CHAPTER ONE
1803–28
Van Diemen’s Land
Landings and Land Grabs
The British Empire invaded Van Diemen’s Land with a pincer movement. They landed in the southeast in 1803 and then the north in 1804. They dug in, planting flags and crops. With that, the large island south of mainland Australia was claimed for Britain.
For the first few years, the occupation was relatively precarious. Contact was limited and sporadic. The two outposts could mostly defend themselves against Aboriginal groups and runaway convicts-turned-bushrangers, but they struggled to project control beyond that.
But there was conflict from the start. In 1804 some soldiers fired on a group of Aboriginal people spotted approaching Risdon Cove, the original southern beach-head. It was remembered and recorded because they had used a small cannon, killed a few people, and captured a boy. Other encounters certainly went unrecorded.
Within a generation, the pincers closed. Colonisation advanced, helped by shiploads of sailors, surveyors, settlers, convicts and soldiers. The southern outpost became the busy port of Hobart Town, growing along the Derwent River. The main administrative focus of northern occupation shifted eastwards, becoming Launceston. Settlers took land in the fertile valleys cut by the island’s rivers, moved into the grassy midlands between Hobart and Launceston, and pushed right up into the edge of the central highlands. Small port settlements and interior river-crossing towns were founded and fortified, and served to support the invasion. Many Aboriginal people were even absorbed into the colonial advance – taken into the occupiers’ homes and raised as their own or trained as servants. Soldiers were strategically stationed to contain convicts, chase bushrangers and deter insurrection, but also to protect what came to be known as the settled districts. Aboriginal people were left to roam the thick forests, scrubby hills and rugged highlands. For now.
The ways, cultures and societal structures of Aboriginal Van Diemen’s Land were poorly understood by the newcomers. Even today, colonial-era Aboriginal Van Diemen’s Land remains obscured by thin evidence and the accretions of myth and history. Early maritime visitors had made some contact and recorded a few details about appearances and tools, but they also fostered a misguided impression that the ways of these people at that first contact were the ways they had always been.1 Certainly the societies the colonists encountered in the nineteenth century were not unchanged relics of humankind’s nativity.
The colonists gradually learned that there were several distinct Aboriginal entities throughout the island, which they generally called ‘tribes’. Each seemed to have their own geographical ranges, so the colonists named them by key locations: the Oyster Bay tribe, the Big River tribe, and so on. This was part of a wider process of mutual learning, where colonists and Aboriginal people interacted with each other, learned from each other, and changed each other in different ways across the island. Tribes that were close to the colonial bases, especially in the southeast, learned more than their more isolated counterparts, and were better understood in turn. Sailors in the southeast, using Bruny Island as a replenishing station for journeys further afield, sometimes exchanged gifts with Aboriginal people – just as Captain Cook had done. Other seamen landed to showers of stones and spears.2 But the great irony for colonial-era Aboriginal societies is that they were recorded and documented through the same processes that vanquished them. And so the uncovering of the real Vandemonian War also reveals much about the Aboriginal Vandemonians.
Towards the Autumn of 1828
By the mid-1820s colonial Van Diemen’s Land was expanding its effective reach. A new convict penal settlement placed a strong British presence at Macquarie Harbour in the island’s southwest. The Van Diemen’s Land Company was established, and commenced occupying the northwest. Although one was a convict outpost and the other a resident corporation, they formed a new pincer movement taking the western half of the island. Both had military support. On paper the conquest seemed nearly complete.
Van Diemen’s Land also became a colony in its own right in 1825, when it was declared independent from New South Wales. Wielding considerable executive power, Lieutenant Governor George Arthur oversaw the development of several familiar attributes of civil society, from local legislative councils and law courts to roads and bridges, and the continued growth of a flourishing local press.
And so the mid-1820s has come to be seen as a key period in the history of European settlement in Tasmania. Even the actions of some Aboriginal people seemed to point to a new epoch of colonial amity. As the Hobart Town Gazette reported in November 1824:
[W]e announce with the most cordial satisfaction, that, from some cause yet unknown, no fewer than sixty-four Aborigines came into town on Wednesday, of their own accord, and in a pacific manner well calculated to conciliate even those who had been most prejudiced against them.3
The Lieutenant Governor ordered them fed, and they were accommodated in the market house building. Bonfires were lit for them, and a police guard was ordered to watch over them, ostensibly ‘to guard their repose from interruption’. It was the very picture of colonial paternalism. The Lieutenant Governor reportedly had a ‘lively interest in these poor creatures’ and it was his ‘desire to at once conciliate their feelings and promote their welfare’.4 Moreover, a ‘plan for civilizing and evangelizing them’ was apparently being developed by Arthur, with the aid of several interested gentlemen and clerics.
Attempts at diplomacy had been undertaken as early as 1814, when Lieutenant Governor Thomas Davey had pointedly visited some Aboriginal people near the mouth of the Derwent River, gave them clothing as gifts, and then encouraged some of them to Hobart, where the Reverend Robert Knopwood welcomed them into his home.5 Over the years, many Aboriginal children were also adopted into settler families, baptised and effectively resided within colonial society in various parts of the island.6 One boy even travelled to England, was educated in English ways, and then returned to Van Diemen’s Land in the hope of becoming an example to others.7
Such attempts to mould Aboriginal people into labourers, agriculturalists and Christians did not spring suddenly from the mind of any particular gentleman or governor. Rather, they were part of the organic processes of the age, common to the paternalistic logic of empire, and had other colonial precedents, especially in New South Wales.
By the late 1820s, a generation of Aboriginal people had grown up either in, familiar with, or aware of the colony’s various outposts. In the north, many had encountered sealers working among the islands of Bass Strait since the colony’s beginning. In the interior, Aboriginal groups increasingly met surveyors, shepherds, stockmen and ‘settlers’, as well as runaway convicts and bushrangers. In the southeast, Aboriginal people had regularly encountered maritime outsiders since the days of Captain Cook.
In early May 1828 the Hobart Town Courier printed a short vocabulary, acquired from some Aboriginal men visiting Hobart.8 A survey party that had been charting parts of the coast for potential harbours brought these men to town from nearby Bruny Island. In one sense the event reflected the relative amity that could exist in parts of Van Diemen’s Land, but it also hinted at the increasing colonial expansion that surveying generally portended.
When Lieutenant Governor Arthur learned of the men’s arrival, he instructed the Colonial Secretary to supply them with ‘biscuit from the Commissariat. And let them be persuaded to return to Bruné Island where an establishment will be formed for them, as I am fearful they will get spirits or be otherwise corrupted in the Town.’9
A few days later Arthur again communicated with the Colonial Secretary. ‘I consider it especially important to conciliate their tribe,’ he noted, giving orders to:
send a quantity of biscuit and Potatoes to be under the charge of a Soldier of the Veteran Company, who will issue them regularly to the Natives. By this means, they may be persuaded to settle and cultivate Potatoes for their future support.10
Arthur also insisted that ‘a discreet man should be selected for this service’. There were many applicants for the job to run the Bruny Island Establishment, each stressing their bush skills, familiarity with Aboriginal people, or general resilience for an onerous task. A bricklayer named George Augustus Robinson was finally selected for the job, seemingly because of his enthusiasm for the Lieutenant Governor’s general plans, and the patronage of the Reverend William Bedford. Through strategic and effective patronage, Robinson would transform himself into the ‘Conciliator’ of popular memory, the man who peacefully brought in the Aboriginal tribes. But in early 1828 all that lay in the future.
From these discreet beginnings, a false narrative bloomed. Arthur’s pacific approach to the Aboriginal visitors from Bruny Island belongs to a highly specific set of circumstances, but his broader policy reflected an aggressive colonial plan. Just a few weeks earlier, in April 1828, Arthur had responded to reports of increased violence in the interior by issuing a proclamation that the settled districts be cleansed of Aboriginal people.11 The closing pincers became an armed frontier – the Lieutenant Governor was preparing to divide and conquer.
War and Partition
Sporadic violence had been endemic in Van Diemen’s Land for two decades, but in early 1828 it escalated to war. Though Arthur did not issue a document or instruction to Aboriginal tribes informing them that the British Empire considered itself at war with them, the April 1828 Partition Proclamation serves as a useful marker of several operational threads coalescing, and can be regarded as the official acknowledgement of major hostilities.
The Proclamation opened by carefully reciting some prior proclamations and orders, thereby establishing the colonisers’ patient and beneficent intentions. Frontier violence was acknowledged but attributed to the misbehaviour of ‘Shepherds and Stockkeepers’ and ‘Sealers’, thereby implying these to have been the illegal acts of individuals, and therefore classified as criminality. The Proclamation further absolved the government by brushing over the invasiveness of colonisation itself, instead pointing to the intransigence of Aboriginal people who exhibited ‘a state of living, alike hostile to the safety of the Settlers, and to the amelioration of their own habits, character and condition’. There was a state of mutual animosity so intense, the Proclamation avowed, as to require the segregation of the country. The Aboriginal people were to ‘be induced by peaceful means to depart, or should otherwise be expelled by force from all the settled Districts’. Any pretence of peaceful settlement was officially over.
As a legal instrument the Proclamation applied a logistical structure for fighting the war. It proposed that ‘a line of Military Posts will be forthwith stationed and established along the confines of the settled districts’ through which Aboriginal people could not pass without the personal approval of the Lieutenant Governor. Magistrates were ordered to effect the ‘expulsion of the Aborigines from the settled Districts’, although they were to be treated well if captured, like other prisoners of war. Furthermore, the application of force by convicts and civilians could be authorised by ‘a Magistrate, Military Officer, or other person of respectability named and deputed to this service by a Magistrate’, providing a legal mechanism for allowing militia operations. All Vandemonian subjects were enjoined ‘to obey the directions of the Civil, and to aid and assist the Military Power (to whom special orders adapted to situations and circumstances will be given)’.
The British Empire had been preparing for war in Van Diemen’s Land for several years. The initial invasion was part of a global strategy of empire-building, and resistance was to be expected. Led by military officers, effected by soldiers and supported by convict labour, the establishment of a penal colony was intended to prevent rival claims in the region, tap into existing trading routes and develop new ones, and facilitate broader settlement. It worked, just as it did around Australia – from Port Jackson in the east to King George’s Sound in the west.
Much like the new colonial outpost of Singapore, which supported a British push into southeast Asia through the Malayan Peninsula, the broad processes of Australasian British settlement were guided for wider imperial objectives, orchestrated under the careful supervision of the British Secretary of State for War and the Colonies. By the late 1820s, the continent was ringed with frontier bases, projecting British influence into their subregions, controlling key sea routes and approaches, and supporting continued advances into the interior. Hobart and Launceston were parts of this big picture.
But by 1828 the British were overstretched. Wherever the British landed, indigenous inhabitants generally fought back, resisting encroachments into their territories. Although often treated more as a tactical nuisance than a strategic problem – a side effect of settlement particular to each situation – there are clear trends in the encounters between colonisers and Aboriginal peoples. Curiosity, conflict, cohabitation, collaboration, avoidance and adaptation all highlight the multifaceted but singularly recognisable nature of colonial invasion. The ringing of Van Diemen’s Land with coastal settlements by the late 1820s, coupled with continued moves to settle and pacify the interior, revealed that Aboriginal people could be dispossessed only so far. Eventually they would have nowhere to go.
Arthur’s Armaments
Arthur had been aware of Aboriginal resistance from the beginning of his term in Van Diemen’s Land. He was also cognisant of the colony’s larger strategic role in the British Empire. In May 1824, his predecessor Lieutenant Governor William Sorell had appraised Arthur of the conditions in the island,12 detailing the regimes for the management of convicts and the assistance given to free settlers.
Sorell’s briefing also articulated strategic apprehensions. One point concerned the means of communication between settlements, highlighting the importance of ensuring the smooth flow of information and supplies. More particularly, with fewer than 230 soldiers on the island, Sorell believed that the occupying force required ‘augmentation’. He had requested ‘Guns and Horses, Sufficient for Batteries to cover the Harbour’ as well as ‘a Supply of arms and accoutrements Suitable to a small local force, and of arms and equipment for a Small corps of yeomanry’. Sorell desired, in effect, to be able to raise a local militia.
In part this was because the professional soldiery was mainly occupied with guard duties at the major settlements. George Town, Launceston, Hobart and Macquarie Harbour all occupied a significant proportion of the total force available. But as Sorell informed Arthur, there were also soldiers in the interior:
there are three Interim Stations, one at New Norfolk, one at Ross and one at Jericho. There has been a party temporarily on the Clyde, where the Natives had been very troublesome, and where I projected a Hut Barrack for a permanent Station and a small Prison.13
It was not just convict guard duties that determined military manoeuvres across Van Diemen’s Land. Two and a half weeks after Sorell’s briefing, Arthur wrote to Earl Bathurst, the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, about Van Diemen’s Land’s ‘very defenceless state’. He amended Sorell’s earlier requisition, and sent it with the despatch to Bathurst in London.14 He wanted:
24 x 24 Pounders, with iron Garrison Carriages, Side Arms and other Stores Complete.
50 x Barrels of Gunpowder.
6 x 6 Pounders Field Pieces, cars complete, to act with or without Horses, with Sides, Round Shot, in fixed bottoms, Harness and Drag Ropes complete.
1000 x Muskets, with Bayonets, Belts, Pouches, etca., etc., complete.
200 x Swords and Belts for Yeomanry.
200 x Brace of Pistols.
Between the field cannon, a thousand bayonet-bearing muskets, and hundreds of swords and pistols, Arthur was clearly making preparations for a land war.
Arthur continued agitating for arms and soldiers in his first year in office.15 He informed Bathurst in August 1824 that he thought ‘Five hundred men’ would not be ‘too large a Force to protect an Island so extensive, if the exigencies of other Colonies will admit of it’. He acknowledged that ‘as the Natives have been also troublesome in New South Wales, I do not believe any considerable reinforcement can be well spared from that Colony’. But he pointed to his own colony’s trouble with ‘the late unusual hostile proceedings of the Natives’ in the interior as being a key concern, as well as runaway convicts and ‘Bushrangers’. He suggested the formation and armament of local district corps to address the growing insurgencies.
Bathurst agreed. Replying almost a year later – seaborne communication with London was a very slow affair in those days – Bathurst told Arthur that further reinforcements ‘for placing at the disposal of the respective Governors’ were underway.16 Van Diemen’s Land was not, after all, the only colony with ‘troublesome’ Aboriginal people.
Troops came from a variety of sources. Some were initially bound for New South Wales, while ‘three Companies consisting of 50 Men each [were] formed from the “Veteran Battalions”’, which would be sent to the island for the purposes of overseeing convicts. Bathurst also informed Arthur that London was considering the idea of a local yeoman militia, and was generally amenable to the notion, but that no firm decision had yet been made. In the interim, Arthur was given approval ‘to organize a Police Establishment, until the Military Assistance … shall become available’.17
Police Magistrates and Field Police
By early 1828 Arthur presided over something closely resembling a military-run police state where the operational reality of Van Diemen’s Land saw a close alliance of the civil and military powers.
Much of the island was divided into police districts centred on the major towns, where magistrates and field police were responsible for policing the ‘settled districts’. In the central midlands between Hobart and Launceston, gentleman settlers occupied the positions of police magistrates – Thomas Anstey at Oatlands and James Simpson at Campbell Town. The remainder of the interior police magistrates were military men, strategically covering the midland’s flanks. In Richmond, near to Hobart and the head of the Coal River Valley, was the ex-soldier Thomas Lascelles. In the region of Norfolk Plains, in the north-west of the midlands, was another ex-soldier, Malcolm Laing Smith. At New Norfolk, in the upper reaches of the Derwent River, was the ex-naval administrator William Hamilton. Soldiers occupied the crucial perimeter posts. At Great Swan Port on the east coast was Captain George Hibbert of the 40th Regiment. At Bothwell, by the edge of the central highlands, was Lieutenant Joseph Curtin, also of the 40th Regiment. And at George Town on the north coast was Captain John D’Arcy of the New South Wales Royal Veteran Company.
Arthur had established a field police in 1825, with an initial complement of 30 men. Intended to be flexible, responsive and familiar with the territories to which they were posted, the field police’s role went beyond simply capturing runaway convicts and bushrangers. They also served as guides and worked as a sort of official ‘civil law’ presence on settler-led and military expeditions.
By 1827 Arthur had further combined the civil and military powers, appointing Major Tobias Kirkwood of the 40th Regiment as ‘Commandant of the Field Police’.18 In July 1827, Arthur reportedly spent some time personally ‘directing the movements of the Field Police and Military’.19Their actions often went unrecorded, but they were an active presence in the colony. In one incident in November 1827, when three field police were capturing a runaway convict, they reportedly encountered ‘about 150 natives who attacked them with stones’.20 The Hobart Town Courierreported that one of the field police was hit in the head. In response, these field policemen:
expended seventeen rounds of ball cartridge and killed two of the dogs, but are not certain whether any of the natives were hurt, on fixing their bayonets and charging, the natives retreated. The plan of the Field Police cannot be too highly appreciated, they are a most useful and active set of men.
Arthur clearly thought so too. With instructive timing, and revealing his wider strategic thinking, Arthur reviewed the administration of field police rewards in early March 1828. He had found the force ‘highly beneficial’ and ‘an Augmentation of the Band’ was being implemented.21 Because field police duties were potentially onerous, and could make them decidedly unpopular with the broader convict population, these convicts were offered reduced sentences in return for this special service. The new incentives would, the Colonial Secretary informed the police magistrates, come into force in April 1828 – just in time for the Proclamation.
Military and Paramilitary Dispositions
This ‘augmentation’ of the field police highlights the escalation of operations against Aboriginal people in early 1828. Even the early dispositions of the growing force points to the ‘augmentation’ of a wider strategic situation, not merely the supporting of existing duties policing convicts and settlers.22 The military-run police districts of the perimeter, with their sizeable military stations, only attracted a total of 10 field police appointments. Army bases had little need of field policemen. The other interior stations, however, could certainly do with paramilitary support. New Norfolk, Oatlands, Norfolk Plains, Campbell Town and Richmond gained 15, 18, 18, 21, and 12 field police respectively. Having tested the system over a few years, Arthur was growing his small mobile force into something resembling a militia, answerable to a network of officers mostly composed of soldiers or ex-soldiers, and strategically stationed to respond to incursions through the partition line.
As well as arming and expanding a mobile police force, during March 1828 Arthur focused on the situation and orientation of military posts in the island. When he travelled to Launceston late in the month, ostensibly to be at a church consecration, the Colonial Secretary noted in internal government records that the purpose of the journey was also for ‘inspecting the Military stations and Road parties in the interior’.23
Earlier in the month Arthur had even created a new garrison situation. ‘It is necessary’, he informed the Colonial Secretary, ‘that a Military station should be permanently established in the vicinity of the Western River’.24 The detailed instructions Arthur gave were for a sizeable post: an officer, 25 soldiers and four horses. He also noted that it was an ‘urgent’ priority and he wanted it to be ‘durable’ and ready ‘before the winter sets in’.
Arthur’s plans for the military station of Westbury, and his touring of military posts, were evidence of a broader plan, and not just reactions to the specific circumstances of each locality or moment. Strategically placed on annual Aboriginal migration routes from highlands to coastlands, the Westbury station helped form a protective ring around the main settled districts of the interior, worked as a military link between the major areas of colonial expansion in the eastern and western parts of the island, and provided imperial troops to protect the interests of the Van Diemen’s Land Company. Not for the first time in the empire’s history, British soldiers were defending the investments of British stockholders.
Ever since assuming command of Van Diemen’s Land, Arthur had strategically deployed the military to help effect colonial expansion. In November 1826, he authorised civilians to respond to attacks (or simply the threat of attack) by combining with military forces and driving Aboriginal people away, ‘treating them as open enemies’.25 These sorts of general island-wide orders and regulations were supported by specific deployments, like that at Westbury in the north. In another instance, Captain Hibbert was sent ‘with a detachment of Military’ to occupy a part of Oyster Bay on the east coast at Great Swan Port in mid-1827.26 They were initially stationed at the property of a prominent local colonist – himself an ex-soldier – for his ‘protection’.27
It was not the first time the military had been stationed there, but this time it was a greater and more permanent military presence. A newspaper correspondent enthused that this could be ‘the forerunner of a populous settlement’, pointing out that the added protection would encourage more colonists to the area. But when the settler asked to be reimbursed the cost of hosting the army, Arthur was incensed. He replied through the Colonial Secretary ‘that any other settler would have given twice the accommodation to have obtained the like security.’28 Whoever’s expense it was, garrisons of redcoats stationed in the barns of colonists cast protective shadows and enforced a peaceful settlement. This is how the Australian colonies were established.
On the Legality of Conquest
The deployment of the military was not merely passive. In 1827, Arthur issued a government notice for ‘the protection of the settlers’, clarifying ‘that the black Natives may be driven from the settled districts’. He called it ‘a measure of indispensable necessity’,29 and promised ‘Sufficient troops … will be at the disposal of the civil power’. On the same day he sent a garrison order instructing ‘two subalterns, two sergeants, and 30 rank and file, of the 40th Regiment’ to march from Hobart into the interior.30 Some of this force was sent to ‘Ross Bridge to strengthen the detachment at present stationed there’, while the rest continued on to Westbury. He sent Major Turton of the Engineers Department on a tour of ‘all the out-stations’ to determine what further military aid was required ‘for the protection of the different districts’ and also requested that Turton liaise with the police magistrates for their opinions.
While the main body of redcoats marched northwards from Hobart, Captain Hibbert was ordered to send one ‘sergeant and 10 privates’ from the Oyster Bay station on the east coast westwards into St Paul’s Plains in the Oatlands’ district. He would receive replacement troops directly from Hobart, while this advancing party commenced operations to ‘protect the country’ in the central midlands ‘from the attacks of the Natives.’ When Arthur took his tour of the stations in early 1828, he was not just checking their camping conditions – he was personally inspecting a broad strategic deployment directed towards a specific purpose. The colony was effectively in a state of war, and had been for some time.
While framed as a new strategy, Arthur’s Partition Proclamation represented a culmination of measures already being implemented. While formally using a future tense – instructing the Vandemonian public that ‘a line of military posts will be forthwith stationed and established along the confines of the settled districts’ – such measures were already clearly in place or underway. When the Brigade Major’s Office forwarded the Proclamation to the key army officers on the island, it meant sending copies to 11 significant military stations. And while orders and Proclamation alike expressed the desire to avoid unnecessary bloodshed and hoped that diplomatic overtures could have some impact, the underlying concept was that the military was tasked with effecting the removal of Aboriginal people. The Proclamation spoke of peace, but articulated war.
Arthur’s Proclamation established a neat chain of command that bypassed the niceties of civil society. Hostilities could therefore be directed by the police magistrates, sanctioned by their subordinate officers, and conducted by the army. Operations were coordinated at the direction of a man holding the dual role of Lieutenant Governor and Colonel Commanding. All this was perfectly legal, because delegated authority to represent the empire emanated from the King and passed through a sequence of duly appointed officers right down to field policemen and army officers. Each bore a little bit of the power and authority of the Sovereign.
Such practices were not entirely new, and all operated under a prism of theoretical legal civility. Conflict with Aboriginal people in the interior was hardly a secret, or even unique to Van Diemen’s Land. In New South Wales, conflict in the Hawkesbury district had led Governor Lachlan Macquarie to send redcoats out in punitive raids in the 1810s, ordering the soldiers to hang the corpses of slaughtered Aboriginal people from the trees.31 Such measures were, Macquarie asserted, to ‘Strike them with Terror against Committing Similar Acts of Violence in future’.32 Some of the violence of New South Wales translated to the transportation of Aboriginal men to Norfolk Island and Van Diemen’s Land, in part rendering the realities of Australian colonial warfare as mere criminality, all while using British law as a weapon.33
Over several decades a number of Aboriginal men were absorbed into the convict system. One such man was Musquito, a warrior from New South Wales who later served as a guide on expeditions against Vandemonian bushrangers, before becoming something of a bushranger himself.34After killing a Tahitian on the east coast he was tracked down with the aid of Aboriginal guides, and was eventually hanged in Hobart after a public trial.
Several Aboriginal Vandemonian men were also hanged or sentenced to transportation from Van Diemen’s Land, but these were rare exceptions to the general rule that conflict was dealt with extra-judiciously in Van Diemen’s Land. Men who were well known to newspaper-reading colonists were generally seen as part of colonial society and could be dealt with as such. For the unnamed people of the interior, however, the situation was a bit different. While they could be known to some colonists individually, as a body they were still largely outside of the structures of colonial society, economy and culture. It was this separateness that encouraged the process of ‘effecting the retirement or expulsion of the Aborigines’ from April 1828.
Here several threads overlap. Arthur was undoubtedly genuinely interested in the possibilities for a negotiated settlement. Promoting the use of Bruny Island for acclimatising the less ‘troublesome’ Aboriginal groups south of Hobart into colonial society, Arthur was also investigating the possibilities for direct negotiation with the more hostile tribes of the interior.
Arthur seized an opportunity that appeared in late 1827, when a young Aboriginal man was captured. He had been raised by a settler family but had returned to the bush for a time before being captured. Arthur wanted to put him to work as a go-between. Named Kickerterpoller, he was known widely throughout the colony as ‘Black Tom’. As a one-time accomplice of Musquito, he was also considered a bushranger and murderer. Brought to Hobart Gaol, Kickerterpoller was quizzed on whether he might ‘be employed to mediate and explain to the Natives the impropriety of their conduct’, to which he apparently agreed.35 A few months later Kickerterpoller was ‘examined’ in Arthur’s Executive Council on the ‘endeavour to negotiate with the Chiefs of the Tribes and dissuade them from their present system of hostility’.36 While the exact details of the conversations and plans are a bit unclear, one roughly contemporary report of the conversation suggests that Arthur and Kickerterpoller discussed the causes of conflict, the feasibility of the partition plan, and options for protective exile for Aboriginal people on islands off Van Diemen’s Land.37
Another factor connected with the Proclamation concerned pressure from settlers, as it seemed to answer calls for action. Some settlers even explicitly asked Arthur for protection or assistance. Newly arrived colonist John Allen wrote of his recent acquisition of land in the Great Swan Port district on the east coast, where he had built a hut and planted crops – and lost both to an Aboriginal raid.38 Arthur read Allen’s petition in mid-March 1828, and recorded in a memorandum for the Colonial Secretary that he was ‘sorry to find that the natives have evinced a very wanton disposition for outrage, in destroying the Stacks and premises of this individual’.39 Arthur ordered Captain Hibbert to provide Allen with help for rebuilding and provisions from the government store for three months. Arthur then addressed the Colonial Secretary directly:
Be so good as to prepare a memorandum exhibiting some of the more daring and sanguinary outrages recently committed by the Natives, for the purpose of being laid before the Council, in order that some counteracting measures may be adopted on the part of the Government.
While he was potentially looking for some strategic insight into the operations of Aboriginal hostilities, he was also clearly gathering evidence to establish the political case for an offensive. The Partition Proclamation was issued just a few weeks later.
Public opinion was also at play. But here again this was more complex than the newspapers would have us believe. While Arthur’s autocratic inclinations often led to conflict with the press, he was not above using it to suit his own needs. Close examination of the manuscript archive of the Colonial Secretary’s Office and the content of colonial newspapers reveals an adept manipulation of the press for propaganda purposes. In this case it is at least suspicious that in the weeks leading up to the Proclamation, the Hobart Town Courier focused attention on the question of ‘the distressing subject of the blacks’.40 In late March the editor advocated that Aboriginal people be ‘removed to one of the islands in Bass’s Strait’. In early April he referred to ‘the hostile tribes that infest the settled districts’, and advocated a Proclamation or implementation of Martial Law as had been done at Bathurst in New South Wales.41 Later in the month he presented the new Proclamation on the front page of the paper ‘with no small pleasure’.42
While newspapers only captured a fragment of the whole story, their frequent reporting of ‘outrages’ and discussion of negotiation, exile, infestation, segregation and assimilation all combined to mould public perception. Although it seemed that Arthur had succumbed to public pressure to confront the insurgency, the arrival of more than 100 troops before he issued the Proclamation is unlikely mere coincidence.43
The government was preparing to dig in. Over the winter of 1828 it consolidated its positions and geared up for a series of spring offensives.