. Even the volume’s largely miscellaneous section on ‘Reports & Journals of Various Roving Parties’ is silent about Arthur’s campaign.
The clean copy correspondence files of the Colonial Secretary’s Office only capture a small part of the action, and the Lieutenant Governor’s own memorandum and letter copy file goes quiet on the subject after 28 September when Arthur directed the police magistrate at Richmond to send various batches of volunteers to their prescribed positions.
A whole volume in the Colonial Secretary’s archive was dedicated to the campaign, and contains Arthur’s letters while in the field, Douglas’s reports and those of commissariat officers, as well as a few other bits and pieces.1 These capture the upper command elements and provide insight into Arthur’s overall strategic view, but they are slight on many frontline details. The colonial press did follow the campaign with great interest, albeit often a week or so behind the action and with its almost habitually questionable reliability. But there were some volunteers who diarised their participation or later shared their experiences.
Emmett’s War: Departing Hobart
One such volunteer was Henry James Emmett. His family compiled a manuscript account of what was titled his ‘Reminiscences of the Black War by Leader’.2 While ostensibly his own writing, it was completed some 40 years after the war and shows signs of editing and improvement by another author, probably Emmett’s son. ‘I have deemed the subject of sufficient interest to the public,’ the editor admits, ‘to rewrite them, and to add to the reminiscences from personal recollections so as to render the narrative less fragmentary’. What survives then, is a complex and argumentative document, reflecting and addressing the concerns of the 1870s as much as the actualities of October 1830. But, these caveats aside, it is still a valuable account.
Styled ‘Commander of The Black War party’ in his reminiscences, Emmett was a clerk in the Colonial Secretary’s Office when Arthur’s campaign was announced, and ‘being desirous of seeing the whole country’ volunteered to join the General Movement. His acquaintance, a young man named Groom, also volunteered with him. They ‘were ordered to start away on the 1st October’. Other members of the department remained in Hobart ‘to mount guard’.
Emmett’s experience was also played out in Launceston, where documentation survives showing Arthur encouraging recruits: ‘any clerks in the Public Offices … whose services can be dispensed with may volunteer to lead parties of Ticket of Leave men’.3 In Hobart such instructions were passed verbally, so it would seem likely Emmett and others were encouraged directly. After volunteering, Emmett was asked to lead a party. It comprised himself, his friend Groom, his own assigned servant, his father’s assigned servant and six others, totalling 10.
Emmett then enthusiastically ‘made arrangements for my departure and my outfit’. He got fitted out in ‘a complete suit of dark Moleskin’, but regretted it later as inadequate to cope with the weather. The winds that bothered the Provisional Constable in Bagdad heralded a cold front, which brought snowfalls to parts of the island. Emmett also acquired ‘a pair of Stockkeeper boots’, ‘a canvas knapsack’, and a compass. Completing his kit was a ‘double barrel Percussion gun costing £20’. Volunteering was not cheap, especially as Emmett had to see to the servants as well.
At ‘6 in the morning of a most lovely day’, 1 October, Emmett and his team met at the Hobart Police Office ‘with two days provisions in our knapsacks’. He reported that about 300 men ‘formed a square facing inwards’ in the yard, with ‘a large number of persons assembled including the merchants Public Officers & others’ in attendance as spectators. An hour later Arthur arrived with his staff. As Lieutenant Governor and Colonel Commanding, he was entitled to an armed guard, no doubt heightening Emmett’s sense that he was participating in something significant.
From the centre of the square, Arthur ‘addressed us in a most feeling speech of upwards of an hours duration giving us an outline of our intended duties, every thing being done in Military Style’. Even more pleasing for Emmett:
At the conclusion of the speech His Excellency spoke to me in the most friendly & fatherly manner thanking me for what I had undertaken. He also requested me to take charge of thirty more men so far as New Norfolk.
Several hours later, after preparations had been completed, Emmett’s volunteer force ‘marched off’. Shadowing the force as it left Hobart was a large gathering of spectators, many of whom were upset by the departure:
It was pitiable to observe the sad state of the poor women & children who followed a considerable way sobbing with their aprons to their eyes & others with plates of food & mugs of Tea, as if it was the last meal we should ever partake of, or that we should never meet them again.
Despite this scene, Emmett noted he ‘would not allow the men to fall out of the ranks’. He marched the volunteers a few miles out of town before he ordered them to halt and ‘allowed the men to take an affectionate farewell of their wives & sweethearts’.
Emmett faced what he called ‘a fresh trouble’ when he had ‘to get the men past the public House’ – the Black Snake Inn at Bridgewater. While seemingly an amusing aside, it really addressed a larger concern for the young leader. Emmett ‘stopped for a short time on the road side and allowed some beer to be brought down but would not suffer the men to enter the Inn’. He was worried that some of the men might use the opportunity to abscond from the party of convict conscripts and volunteers, especially the extra 30 men that Arthur had asked him to oversee. These were ‘perfect strangers, men holding tickets of leave and who were compelled to serve’, Emmett noted.
After their break he marched the party a further 2 miles on before stopping for the night ‘in a very pretty valley’. As they slept in the open around their fires Emmett attempted to stay awake, worried some of the men might try to slip off and retrace their steps to the inn.
In the morning, Emmett counted his own team, and then used the muster roll to check the others. Despite his night watch one had managed to escape in the dark, ‘leaving his musket & knapsack behind’, who Emmett remembered years later as ‘Paddy Something’. Paddy’s disappearance, Emmett admitted, ‘very much grieved and annoyed me, fearing that I should be blamed’. Nonetheless, that afternoon they reached New Norfolk and Emmett transferred responsibility for the 29 men and the missing Paddy to the police magistrate. He at least had the satisfaction that when Paddy was caught, he ‘would have been severely punished as his conduct set a bad example to the others’.
Law, Facts and Politics
The conduct of the parties was a topical concern. On the day that Emmett marched from Hobart to New Norfolk, Arthur formally extended martial law to the whole of the island:
against all the Black or Aboriginal Natives … excepting always such Tribe or individuals of Tribes, as there may be reason to suppose are pacifically inclined and have not been implicated in any such outrages.4
The announcement neatly answered and dismissed Gellibrand’s public concerns and the debate it instigated at the meeting at the court house: Aboriginal people were fair targets unless other conditions were met. The Proclamation enjoined 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 means be captured’. So shooting at Aboriginal people was sanctioned if they could not be captured or if there was reason to believe they were not ‘pacifically inclined’. Basically anything other than peacefully surrendering meant they were fair targets. That captives ‘be treated with the utmost care and humanity’ was the only injunction without such a logical inversion or a subjective loophole. Arthur’s Proclamation therefore had the overall effect of mostly protecting colonists from Gellibrand’s theoretical murder charge.
But this legalistic sleight of hand also contained a major public lie. Following convention, it articulated the cause and effect of the previous declaration of martial law and the partition of the colony in 1828, before turning to an explanation for its extension:
And whereas, by reason of the aforesaid exceptions, so contained in the said Proclamation, no Natives have been hitherto pursued or molested in any of the places or portions of the Island so excepted; from whence they have accordingly of late been accustomed to make repeated incursions upon the settled districts with impunity, or having committed outrages in the settled districts, have escaped into those excepted places, where they remain in security.
This was nonsense and Arthur knew it. When Batman had raised the issue of the extent of martial law, Arthur had personally given instructions to pursue Aboriginal people beyond its technical limits. Jorgenson had been sent beyond the line of martial law to assess the extent and impact of Aboriginal people in those areas, and he concluded it was not used as a raiding refuge. The Proclamation followed ancient legislative conventions and prerogative convenience by writing legal fictions into its own preamble – thereby making them facts at law.5
Arthur’s Proclamation ensured the legality of what it called ‘an active and extended system of Military operations against all the Natives generally, throughout the Island, and every portion thereof, whether actually settled or not’. The public got behind it, and the press continued their obsession with the Aboriginal atrocities.
Even the frequently critical Colonial Times – which opined that Arthur’s campaign would likely meet with ‘bad success’ – ran several stories of Aboriginal attacks in its last edition before the campaign commenced.6 In one ambush on a sawing pit, a badly wounded sawyer succeeded in grabbing a musket from an Aboriginal attacker and firing it at his assailants as they fled. The sawyer’s companion, though only slightly wounded, suffered horrible side effects of the strike: he contracted a ‘brain fever’, lingered a few days, and ‘died raving mad’. Another case concerned the killing of ‘a soldier of the 63rd, stationed at Boomer Creek’, who was ‘beat about the head and horribly disfigured’ when alone in the bush. Two fellow soldiers were reportedly too scared to leave their hut, and only found the body in the morning. Moreover, ‘a runaway from Hobart Town, has likewise fallen a sacrifice to the inveterate feelings of the Aboriginal inhabitants’, and there was ‘a very horrid murder of some of Major Gray’s men’. Again the story dwelled on the desecration of bodies, reporting that the attackers ‘afterwards disfigured them in a most shocking manner, cutting the heads off of three of them, and placing them between their legs.’
The Hobart Town Courier contented itself the next day with reproducing just one of the ‘letters from the interior’, which it claimed to be receiving in volume. It referred to some of the same incidents, revealing the way that news of attacks clearly spread by word of mouth:
Benlomond, Sept. 27, 1830. – Dear Sir, I have just time to say that the natives, last Thursday week, murdered two men at Oyster bay; and on the next day they beat a sawyer almost to death. On Sunday after they murdered a soldier. On last Wednesday they attacked the house of Mr. Boultbee, when he was absent, and if it had not been for a soldier who happened to be there they would have murdered Mrs Boultbee and all their children. On Friday last, they murdered three men at a hut in which eight men lived, belonging to Major Grey, and left a fourth for dead who is not yet out of danger. They robbed the hut of 4 guns, 12 blankets and other things, they had come direct from Oyster bay. Your’s [sic] Truly, JOHN BATMAN.7
Curiously, the Hobart Town Courier also carried letters from two speakers from the public meeting at the court house, rejecting the newspaper’s coverage of their speeches. ‘If the expressions you have dared to impute to me are read in other countries,’ Adam Turnbull wrote, ‘what will they think of us?’8 He went on at great length about many points, but all connected with his own reputation.
You make me speak of extermination as if it were a household word, and contained nothing awful in its meaning, at the very time that I was advocating the interests of the Aborigines and insisting upon the necessity of saving them as it were from themselves.
Concerned at being thought of ‘as an exterminator’, Turnbull went on to reject reports that the meeting’s resolutions had been passed unanimously. But he nonetheless admitted his real position in support of the campaign, as being for the greater good of Aboriginal people:
I would not with an affectation of mawkish sensibility, unregulated by reason, shrink from the shedding of blood, if that alternative be necessary, for the only means of preserving the Aborigines is, in my opinion, to dismay them, so that revenge may be drowned in terror; and if this terror cannot be excited without bloodshed, then some must suffer that the rest may be saved, and the Whites secured.
Turnbull ended by quoting Ovid in Latin, literarily presenting himself as against the hawks. In reply, the editor reproduced Turnbull’s second and third speeches in full, omitted from the earlier reporting. ‘The blood you shed will be the means of ending the war,’ Turnbull had claimed in one, posing the campaign as a means to save Aboriginal people from ‘the occasional murders by the stock-keepers’. It was a real sign of the moment that the ones who saw themselves as the peacemakers were so willingly advocating terror.
Turnbull’s letter and speeches took up most of that page, but a short letter from James Thompson also rejected any inference ‘that I advocate the destruction of the native tribes of the island’. These gentlemen, whose names were known abroad, were concerned for their reputations back in Europe and into posterity. Turnbull’s repeated references to the Spanish in Mexico highlight his sense that history was being made, and his reputation was at stake as an advocate of strong military action.
The fallout from the public meeting at the court house and the tension between an aggressive military campaign and concerns about Britain’s humanitarian image continued into the following week. The Colonial Times came to its rival’s defence and parodied Turnbull’s obsession with his reputation, declaring simply ‘that on that day the extermination of the Aborigines was considered by several as advisable and expedient’.9 But it also queried the policy of conscripting ticket-of-leave holders into the campaign, ‘compelled to belong to a band of guerrilla warriors after the Blacks’; referred to the commencement of operations by quoting an old rhyme about a king and soldiers marching up a hill and ‘down again’; and poked fun at the enthusiastic but coddled young heroes of town who were spoiling for adventure in the interior, who each had a:
poor pack carrier who follows his young master, the juvenile leader of a legion, to the field, charged upon no account to let the dear boy get his feet wetted, but to be sure to carry him safely through whatever streams they should have to pass – to let him have a cup of warm tea the last thing at night, and the first in the morning – and to sit by him when asleep to keep the mosquitos from biting his darling cheek.
Reunions Near the Western Front
Once in the New Norfolk district, Emmett’s party camped for two nights before moving on towards Bothwell on 4 October. Surprisingly, just as the party was making plans for departure, the runaway Paddy ‘turned up’. He ‘begged so hard to be forgiven’ that Emmett took pity on him and allowed the ‘penitent’ fellow to escape punishment. But there was another surprise in store. ‘On reaching the punt to cross the Derwent river,’ Emmett wrote, ‘to my astonishment I met my youngest brother George.’ A clerk like his elder brother, George worked in the chief police magistrate’s office in Hobart, and ‘had obtained permission to join’ Emmett’s party, although he took a few days to catch up and find Emmett’s trail. George had another of their father’s servants in tow, bringing Emmett’s party ‘to twelve persons’.
Emmett was ordered to travel ‘along the dromedary tier about halfway up keeping the beautiful Macquarie plains in view, and then to make my way across the country to the township’. While the General Movement was yet to properly commence, operational tactics were already being deployed and the country scoured, perhaps intended as a mix of genuine reconnaissance but also impromptu field training for these civilian militiamen. ‘There were other parties above and below mine’, he added, ‘though we did not meet’. The party stayed on alert as best they could. ‘The Natives had been very troublesome in that quarter,’ Emmett noted, although adding that ‘I did not see any signs of them during my route’.
The journey to Bothwell was incident-free. Upon arrival Emmett reported to Captain Wentworth of the 63rd Regiment, the current police magistrate. Emmett thought him ‘a most gentlemanly man, with whom I got on very pleasantly’. But their sojourn in Bothwell was brief. Emmett’s party was directed to leave camp before dawn the next morning and march to the farm of ‘a retired soldier residing at Cluny’, Captain Clark. Together they ‘would proceed … to the foot of the Blue Hills’, but first they enjoyed a ‘most sumptuous breakfast which Mrs and Miss Clarke [sic] had prepared for us’.
On the subject of food, Emmett recollected:
The provisions we drew from the settlers was generally very good … but the Commissariat Tea & Sugar was abominable. The tea was at once christened Posts & Rail, consisting in fact of black sticks an inch long (black tea in those days was not thought of). The sugar was of a dark color [sic] and quite wet like a lump of putty.
Emmett also noted that he ‘was compelled to draw’ the full ration of Tobacco – despite the fact that he and two others in the party did not smoke – because ‘the Commissariat Officer said it would make confusion in the accounts’. It was good fortune for the smokers in the party, but the bureaucratic pedantry, like the food, clearly stuck with Emmett into later years.
After breakfast, the parties headed off towards the hills. On the way they ‘crossed a long narrow marsh, pretty clear of timber except here & there a fallen tree’, which would have made for pleasant walking except it was ‘swarming with large black snakes’. Emmett claimed to see ‘between 20 & 30 which slowly crawled out of the way’. He was unable to ‘stop to kill them, or call out for assistance, as the men were at least 300 yrds [sic] distant on each side’. They were already marching in a dispersed formation.
Upon reaching the base of the hills, the plan was ‘to extend and make one long line each man keeping as far apart as possible, & then quietly to ascend the mountain, which was a resort of a very Savage Tribe of natives’. Two hours into their climb, which Emmett characterised as ‘a most arduous task’, they heard a sound which put them on alert. But it was ‘Mr Champ a Leader of a party, dipping up water with his pannican’ [sic]. Champ ‘had accidentally been separated from the rest by proceeding along a gully which branched into two, his men taking one, while he took the other’.
Emmett commented that Champ was woefully under-equipped, carrying ‘neither a blanket, or an ounce of food, nothing but his tin pot’. Emmett made a point of noting that ‘I always carried the same as my men, or rather more, with chart, Journal, Compass &c’. But Emmett was big-noting himself: Champ was actually a lieutenant.
The party reached the summit in the evening, finding it ‘quite flat and of considerable extent of fine grassy land, swarming with kangaroos’. Emmett added that ‘not a shot was fired’. While the prospect of kangaroo meat may have been tempting, the men had managed to maintain a quiet profile. They went to sleep in the open after ‘a beautiful and warm day’.
Emmett’s movements reveal that he was operating according to the instructions in Arthur’s Government Order 11, clause 13:
The parties of volunteers and ticket-of-leave men from Hobart Town and its neighbourhood will march by New Norfolk, for the purpose of assisting Captain Wentworth’s force in occupying the Clyde; and they will be rendering a great service by joining that force in time to invest the Blue Hill, which will be about the 10th of October.10
Emmett’s party was also on schedule. He and the other auxiliaries were supposed to take and hold the high ground, denying Aboriginal people the protection afforded by these hills as the main forces swept through. If the instructions were being implemented elsewhere in the district, then another detachment of volunteers was probably heading towards ‘the pass which runs from the high road’ to take another key landmark. Meanwhile, the main military detachments of the western division, assisted by roving parties, were likely starting to scour parts of the high country and river valleys in preparation for the main drive.
Preliminaries at Midlands HQ
As these preliminary movements began, Arthur was in the midlands, reviewing his strategy and the disposition of the colony’s forces. By 5 October he was at Ross, having travelled up from Hobart the day previously. Arthur corresponded with the Colonial Secretary at various points en route, getting arms and convicts sent into the interior, and giving the Colonial Secretary authority to deal with certain administrative matters in the Lieutenant Governor’s name and absence.11 These campaign memoranda were recorded and numerated in a subsequent copybook, but this is not a complete record of events. Some further correspondence – referred to in surviving letters – remains missing.
Nevertheless, Arthur gave a series of instructions from Ross as the force prepared for the first drive.12 His focus that day was Major Douglas’s northern front, forming in the northern midlands. There were several considerations, mainly concerned with lines of march and the 12 October positions ‘to occupy, when the line is formed’. Douglas had ‘carefully examined the whole of the ground’ that was going to form the 12 October front. The 10-man parties each had a specific part of that line as their main objective. Arthur wanted Douglas to ‘take care to appoint to each party a guide who is competent to lead it in the proper direction’. Once in their 12 October positions, each party guide was supposed to then receive instructions about ‘what bearing he is to observe on the march’ from Assistant Surveyor Thomas Scott.
Scott’s role in preparing the campaign was significant, as was his role in recording it. Like Emmett, Scott left a manuscript devoted to the campaign, in his case a volume of collected ‘Papers – Connected with the Campaign after the Natives’.13 ‘NATIVE WAR’ is heavily penned in bold on the cover. In this is an almost miscellaneous collection of documents, including drafts of Arthur’s Government Order 11, memoranda, various lists of men and dispositions, and even some short letters from Arthur asking Scott to dine with him and attend a meeting in the midlands to prepare for the campaign. As well as attending the Oatlands planning meeting and helping to chart the lines of movement, Scott had published a map of the colony, which went on sale in early September in Hobart and Launceston in readiness for the campaign season.14 ‘Copied from a Map, in possession of His Excellency The Lieutenant Governor’, the map contained ‘the several police districts … the roads, townships, most of the settlers dwelling houses and stock huts’. It was available for 10 shillings and sixpence, or 15 shillings ‘in a Case for the Pocket’. It was likely the chart carried by Emmett and other volunteers.
But for all the talk of maps and bearings, Arthur believed that men familiar with the country were critical to the success of the military operations. The Colonial Secretary informed the police magistrates of Oatlands, Campbell Town and Bothwell in late September ‘that one of the most important services you can render in furtherance of the measures against the Natives, will be to form a Corps of Guides in your District to be attached to Parties’.15 Thanks to Scott’s collected papers, a small part of one guide’s preparations are preserved in a letter, dated 5 October at Oatlands, from John Danvers. He had just returned from the east coast, having guided one of the bonfire teams to their station while also running messages:
On the 1st October the wood gatherers with myself reached the mountain. On the same day I went part of the way to Waterloo point with Willoughby, and arrived there next morning. I delivered my dispatches, and on the same day proceeded to Little Swan port. … The Officer commanding at Great Swan port will send men to relieve and assist the fire gatherers, in case it should be wanted. There can be no doubt but that the fires will be well attended to.16
In a similar way, the final section of ‘Miscellaneous letters and Reports’ in the Colonial Secretary’s volume on the campaign contains a few documents capturing the final preparations in the Oatlands district. Anstey advised Arthur on 4 October that ‘the Oatlands levy en masse will exceed 200’, adding that ‘I have fresh offers of assistance every hour’.17 An enclosed report from Jorgenson contained the names of four settlers who had volunteered their assigned servants but not themselves, several who could not volunteer because they had no servants, and detailed a few settlers yet to advise their contribution or who were otherwise recalcitrant in coming forward.18 One had reportedly refused to participate ‘upon principle’. Jorgenson only mentioned in passing that the force included some of ‘the Field police Constables’.
Anstey’s militia became part of ‘The Civil Force which is to reinforce Major Douglas’s Line’, as Arthur described them after receiving this news from Oatlands.19 Arthur’s own figures on the military deployed along Douglas’s northern front were split into five divisions, totalling 367 rank and file. Three of these divisions were drawn from the 63rd Regiment, and one each from the 17th and 57th. Intending that they would converge into a line on 12 October covering the country at the northern midlands from the east coast towards the central highlands and lakes, Arthur ordered Anstey’s whole levy of some 200 men to ‘be distributed along Captain Mahon’s Line’. This was the ‘Right Wing’, the westernmost part of the front covering the edge of the midlands and highland lakes. Here Arthur was still following his established plan, so it is likely the Oatlands field police were sent there too.
At the same time, Arthur gave orders regarding the remaining midlands volunteers. He ordered ‘Nine parties of 10 from Mr Simpson’s levy’ at Campbell Town to support the ‘Right Centre’, a further 70 from Campbell Town and 50 from Richmond were attached to the ‘Left Centre’, while the ‘Left Wing’ leaning towards the coast was to receive 60 men from Campbell Town and 50 from Richmond. Among the named party leaders in this district was John Batman.
None of the midlands volunteers were sent to Lieutenant Aubin’s division on the coast itself. A letter from Aubin in early October confirmed for the ‘Colonel Commanding’ that he had established a provision depot ‘on the Oyster Bay tier’, but this is a rare instance of documented activity.20This crucial flank remains one of the least-documented parts of the campaign.
Lawrence’s Party and the Launceston Volunteers
The forces preparing to form a reserve line among the lakes under Captain Donaldson were slow to gather. On 5 October, in fact, one of the volunteer parties going to join Donaldson in Norfolk Plains was only just leaving Launceston. Like Emmett, Robert Lawrence was a young volunteer leader, only in his early 20s when leading nine other men off to war.21 Like Emmett, he too had an assigned servant attached to his own party, and two others were former servants of his father. A wealthy landowner’s son, Lawrence was a keen botanist and diarist, and kept a daily account of his experience of the campaign. Knowing that he was potentially engaged in a history-making event, he made a distinct break from the remainder of his journal, subtitling the new section ‘the expedition against the Blacks’. In this he may have been influenced by the Launceston Advertiser, which suggested in late September that it would be good if ‘each leader of a party will take pen, ink, and paper with him, and note down a journal of each days [sic] transactions’.22
The Launceston Advertiser’s suggestion highlights the peculiar nature of the relationship between the colonial press, the conflict and its record.23 Launceston’s small size, its distance from the seat of government and the proximity to major landowning settlers produced quite a different dynamic from that in Hobart. The public meeting held in Launceston, for instance, had a completely different outcome.24 Having learnt that Launceston’s civil commandant had initiated a voluntary town guard without consulting those who styled themselves ‘community leaders’, the Launceston Advertiser’s editor published an open letter to the Lieutenant Governor complaining of the commandant’s actions. Presumably the editor was unaware that the commandant had been ordered to ‘secure the Town’ a day beforehand.25 That the commandant had also withheld the key to the court house, thereby stalling the meeting, only added to the editor’s fury. During the delay in retrieving the key, many would-be attendees supposedly left, and so the perceived attempt to prevent the meeting became the scandal rather than a debate about extermination.
But on the issue of extermination the Launceston Advertiser was obliquely clear: supportive of the mobilisation, wary of hoping for captures ‘if they were bound to catch them alive’, and of the opinion ‘that the result will be beneficial to the settler and the country generally, but it cannot be achieved without bloodshed’.26 The day before Lawrence’s departure from Launceston, the newspaper printed reports of multiple victims of Aboriginal people’s supposedly ‘base and bloodthirsty passions’. ‘To capture them will be very difficult,’ it noted in reference to these attacks. The forthcoming campaign ‘will be very difficult, but to visit them with condign punishment, will be not only easier of performance, but will far better satisfy the friends and relatives of the fallen’.27 In Launceston, the campaign was a chance for revenge.
The Launceston Advertiser had long been hostile to any pacific language or government injunctions, so its less than subtle hints were unsurprising. But like many local publications its editors often failed to grasp the bigger picture of which the newspaper was a part, and frequently failed to recognise the nuances of some of Arthur’s political posturing through government notices and orders. In advocating that ‘there is very little chance of preventing their deadly incursions, except by shooting a few of them’, the newspaper saw the general mobilisation as a chance to move on from misunderstandings about one tribe’s reported ‘peaceableness at George town’.28 This was a reference to Arthur’s Government Notice 183 of 16 September, reporting that the Lieutenant Governor had learned ‘that a tribe of Aboriginal natives which has recently visited George town, has evinced the most friendly and amicable disposition in their intercourse with the European Inhabitants’.29 Arthur had encouraged colonists to treat ‘this tribe, or any other which may manifest similar feelings … with tenderness and kindness by such parties as may happen to fall in with them’. But, situated in the area beyond his imminent campaign, the order was conveniently vague, a general reminder about humane conduct certainly, but also a formal record of the government’s humane intentions that would be carried on departing ships throughout the empire just as a major military operation was about to commence.
Government Notices 182 and 183 of 15 and 16 September probably better reflect Arthur’s priorities. Through these Arthur made a member of the 63rd Regiment a Justice of the Peace and appointed one ‘Sholto Douglas, Esq. to be Chairman of the Quarter Sessions at Oatlands, and Campbell Town’.30 Even Arthur’s systems of public reward highlighted a strong focus on catching over conciliating. Closely following these was Government Notice 186 of 17 September rewarding three men for their efforts ‘in pursuit of the hostile Aborigines’ with land grants of 100 acres each. They were two ‘Aboriginal natives of New South Wales’ and one ‘Aboriginal native of Van Diemen’s Land’, Pigeon, John Crook and Black Bill respectively, all men attached to Batman’s party.31
In the first week of October when the campaign commenced, Arthur issued a government notice and a government order which neatly reveals his publicity machine at work.32 In Government Notice 193 Arthur very publicly rewarded a convict servant of Captain Smith with a conditional pardon for capturing three Aboriginal people. This was supposedly achieved by laying down his gun, and then giving them bread and blankets, whereby:
he soon succeeded in so completely conciliating all three as to induce them to go opossum shooting with him, by which stratagem he led them voluntarily to the military party.
In publishing this, Arthur encouraged ‘other prisoners to act with equal humanity and forbearance’, but was also reminding the conscripted prisoners that captures would bring hopes of reward.
Arthur’s propagandising continued with the government order of 7 October – the same day of the major drive. This ordered the police magistrates of the colony to:
use their utmost exertions to obtain the most ample accounts which can be derived from authentic sources, of all such outrages as may have taken place, within their respective districts during the last five years, and, that they will forward with the least possible delay, a very minute and particular report, not only of all persons who may have been murdered or wounded by the Aborigines, but also of all houses which have been attacked or plundered by them.
While his further request for information about ‘the numbers, movements and habits of the savages’ could be construed as being useful military intelligence, it also reinforced the idea that Aboriginal people were the aggressors and the strong colonial response justified.