CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

From Open War to Black Operations

1830–31, Summer

Western Front and the Northeast

Audits and Operations

As the colonial forces dispersed, the book-keeping went on. Documentation from the campaign continued to be produced for months, accounting for men, muskets and munitions. Much of this material survives as lists or enumerations of men, assessing the force’s strength in the final stages of the drive, or represents post-operational audits, concerned with issues like discrepancies in the stores and ledgers.

On 26 November 1830 a ‘Nominal List of the Parties in Search of the Aborigines’ was compiled.¹ It contains three groups of men, divided into four parties. The first group of 10 men was focused on the final stages of the campaign, and ‘divided into two Parties under [William] Maginnis & [William] Grant in Search of the Stragglers who have been in Pursuit of the hostile Aborigines’. The disarray of the last drive left many small parties of men disoriented and potentially lost in the bush. The other two parties, headed by Thomas Guard and Ralph Dodge, were sent over the line into the peninsulas. ‘These men under Thos Guard’, one annotation recorded, ‘are sent to ascertain if there be any of the Aborigines on Forrestiers Peninsula’. Dodge’s team were sent further on to the Tasman Peninsula with similar instructions.

A few weeks later Guard reported to the police magistrate in Richmond, who in turn briefed the Colonial Secretary:

by his [Guard’s] Report to me it is very evident that no Natives have been in that Quarter for many Months; he states that he fell in with several of their Huts which did not appear to have been occupied for four of five months, as the Grass was grown very long and not the least trampled in the Vicinity, neither could any recent Tracks be observed in the Places which they have been accustomed to frequent, but what impresses on my mind the Certainty of their not having been there for several Months, is, the Saltwater Lagoon on the East side of the Peninsula being covered with young swans, from the Size of those nearly fledged to others not above ten Days or a Fortnight old, it being well Known that this Lagoon was their constant Resort from the Month of August till December for Eggs and young Swans.²

Guard’s inspection confirmed that Aboriginal people had not been driven into the peninsula by the operation. But there was a clear subtext as well: the campaign may not have formally captured many people, but it certainly disrupted them – they had largely been effaced from this landscape.

Such reconnaissance was not just about assessing the efficacy of the General Movement, but was part of determining subsequent operations. Like the rangers in the midlands before him, Dodge recorded his journeying so that headquarters could build up a bigger picture. ‘By a Diary which he Kept,’ the Richmond police magistrate noted, ‘it appears that the whole of the Land on Forrestier’s Peninsula has been well scoured, that if any Natives had been there recently some Traces of them must have been observed.’

While Dodge had not yet returned, there was some news courtesy of ‘one of the Party which was stationed at the lower Neck who … had seen the Party under Ralph Dodge’. To that date in early December ‘no Signs of the Natives had been observed in that Quarter’. While suggesting that Aboriginal people would not be caught on the peninsula as Arthur initially planned, this news also meant that by sealing the East Bay Neck with soldiers, Arthur had taken a large slab of territory. The newly established penal station at Port Arthur, located on a far point of the Tasman Peninsula in September, meant that the thin necks of land could now serve the twin purpose of excluding Aboriginal people and containing convict runaways.

The Western Front, Operations behind and beyond the Line

Other nominal lists reveal similar stories. One concerned a colonial victim of the campaign, Issac Hall, whose name appears on a list of ‘Roving Parties Under Captain Moriarty’.³ He is recorded at the bottom in a postscript section, beneath two volunteers registered as ‘Sick at Sorrel’. Hall was described as ‘Dead of the wounds in his Arm – This man came as a Volunteer from the Broad Marsh and was very attentive and an Active good man’. The burial register for Sorell and Richmond records that he was a farmer, aged 30, who lived at Old Black Brush.⁴ He was buried on 17 November, in the final stages of the line. Other correspondence reveals that Hall ‘came by his Death in consequence of receiving a Gunshot Wound’.⁵ His death was likely an accident of the massed colonial firepower of the late campaign.

Another incident recorded in a ‘Nominal Return of the Civil Force’ under Wentworth’s Western Division, dated 19 November, reveals one response to the reports of Aboriginal people in areas behind the line during the later stages of the General Movement.⁶ A ticket-of-leaver named Fisher led six other men, and had ‘gone Roving to Clyde’. The small note reveals that prior to the completion of the drive to the East Bay Neck, the successful if slightly controversial captor of Peletega was detached to go deal with renewed problems in the Bothwell district.

James Fisher’s activities during this period, like most of the colony’s military and paramilitary operations from this point onwards, are difficult to uncover. Arthur certainly kept his promise to keep colonial operations discreet, and surviving operational correspondence noticeably diminishes from late 1830 onwards, with the notable exception of what were called ‘friendly missions’. Only hints of the campaigning in the Bothwell district really survive from this period. Certainly they continued into the new year because the Bothwell police magistrate complained that ‘a difficulty exists in procuring supplies, for the commissariat store at this place, for men now employed on roving parties in this District’.⁷ A few days later, the Colonial Secretary wrote to the police magistrate at Bothwell about a related matter:

I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the 3rd instant forwarding the detail of a plan of James Fisher’s … ‘for capturing the Aborigines alive’ and in reply, I am directed to convey to you The Lieutenant Governor’s approval of your immediately carrying it into effect.⁸

This seems to have been a scheme for using a hut filled with armed men as a decoy. A few weeks later another letter referred to ‘an estimate of the expense which will attend the erection of the Hut proposed by James Fisher’ to which ‘Lieutenant Governor has signified his approval’.⁹Certainly it was a tactic that Arthur had long advocated, and hints at the networks of verbal communication now mostly invisible. Moreover, because Arthur wanted to ensure ‘that the Hut in question is erected on Crown Land’, it fitted into earlier patterns of such tactics already orchestrated with rovers. By targeting peripheral territory with few settlers it also produced fewer witnesses.

Fisher may also have been encouraged by the Hobart Town Courier advocating a similar scheme in early December 1830.¹⁰ Discoursing on the question of ‘what is now to be done with the blacks?’, the paper advocated a range of options:

Send numerous roving parties with skilful and expert leaders to guard and protect certain districts – to station as many outposts as possible … let every one be well armed and constantly prepared for them – round certain huts to erect such a sort of log fence or stockade … to train dogs to give the alarm … to shackle or chain those who are caught, and compel them to lead the parties to the haunts of their tribe.

Then, claiming no special knowledge of government intentions, the newspaper urged the use of strong parties in huts to ambush Aboriginal raiders. Despite its declarations of impartiality and ignorance, this newspaper had often reported views close to those of the government, and this seems likely to be another case of its getting inside information. The newspaper’s editors may not have been aware that there were roving parties in the fields, but they did seem to know that these were proposals that the government was interested in receiving.

Yet while elements in the government were certainly directing forces to key situations, some of the other rovers left the General Movement with some confusion. John Sherwin Junior wrote to Arthur in early December that he had ‘left the Lines on the 23rd Nov’, but had not heard from Wentworth for some time.¹¹ It suggests that Sherwin too may have been detached from the operation with some expectation of further duties. As Sherwin explained, ‘I thought it best to wait on your Excellency for your instructions, but as your Excellency at the present is so much engaged I will wait your answer at my father’s.’ He may have anticipated further roving duties. ‘The object of my coming to Town has been for the express purpose of knowing what to do,’ he explained. Precisely how Arthur ultimately responded is unclear, although annotations on the letter from Arthur and various government departments reveal that the terms of Sherwin’s roving operations were rather fruitlessly investigated – in some minor ways the relative secrecy of paramilitary operations was coming back to frustrate the administration.

Not all news was hints and whispers. As Sherwin’s query was followed up in Hobart, there had already been some success in the Bothwell district. On 19 December, Mr Howell – at whose property Fisher had captured Peletega a few months previously – learned that Aboriginal people ‘had gone into the Blue Hill’ and so he ‘went with a party of six men in pursuit of them’.¹²

about one o’clock we came up with them eating dinner but [they] were informed of our approach by one of the tribe stationed on a distant hill. We were afterwards enabled to trace them by bits of fire they had here and there droped [sic] until about six o’clock in the afternoon when we came up with them on the banks of the Ouse and watched them walking on the side of the river about a mile down when they crossed the river and made up their fires for the night when it was sufficiently dark to approach them we got nearer to their camp when for the first time we discovered that they were on the opposite side of the river we then proceeded about a mile down the river and the six men crossed with great difficulty and came on them between three and four o’clock this morning and succeeded in capturing two of the natives a man and woman and took from the tribe two muskets and two fowling pieces ammunition several blankets knives and a quantity of spears

‘The spears blankets &c have been destroyed’, the Bothwell police magistrate explained to the Colonial Secretary, before drawing his attention to the confiscated weaponry and ammunition: ‘It is an observation worthy of remark that these four stand of arms were loaded, and in perfect order, and that two of them had native flints in them.’ It was evidence that Aboriginal people were using colonial weaponry and repairing them as well.

The Bothwell police magistrate also reported that a group of some hundred Aboriginal people ‘attacked two of Mr Allardyce’s men on the same day near the “Lagoon of Islands”, one of whom was in a ‘doubtful state at his master’s residence on the Clyde’. This story was briefly repeated in some of the Hobart newspapers, showing a continued focus on Aboriginal aggressions while under-reporting the colonists’ initiatives.¹³ Only one of them mentioned the story about Howell, but it had morphed into a response to the attack at Allardyce’s.

The Problems with Captives

The police magistrate of Bothwell took few chances with his new captives, arranging to send them to Hobart ‘in charge of an escort of Soldiers, and a Constable’. They would be locked up at Hamilton and New Norfolk during the journey breaks, and no doubt chained to prevent escape.

This focus on ensuring captivity was sharpened when two of the Aboriginal men ‘who have been living so long at Mr. [George Augustus] Robinson’s house on the New Town road, absconded’ on the morning of 26 November.¹⁴ With increasing publicity about his expeditions, Robinson’s house had become something of a local attraction, with one report claiming that ‘Many of the inhabitants of New town were in the habit of stopping at the door and talking to them’. This part of the story was given as an illustration of these people’s English-speaking capabilities – part of ‘the mode of living of the white people’. But having divested ‘themselves entirely of the cloathing [sic] given to them’ the newspaper concluded that ‘Nothing can tame them’.

Unfortunately for these two escapees from the Robinson residence, they happened to run into a pair of broom-makers armed with hatchets. These broom-makers ‘exerted themselves considerably’ and secured the men.¹⁵ ‘It was with difficulty indeed that one of them was found at all,’ the Hobart Town Courier noted, ‘for he was not discovered till after a search of upwards of an hour, when they came upon him almost by accident, coiled up, nearly imperceptible between two stones.’ This image of a man lying between rocks in the bush near Hobart, sufficiently keen to leave the Robinson residence to attempt hiding from an armed search party, puts the lie to much of the discourse that later grew up about Robinson and the ‘friendly missions’.

Another case from May and June a few months earlier tells a similar story of a young man’s determination to leave Robinson’s custody. This is revealed in a single letter from the police magistrate of New Norfolk to the chief police magistrate in Hobart:

Sir, I beg to forward in charge of a Constable a black native boy, who came to Mr Thomson’s house at Charlie’s Hope on Friday last. He appears to have ran away from Port Davey, or some roving party with whom he may have been sent as a guide. He evidently knows Mr Robinson, and says he got his clothes at Port Davey.¹⁶

That an absconder from Robinson’s ‘friendly mission’ was captured and forwarded back to Hobart would be illustration enough that participation in such expeditions was not entirely voluntary, but the letter went further with a small postscript: ‘Since writing the above the boy escaped, and was again taken near Mr Robt Bethune’s farm on the 28th ultimo.’

Annotations on the same letter reveal relatively rare evidence of the custodial conundrum that Aboriginal captives could present the colony.¹⁷ The chief police magistrate in Hobart noted that ‘this is the Boy who escaped from the Native Establishment to which he has been returned, & strict order given for his safe keeping’. But clearly this was not necessarily considered sufficient for the Lieutenant Governor. ‘If the Committee would wish to recommend it,’ Arthur wrote, ‘this Boy may be removed to Maria Island.’ A final note reveals this was ‘Referred to the Committee’ the same day in June, but the neat record of committee meetings captures nothing of this or many other similar queries sent its way.

Through normal governmental processes, but particularly because it was a penal colony, there were whole documentary chains of custody produced by the administration of Van Diemen’s Land. The arrival, assignment and punishment of convicts all produced documents for officialdom in the forms of registers, receipts and the like. While the major processes of arrival were kept in bulk because of their usefulness to centralised government agencies, with some very interesting exceptions, much of what was once a voluminous body of administrative minutiae from internal prisoner transfers has been lost. The same process similarly affects the records of Aboriginal captives, making it hard to assess any overall shift. But the peculiar wording of a letter from a division constable in Sorell to Hobart in early December 1830 hints again at the strong focus on custody in late 1830:

I am directed by the Police Magistrate to forward the Body of a Native youth recently captured by Mr Walpole to Hobart Town for the disposal of His Excellency the Lieut Governor.

Couched in terms familiar to the Common Law dictum of habeas corpus, this record was not about the disposal of a corpse, but rather custodial responsibility during prisoner transfer. As the colony absorbed more Aboriginal captives, who regularly escaped or absconded, Arthur wanted to focus on ensuring their better and more permanent detention. In January, he recalled the Aborigines Committee. Robinson was asked to attend their first meeting. He had a lot to relate.

Northeastern ‘Friendly Missions’

Robinson had journeyed into northeastern Van Diemen’s Land for the duration of Arthur’s General Movement. His expedition was certainly a diplomatic overture that Arthur regarded as a prelude to a potential push into the northeast. While the Colonel Commanding was in the midlands in early October 1830 preparing his campaign, Robinson conferred with him at the residence of Roderic O’Connor, a prominent settler near Ross. Arthur wanted Robinson to have ‘boats, presents for the natives, and whatever you may judge necessary to further the object of your expedition’, which involved going into that area east of Launceston and north of Douglas’s northern front.¹⁸ This was outside of the General Movement, and Arthur reportedly wanted to give Robinson ‘an opportunity of conciliating and bringing in these natives by gentle means’. Surveyor General Frankland understood that Arthur kept Batman from going ‘to capture them’, but told Robinson that Batman was supposed to have men ‘in readiness to proceed by water from Spring Bay to Cape Portland whenever the advices from you make it appear desirable that he should come to your assistance’. As Frankland advised Robinson:

Whatever humour you may find the native tribes in – it will be desirable that you should not lose sight of them – if you can follow them, so that upon the arrival of parties, you may be able to bring them upon the tribes.

Robinson’s expedition therefore had two key elements. It was a genuine attempt at diplomacy utilising Aboriginal intermediaries such as Kickerterpoller. But it also provided reconnaissance and intelligence for Arthur’s wider military and paramilitary strategy.

Returning to Launceston after his meeting with Arthur, Robinson saw parties of volunteers departing for the front. He too readied a party and departed, albeit initially by boat and heading in a different direction. With Robinson’s expedition was Alexander McKay, who had been part of the mission to Port Davey. Like Emmett, many years later McKay recounted his adventures and became an informant for local historians who recorded some of his testimony.¹⁹ In addition to these snippets of oral history, a short account also survives in McKay’s own handwriting, which describes elements of Robinson’s mission to the northeast.²⁰ In this McKay refers to Arthur’s instructions to Robinson ‘to proceed to the East Coast and Capture what Natives he Could fall in with’. Also connected with this mission was a former sealer named James Parish, who was employed on boats supporting Robinson’s expedition.

Ironically, despite heading off into territory nominally excluded from the military campaign, one of Robinson’s earliest encounters during this mission was with an armed colonial roving party, guided by ‘a person named Lucas’.²¹ This was probably field policeman Lucas of the midlands roving parties, who was leading a party that ‘had come from Mr Cox’s near Launceston’. This was likely that roving group sent by Cox into the northeast that was later recalled at Arthur’s insistence, and whose visit to Batman’s farm documented the temporary return of the indigenous roving party headed by Aboriginal women. Robinson journaled that Lucas’ party was ‘astonished’ at Robinson’s own lack of firearms, although Robinson neglected to mention to either Lucas or in his own journal that the ‘friendly mission’ men had some pistols hidden away. There was a certain pacific mystique that Robinson seems to have liked to cultivate.

But Robinson’s displays of pacifism were not just for other colonists, as he aimed to present himself and his mission as protecting Aboriginal people from violence throughout the colony. As he journeyed he often ‘Conversed with the natives’, as he put it, and in this expedition, shortly after the encounter with Lucas, Robinson collected information about the sealers who lived in the islands in Bass Strait. From his Aboriginal companions, particularly the women, Robinson learned that many of the sealers had taken women as concubines and servants, often treating them very badly. It became something of an obsession for Robinson to document this testimony in detail. One of the women, Bullrer, explained that the sealer ‘Munro and others rushed them at their fires and took six, that she was a little girl and could just crawl’.²² She went on to say that ‘the white men tie the black women to trees and stretch out their arms … and then they flog them very much, plenty blood, plenty cry’. She mimicked the gesture of being stretched out so that Robinson understood.

The testimony against the sealers sometimes got beyond generalisations into specific cases. Bullrer described a time when ‘Jem Everitt, a red-haired man at Woody Island, shot a black woman’. Although frightened, she apparently asked him why he did it, and he ‘said the rest of the men told him to shoot her because she would not get mutton birds’. When the expedition later reached Woody Island, Bullrer showed Robinson ‘the grave where the woman had been buried who had been murdered by Jem’, and gave more details of the incident.²³ ‘She was up at the house and he stood in the bush and shot her through the breast,’ Bullrer stated, explaining that it was ‘because she did not clean the mutton birds to please him.’ Even though Robinson readily tended to report hearsay and rumour into his journals, often very uncritically, the wealth of stories on this issue strongly suggest endemic domestic violence among sealers. ‘Plenty children killed,’ Bullrer said on another occasion, before going on to add that women would secretly ‘kill them in their belly, beat their belly with their fist’.²⁴ She was trying to explain that this frontier was a bad place for children.

Such stories provided the main basis on which Robinson began to suspect the Nimrod’s report of hundreds of Aboriginal people in the direction he was heading was greatly overestimated. ‘Their fear of the sealers is such the natives would approach the coast very cautiously, if at all,’ Robinson wrote after asking some of the women about this supposed sighting.²⁵

But the stories Robinson recorded were not all about predatory sealers. He also captured elements of intertribal relations. Although mentioned in only a few lines, Robinson’s journal records confederated ‘nations’ joining together to fight their enemies. One man, Mutteele, told Robinson of ‘a war expedition on the PYE.DARE.RER.ME nation of Tasmans Peninsula’, where three groups combined to raid the territory. Mutteele also detailed other fights, which undermines simplistic notions of the Vandemonian War as only a two-sided conflict of ‘whites’ versus ‘blacks’:²⁶

The PYE.DARE.RER.ME see them coming and run in the bush, but they track out the PYE.DARE.RER.ME and kill them and take their women to Brune. When relating these exploits MUTTEELE appeared animated. He considered them as great achievements and honourable to his nation. Said at one time they attacked the PARE.DARE.RER.ME, who were fighting for oysters when they surrounded them. They had plenty of spears and killed several and took away some women. Said when he was a little boy he saw the MELL.ER.KER.DEE and the NEED. WON.NEE fight PAR.LEL.LER, a chief.

Similarly, Kickerterpoller told Robinson that his people, ‘the PARE. DARE.RER.ME’, with two allied groups, ‘was engaged in war with the lakes or LUG.GER.MAIR.RER.NER nation and that this nation killed several of their women and took some away’. Kickerterpoller related the time his people hid from enemies attempting to attack their camp by night. They ‘concealed themselves away from the fire’, thereby surviving a volley of spears thrown at their camp, and ‘in the morning they tracked them and fought with them and beat them off’. This second of Kickerterpoller’s story was apparently caused by a broken ‘treaty’ between the groups about an exchange of beads and ochre.²⁷

Through these sorts of conversations Robinson even learned that one Aboriginal group observed the Nimrod passing at sea when ‘they had recently returned from fighting with the natives of the lakes’.²⁸ In that expedition they ‘had killed three of that people and the rest fled’.

Much of this intertribal warfare Robinson recorded was clearly concurrent with the colony’s war. The same group also told Robinson that while campaigning against their tribal enemies ‘the soldiers had killed three of their people, and that they watched the soldiers asleep and killed two’.

‘Friendly’ Roving and Capture

The expedition established contact with this group on 1 November 1830 after tracking them by fire, smoke and footprints.²⁹ As was now standard practice, Kickerterpoller and a few of the other Aboriginal men began to ‘take off their clothes’ to make the first approach, but someone was spotted and an alarm raised. The group fled into the scrub, leaving their hut unattended. While Robinson went to inspect the hut, worried by barking dogs, Kickerterpoller and some other expedition members went ‘to look for the natives’. They successfully established contact and in due course introduced a man to Robinson, who ‘presented him with a few baubles’. Gradually other members of the group were introduced, and Robinson encouraged them all to join his own party:

I had told them previously such a story of the soldiers killing the blacks that they would not stop on any account and all said they would accompany me. Having made them some tea I hurried them to set off, telling them the sooner we got away the better as the soldiers was [sic] coming.³⁰

As he made for the coast, happy to be ‘accompanied by five fresh aborigines’, he resisted all their requests to stop and look for the remainder of their group, thinking it was a stratagem for absconding.

Camping by a stream en route to the coast, Robinson learned more of the cultural significance of the moon, and witnessed various dances.³¹ ‘One dance,’ he noted, ‘was a relation of a man who was with me named TAR.NE.BUN.NER, who had been chased by a man on horseback with a long whip, and of his out-running the horse.’ When it was performed again a few weeks later Robinson added more detail, and even drew an illustration:

Several men perform the part of horse: they stoop down and lean their hands upon the back of their companion and then walk round the fire singing; sometimes they run to imitate galloping. One man acts as driver and he has a bough for a whip, with horses in imitation of a dog – and performed his part exceeding well, shaking his head and appearing frightened, then stopping, then running &c.³²

This was clearly an important cultural development from within the colonial period, an illustration of cultural adaptation as well as a record of conflict. On another occasion when it was performed he admitted it was ‘my favourite dance’.³³

While seemingly enjoying the spectacles, Robinson was also alert to the prospect of Aboriginal people attempting to leave the expedition.³⁴ He took various cautionary measures to ensure they remained. ‘Ordered Stansfield to keep watch all night and not to sleep,’ he noted, ‘and I did the same and desired all the people to do so.’ When he learned that the new group may have been planning to attack the expeditioners he ordered a servant ‘to hide the spears in the bush.’ In the morning Robinson ‘hurried the people forward, being anxious to reach the boat’, and took advantage of a serendipitous noise:

Before setting off heard a sound at a distance, which the natives said was a musket: I did not imagine such a thing (I concluded it was a fallen tree or fragment of rock), but they saying it was soldiers I took occasion of the alarm and said the soldiers were coming … Appeared myself alarmed, saying that I should be shot if I stopped and that I was anxious to get back before the soldiers had killed all the natives.³⁵

Yet the noise may have had further effect, because about midday two other Aboriginal people caught up and joined the party. Both of them ‘seem dejected’, Robinson noted.³⁶ Perhaps they realised elements of his scheme, perhaps there really were soldiers. Either way, some of the new arrivals were taken on hunting detours as the party advanced towards the sea. This was a deliberate strategy that ensured ‘the people by this plan was kept apart’, thereby discouraging a mass departure.

Much to his annoyance Robinson was forced to camp yet another night on the mainland, despite having reached the shore camp of his boatmen.³⁷ He instructed the boat crew, including McKay, ‘to keep strict watch all night that the people did not get away’. The next day the weather was against a crossing to Swan Island, so Robinson ‘gave them baubles and played the flute’ to occupy them, as well as offering clothing to his new companions. ‘Trousers is excellent things and confines their legs so they cannot run,’ he smugly commented. For another night he had to camp on shore. ‘Kept watch as usual’, he noted, ‘Greatly apprehensive the people would go away.’

When the weather was fine in the morning Robinson ‘told them all to put on their trousers, as it would prevent them from running away’, and convinced the group to get in the boat. ‘I said come and they came, go and they went,’ he later said, marvelling at his own success.³⁸ Soon they were deposited on the island. ‘The natives were now at liberty to roam about,’ Robinson explained, because there was now ‘no necessity to watch them’.

Island Exiles

Robinson camped and conversed on the island while one of the boats was away. With its return Parish brought news of the war. ‘Parish said Capt Donaldson had told his soldiers in his hearing not to spare man, woman or child,’ Robinson noted, and ‘not to parley with them’, apparently because Aboriginal people had killed ‘two of his soldiers’. On 9 November Robinson departed on one of the two boats to investigate some of the islands, visiting some of the sealers, and recording more conversations along the way. He also met some of the sealer’s women, taking one woman from an old sealer with a parallel name: George Robinson.³⁹ In his journey he also transported some women between islands, and took yet more.⁴⁰ The integrated if reportedly dystopian straits community was being systematically segregated.

On 15 November Robinson returned to Swan Island to discover that more Aboriginal people had arrived. By targeting a smoke signal, a party that included Kickerterpoller and McKay succeeded in bringing more people to Swan Island.⁴¹ McKay described the excursion succinctly:

I went on the main land with some of the natives which went round the Island with us and found the natives near Mussell Row River where they were encamped and got them to the Boat landing them on Swan Island.⁴²

McKay also mentioned that Robinson had gone to the islands during the sealing season when most of the sealers were away at work, facilitating his approaches to the women. For McKay’s small trip the task was made much easier because Kickerterpoller was well acquainted with Luggenemenener, one of the women they met on the mainland. She was one of the women who recently returned to Batman’s property as part of the indigenous roving party before departing again with Mungo-Jack.⁴³ Robinson inscribed a list of the new people, which included the following name and explication: ‘TIL.LAR.BUN.NER (Jack’s name; he was with Batman and is a native of the POOR.RER.MAIR.RE.NER nation)’. With so many Aboriginal people being called Jack, it is hard to be certain, and the tribal name was quite distinct from that recorded by Jorgenson, but it was possibly Mungo-Jack himself.

Luggenemenener brought news of the war to Swan Island. She explained to Robinson that she had taken the Aboriginal men she encountered ‘to Mr Batman’s, in consequence of there being so many soldiers in the bush and she was afraid they would shoot them. Her apprehensions, poor creature,’ Robinson noted, ‘was too well founded as they afterwards killed two of this number.’ Luggenemenener also described her experience of being out while the General Movement was underway:

she and the five young men had seen the soldiers, and had been inside the Line and had run away again, coming out in the morning. Described the soldiers as extending for a long way and that they kept firing off muskets. Said plenty of PAR.KUTE.TEN. NER horsemen, plenty of soldiers, plenty of big fires on the hills.⁴⁴

But while lapping up this news of the war, Robinson was also concerned to get his own reports out from Swan Island, and dispatched letters with information for the Lieutenant Governor. The boat’s departure seemed to precipitate a change in mood. ‘The natives appeared dejected,’ Robinson noted, learning that one of the women ‘had circulated a story among the aborigines that the boat had gone to Launceston to bring soldiers to shoot them’. The terror with which Aboriginal people regarded the soldiery was one of Robinson’s greatest tactical assets.

For the remainder of November Robinson stayed at Swan Island in what he referred to as ‘this little black colony’.⁴⁵ In early December he again headed off ‘to the mainland in quest of the aborigines … accompanied by six blacks, one white man and two dogs’.⁴⁶ He continued to learn and record stories, including the belief that the sickness which killed many of the people at the Bruny Island Establishment a few years previously was brought about by ‘Boomer Jack that was shot by the soldiers, that his WRAYGEOWRAPPER came to his own country and killed all the people’.⁴⁷But about a week into this expedition Robinson decided to return to Hobart. ‘Conceived it would be advisable for me to proceed immediately to Hobart Town to confer with the Governor,’ he noted, ‘especially as he had expressed a wish at my conference with him at Ross to have my report to send to the Secretary of State.’⁴⁸ He also admitted to being short of supplies. Upon returning to Swan island he learned a little incorrectly ‘that the Line had broken up at Pittwater and not a single native taken’, but it was some time before he made the trip south.⁴⁹ ‘There are now thirty-five natives collected together’, Robinson reflected on Christmas Day 1830. ‘I hope the prelude to many others.’

Humane Governance and Terror Justified

Only in January did Robinson make his journey to Hobart, walking south along the east coast of the Vandemonian mainland in company ‘with one white man and five blacks’, Kickerterpoller among them. As he entered the settled districts Robinson collected stories about local skirmishes, particularly those involving ‘Meredith’s people’.⁵⁰ On 11 January Robinson ‘dined with Lieutenant Aubin’ and ‘stopped for the night’ at Cotton’s farm. ‘The natives very unwell from cold’, he noted, which was the only thing he described of the visit. Although not mentioning the 1829 attack on Cotton’s farm, and the chases that followed, Robinson recorded various stories and locations of note as he progressed, including the graves of men ‘killed by Mosquito and Black Jack’ several years previously, presumably now sites of considerable local interest.⁵¹

But local memories of Aboriginal attacks were still raw. The day Robinson departed from his farm, Francis Cotton joined with other prominent settlers in the Great Swan Port district to publicly thank Arthur for ‘his great exertions during the late operations against the Aborigines’, particularly because they felt their district had to contend with ‘the well known Hostile Tribe of Natives that infests it’.⁵² While these settlers tacitly acknowledged ‘friendly missions’ – wishing the Lieutenant Governor would continue ‘ameliorating the condition of these benighted people’, and would ‘bring them from their state of Pitiable Barbarism to enjoy some of the benefits of Civilized Life’ – surviving drafts of their meeting reveal a strong focus on infestation, atrocities, outrages and murders. Their main concerns were their own fears and dangers ‘while these people are at large’. In this meeting the Great Swan Port community was following other districts around the colony, holding meetings and subscribing letters during this summer of 1830–31, showing their support for the late military action and for continued vigilance.⁵³ Typical of petitions, the addresses also contained platitudinous conventions of the day, referring for instance to the Lieutenant Governor’s ‘humane intentions’, ‘paternal care’ and his ‘philanthropic purpose’.

Arthur thanked the settlers, responding to one that ‘I receive with feelings of great satisfaction, and the assurance which is conveyed to me of your confidence in the measures of Government, for the purpose of subjugating the Aboriginal Natives, will, I trust, not be disappointed.’ This was the political environment into which Robinson stepped as he journeyed through the settled districts. The war was not over; its direction had just become a state secret.

Eventually, on the evening of 17 January, Robinson ‘Arrived in Hobart Town’.⁵⁴ The following day he was invited to ‘wait upon the Governor’ at ‘a private interview’ where Arthur’s ‘family were present, except Mrs Arthur’. The day after this social meeting, Robinson met with Arthur to discuss ‘the civilisation of the aborigines’, after which Robinson diarised Arthur’s approbation of his services and promises of future reward.⁵⁵ On the next day, 20 January, Robinson’s journal recorded that he ‘Waited on the committee on the aborigines.’

The Aborigines Committee had nominally been ‘Summoned … after a long adjournment for the most Satisfactory and gratifying object; viz, of learning from Mr G A Robinson an account of his proceedings, since the period he Commenced his mission to the Black population of this Island under the auspices and Sanction of the Government’.⁵⁶ Robinson gave a short verbal summary of what he had learned from journeying south towards Port Davey, up the western coast, and along the north coast towards the northeast since his departure from Hobart a year earlier. He estimated there were only about 700 Aboriginal people across the island, and promised to produce a more detailed report for the committee. ‘To Conciliate the Natives’, he stated, was ‘the main object’ of his missions, and suggested ‘the whole of the Native population can be brought in’ and ‘all removed to Some place of Security in three years’. Robinson said that he had explained his mission to Aboriginal people as ‘to preserve them from injuries on the part of the Whites, and to place them in a Situation where they might be instructed in the modes and Customs of Civilized life’. No Aboriginal people were questioned by the committee.

This notion of Aboriginal protection underpinned the logic of Robinson’s testimony and served to justify his mission, but Robinson was also conscious of the continuing warfare in the interior and its threat to settlers. Potentially echoing Fisher’s operations being readied in Bothwell and others like it, Robinson admitted that ‘it would be prudent to afford protection to the remote Settlers and Stock-keepers. Stationary Parties is the only way to effect this’ – past experience, Robinson suggested, ‘proved that all the Roving Parties are of no use’.

Once again the roving parties were represented within the committee’s minutes as a public foil for the lack of captives from the war-ravaged interior. But Robinson’s testimony – like his assertion that ‘after committing any Outrage they generally remove to a great distance immediately’, and his opinion that Aboriginal people ‘were very much intimidated by the operations which were carried on against them’ – likely reflect a broader political reality. These two points seemed to justify the extension of martial law to the whole island and framed Arthur’s campaign as a beneficial display of force. It is another useful reminder that the committee’s public record was as much a political document as an administrative one, reflective of conversations at Government House as well as those with Aboriginal people in the bush. Robinson’s thinking that ‘even the better disposed look upon the Whites with terror’, for instance, was potentially about more than stock-keeper misbehaviour and the predations of sealers on women. He had used stories of soldiers to scare people himself, after all, and within the broader political context it could also be taken to affirm that Arthur’s original plan of terrorising the tribes into submission was becoming effective.

After Robinson left the meeting, the attendees focused on an appropriate island for ‘an Establishment’. Opinions differed between Maria Island or somewhere in Bass Strait, and this discussion continued over subsequent days while Robinson prepared his report.⁵⁷ The idea of exiling all the tribes had become de-facto policy, summed up by the committee minutes on 27 January 1830:

The object of the removal of the Natives from Van D Land is recommended for the purpose of protecting the Settlers and of Ameliorating the State and Condition of the Natives.⁵⁸

A week later the committee recommended that Robinson ‘remove the Natives from Swan Island, and after he has comfortably settled them in the Establishment he will renew his mission to the hostile Tribes’.⁵⁹ Robinson also reaffirmed for the committee that he was ‘of opinion that placing Armed Men in the distant Stock Huts is a very judicious measure.’

Robinson’s public support for such measures was made with fortunate timing, because a few days later the government received word about Fortosa, whose party had just made ‘an excursion to George’s River and the Country round the Bay of Fires’.⁶⁰ Fortosa had recently been scouring some of the same territory visited by Robinson over the past few months. Although ‘having searched it without success’, Fortosa was still in the field, and had switched from roving to waiting. ‘The party is now stationed at a place called “Black Boy Plains” in the South Esk about the junction of the Breakaday River,’ Simpson reported, ‘in which neighbourhood the Natives were last seen, a few days previous to the party’s arrival.’ Robinson’s mission may have attracted public attention, but other parties were quietly active in the field.