CHAPTER NINETEEN

The War after the War

1831, Summer and Autumn

The Midlands and the Western Front

The Oatlands Rangers after the Line

When Simpson updated Arthur about Fortosa’s whereabouts in early February 1831, he offered to convey ‘any communication’ Arthur might have had for Fortosa.¹ The letter has no annotation, and the Colonial Secretary’s letter copybook has no corresponding entry. If Arthur did send a message, he did not leave a clear paper trail. Typical of the whole conflict, outside of the Colonial Secretary’s Office correspondence it was Jorgenson who produced the richest body of documentation of colonial manoeuvres in early 1831. While the operations of parties under Fortosa and Fisher remain mostly secret, thanks to Jorgenson the midlands roving parties can still be observed in detail a little longer.

Jorgenson was another of those men whose paramilitary operations continued as the line operations were breaking up in late November 1830. He appended a brief note to his journal of the final stages of the manoeuvre towards East Bay Neck, which reveals that ‘At peep of day’ on 28 November 1830, Jorgenson ‘set off for the Brown Mountain’ with four men.² Word had reached him the previous day at Sorell ‘that the Natives had been seen at the White Marsh’. When he reached this area, he ‘learned that a fine cow had been speared by the Natives’ a few days previously. Heading in further pursuit to ‘the White Kangaroo River’, he ‘learned that a boy had been chased by a Black’ the day before the cow was speared. Nearby men formed a party and went in pursuit, and Jorgenson reportedly sent word to Arthur. He also wondered whether sticks placed in the ground that ‘pointed towards the East’ were a decoy. ‘Some of the Blacks who have deserted from us, and who have been with us in the bush, may have told them that we take great notice of those sticks.’

Summarising the strategic situation in the midlands over the summer of 1830–31 in a report dated 1 March 1831, Jorgenson presented a period of relative quietude that seemed to reflect that wider conviction that the campaign had diminished the hostilities.³ As Jorgenson claimed:

The District, since the breaking up of the Line, has enjoyed a profound and uninterrupted tranquillity, free from all attacks on the part of the Aborigines, and even the Four Blacks who used to prowl about the Big Lagoon, Kangaroo River, and Jerusalem, have totally disappeared. The reports from Oyster Bay also state that the Aboriginal natives have not been seen in the Great and Little Swanport Divisions since the Line was dispersed, and as far as I can gather the same has been the case in the Carlton and Richmond districts.

Jorgenson nonetheless admitted that he had not received many ‘regular reports … for these last three months’, and mentioned that those he had gotten from ‘the various Leaders of the Oatlands Roving Bands present such a uniform sameness that nothing novel or interesting appear in any of them.’ While reportedly incomplete, his disdain for poor record-keeping nonetheless highlights the continuation of roving patrols.

For some time after Arthur’s campaign, Jorgenson explained, there was a ‘general impression … that the Blacks, from a variety of reasons, had come to a determination not to attack the settlements, but to remain in a state of quietude’. Yet this false peace did not hold, and reports of attacks started to come in, some of which Jorgenson detailed as ‘proofs that the Aborigines still persevere in their hostile intentions and aggressions’. He also recorded a series of responses to false reports within the Oatlands district. One case concerned a supposed sighting of ‘a Black’ which turned out to be a settler ‘who had lost his way, remained in the Bush all night, and was dressed in a black jacket, Waistcoat, and Trowsers [sic]’. Nonetheless, on the report reaching the authorities, ‘Donald Mackenzie with his small band went instantly in pursuit’. Mackenzie had been with Jorgenson in the expedition towards the speared cow some months earlier.

Another report seemed similarly suspect, but still drew veteran rangers into a pursuit:

Jillett’s stock-keeper, who stated that he had been pursued across the two main roads as far as St Peter’s Valley, and Peter Scott and Benjamin Allinson without a moment’s delay formed a small volunteer party and proceeded in search. After scouring the Bush in every direction they could not discover a single track, neither in the Bush, nor in the sand on the Main-roads, and adding to this the improbability of chasing a man across two roads and in a place surrounded with stock huts and farms, within a couple of miles of a military station, and the general character of Jillett’s stock-keeper, we could come to no other conclusion than that the whole was invention.

The third report derived from another witness subsequently thought to be unreliable, which partly seemed to have emanated from ‘four distinct cooes … heard at the Public house’. Yet it too had made a field policeman go in pursuit with company. They even encountered another party while chasing the source of these noises, demonstrating that the country swept by the General Movement was still being patrolled and regularly scoured.

Yet there were major changes afoot concerning the field police rangers. Jorgenson noted that many of the original rangers had now received their tickets of leave, and commented that some of their replacements were not suited to the service. He offered the example of James McCarthy who ‘so far from being of any real service, requires watching’. McCarthy had previously been ‘cruelly treated by the Blacks at the Big Lagoon, had his skull and jaw bone fractured by them, and otherwise wounded’, Jorgenson reported, worrying that McCarthy’s ‘terror of the Blacks’ would see him ‘throw down his musket and make off’ rather than fight. ‘He certainly labours, at times,’ Jorgenson claimed, ‘under estrangement of mind, which manifests itself particularly in warm weather.’ Between McCarthy’s unsound mental state, another sick field policeman and the personnel changes, Jorgenson claimed there were ‘only Nine effective men’ in the Oatlands district.

At least three of the lead rangers had spent time in stationary huts attempting ambushes, which Jorgenson thought had proved an ineffective measure:

Peter Scott on the Little Swan Port River, Benjamin Allinson in the Vicinity of the Big Lagoon, and Richard Tyrrell in Davy’s bottom all erected huts at the places named, and these remained with their parties for upwards of one month each, exercising the most especial care, caution, and patience, but to no purpose; huts within a mile or two of them were robbed by the Blacks with impunity and there is not an instance that they have approached any hut of any description where a roving party was concealed.

He concluded that Aboriginal people were ‘perfectly aware when they may attack a hut with safety, and when not’. Because of this, combined with various military withdrawals from old stations in the area, Jorgenson shifted these three parties back to mobile duties to ‘rove incessantly round the District’. He directed them ‘to confine their exertions merely for the protection of the settlers, particularly on the out-runs, and leave capture entirely out of the question, unless they should actually fall upon the traces of the Blacks’. Anstey annotated this report, explaining that this was Jorgenson’s order rather than his own, possibly aware it may have met with Arthur’s displeasure. Jorgenson explained that his scheme was to maintain an impression that the country was swarming with armed parties, and he credited this plan with keeping the district safe. Anstey annotated this too with a sarcastic comment about ‘three small Parties’ keeping the tribes at bay as being ‘Prodigious!’

Nonetheless, the parties did report some useful information, describing a series of stationary smoke plumes in the distance that suggested Aboriginal people could have been staying away from the settled districts. ‘It might very well happen that some of the Aboriginal tribes might be pacifically disposed, and others not,’ Jorgenson commented, adding a little hopefully that the concept of the line of demarcation had been explained to Mungo-Jack, who might have conveyed the concept to the tribes after his escape. Anstey agreed that this was plausible. Jorgenson proposed a multi-week expedition into the highlands and towards the west, but in the margin Arthur made only a non-committal comment about its probable uselessness.

Autumn Hostilities in the Interior

A few days before Jorgenson finished his report of the past few months, an Aboriginal group was spotted near ‘the upper Macquarie’ descending from Tooms Lake.⁴ George Scott, one of the settlers in the area, wrote to Anstey to alert him:

My splitters in coming from the tier yesterday saw ten of them. They did not seem to observe the splitters, but walked slowly on. John Telford’s party, your shepherd Wilson, and all my men started after them. They came home about 12 o’Clock today, but without success.⁵

Telford was one of the field police rangers roving the district, clearly in place to respond to sightings. Fortunately, Scott’s letter of 27 February helps illuminate more of the rangers’ actions during this relatively undocumented period. Scott informed Anstey that a nearby hut ‘was robbed’:

Telford went there this afternoon, and discovered the prints of their feet in several places not far from the hut. He is gone to your hut tonight to search round the tiers tomorrow, round Stocker’s and Bell’s bottom.

The result of these searches is unclear. But Scott’s letter, which survives in excerpt within another letter by Jorgenson, reveals that the arrival of this Aboriginal group in the midlands elicited a coordinated colonial response.

On 3 March Telford received orders to ‘proceed without delay to the Eastward with his party … keep a sharp look out, put everyone on his guard, and if necessary, again muster a party, for the purpose of capture’. As Telford was preparing to leave, ‘intelligence came in from the Police Magistrate at Campbell Town of an attack’. Two men were wounded, one badly, and this Aboriginal group was thought to be ‘likely to fall down on the Oatlands district’. Because of this, Telford was also instructed ‘to direct Robert Hyatt to remove his party to the Big Lagoon, and to cruise between there, the Little Lovely Banks, and the Quoin at the back of the Green Ponds.’ Jorgenson also described roving directions given to two other parties. Once again the district was being scoured.

But the field police were not the only agents at play. Forwarding Jorgenson’s letter to Hobart because it contained ‘an authentic Report of the re-appearance of the Aborigines’, Anstey commented that ‘Captain Anley, 17th Regt, not having yet received any Orders from the Colonel Commanding touching the Blacks, I have not reported it to Capt Anley’.⁶ While on the surface it would appear to suggest that dealing with Aboriginal people was now primarily a police initiative, on closer examination it proves to be the opposite. Anley had only arrived in Van Diemen’s Land from England in late January.⁷ He was part of a cohort of the 17th Regiment, including two sergeants and 27 privates, nominally sent as part of the guard for a shipload of male convicts, but now on duty in the interior. Anstey was intimating to Arthur that the new officer needed to be told, through military channels, how things were done in Van Diemen’s Land.

As it happened, the same day that Anstey was writing this slightly coded comment, out at the Eastern Marshes Anley’s men were already engaged in the war. As it was tersely reported by Jorgenson, ‘the military chased the natives and actually came within twenty yards of them, when they got into a scrub, and disappeared as if by magic.’⁸ News of this chase reached Oatlands on Wednesday 9 March, one of numerous reports reaching Jorgenson, Anstey and Anley of trouble throughout the district. Some of these were just sightings of Aboriginal people in the distance, others close encounters. Of the latter sort, there was the case of a ticket-of-leaver who ‘had fell in with the Blacks, but did not dare to fire at them, for fear of being rushed’, and an incident where ‘three of the hostile aborigines seized George Campbell’s dog’. Fear clearly gripped the district. When two men ‘went into the tiers for sawed stuff, they heard cooing, and dogs barking in the scrub’. Anstey claimed that ‘no blood has yet been shed’, although he was meaning colonial blood, adding that he was ‘in hourly expectation of news of murders’.

But the authorities were not just going to wait for the tribes to strike first. As Jorgenson detailed, the military response to these varied reports was swift:

On Wednesday (9th) Captain Anley sent out from Oatlands three parties of six soldiers each in pursuit, under the direction of Field police Constables … The first party by the Big Lagoon, Malcolm Logan’s marshes, and Johnson’s Quoin as far as Constitution Hill. The second party along the Jordan through Abysinia, and the hunting ground, and the third across Harrison’s tier, through Michael Howe’s marsh, as far as Osborne’s marsh. Another party of military stationed in the Eastern marshes received orders on the same day to go in pursuit.

The field police parties continued their roving operations too:

Robert Hyatt’s roving band scoured about the Table Land, and Davis’s bottom. Moaby and Caines at the back of Michael Howe’s marsh and John Telford with his party about Mac Gill’s marsh, Hobbe’s Bluff, and at Mr Adey’s, Little Swan port river.

There was general agreement, Jorgenson claimed, ‘that the district is on all sides invaded’. But so far it was safe, Jorgenson asserted, because of ‘the vigilance of the military, the roving bands, and the volunteers (joining the latter)’.

Then, just as the war again seemed to be spilling into another confused round of raids and strikes, Jorgenson’s correspondence stops. This was the last letter filed in the section of the CSO1/1/320 (7578) volume that compiled Jorgenson’s reports. But Jorgenson’s final lines are telling. Before posting this letter on 15 March 1831 Jorgenson had time to add a postscript, which conveys neatly the sense of a conflict now being conducted with stealth and discretion, albeit through the description of a missed opportunity:

Since writing the above news is arrived that on Saturday last Henry Pratt, Parker, and Foley, all on horseback, passed a Tribe of Blacks in Black Johnny’s marsh Salt pan plains within twenty yards, without seeing them. Cassidy’s Shepherd was at some distance behind when the Blacks squatted down, and saw them, but the horsemen were too far off, and rode so swiftly, that they could not hear him. Traces of the Aborigines are now seen everywhere.⁹

With that last image of horsemen prowling an increasingly agitated district, the war in the midlands shifts. And with it, the official wartime documentation ceases.

Disbanding the Rangers and Changing the Code

The documentary quietude reflected in the surviving records may have come from a higher directive. On 25 March the Colonial Secretary informed Anstey ‘that the Executive Council having particularly advised the recommendation of the Aboriginal Committee that the roving parties should be discontinued’.¹⁰ Anstey was again thanked for his service, and the midlands roving parties were again supposed to be disbanded. The Colonial Secretary mentioned that the useful members of these teams ‘may be attached to the Field Police in those Districts, that are most exposed to the incursion of the Savages’. The letter was coded 10,852/64 – the 64th communication in the 10,852 file. It was a relatively new coding, one of several being used to address issues connected with Aboriginal people and their detention.

This archival shift partly reflects the probable convenience of a replacement numerator – the volume of correspondence filed as 7578 was heading towards a thousand communiques, after all – but it also highlights that the Colonial Secretary’s Office was now fully on top of its archiving. The winding down of code 7578 still had some way to go, but it was rapidly diminishing in proportion to increasing use of alternate file numbers. Like the roving parties themselves, the 7578 code gave way in part because of political circumstances.

In late February 1831 the Executive Council discussed the removal of Aboriginal people from mainland Van Diemen’s Land to an island in Bass Strait, and almost as an afterthought ‘advised the Lieutenant-Governor to discontinue the roving parties, as the measure appeared to have a bad effect upon the Natives’.¹¹ Instead, the council advocated Arthur should ‘station small parties of military in the remote stock-huts in the interior’. It was part of that quiet shift back to a full military frontier, defensively arranged, much as had been the case when Arthur partitioned the colony in 1828. While most of the recorded discourse centred on issues of protective captivity and prospects for ‘negotiation’, it was geared towards the tribes in the west of the island who were not yet embroiled in full conflict with the colony. It was another case of diplomacy before force.

This ostensibly protective and conciliatory focus continued in the following month, further highlighting the sense that diplomacy preceded active colonisation, rather than soothed its results. On 14 March the Executive Council again met to discuss this issue, with Arthur concluding that negotiation in the warring interior was unlikely to succeed. But he did think it was ‘most proper that an embassy should be again sent to the tribes inhabiting the Western Country, and that blankets and food should be given them’.¹² While this was underway, stationary military posts would be deployed to protect the settled districts and if possible capture Aboriginal people. Moreover, ‘all the Natives at Swan Island, and in possession of the government either at Hobart or at Launceston, or indeed in any other part of the Island, should be removed to some eligible Island in the Straits’. Robinson was now given proper authority to collect Aboriginal women living on the islands of Bass Strait. On the surface, as far as the documentation of executive deliberations was concerned, there seemed to be a shift away from paramilitary operations and offensive military ones. The new approach seemed to be mobile conciliation and static defence.

But to some extent this was just for show. Likely aware of the potential for international repercussions from military operations in Van Diemen’s Land, Arthur was concerned to ensure the case of military necessity was proven, even if it meant collecting information after the fact. In early 1831 Arthur followed up his request for information from police magistrates per Government Order 12 of 1830 regarding ‘all such outrages as may have taken place … within the last five years … 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’.¹³ Clearly, he was not satisfied with the responses. On 14 January 1831, for instance, the assistant police magistrate at Brighton was told that ‘you will forthwith revise your Report, as it does not comprize but a very small part of the information which was required by the Government Order’.¹⁴ A few days later the police magistrate of New Norfolk was informed that ‘The Lieut: Governor is satisfied with the Report as far as it goes, it nevertheless appears to His Excellency that many cases of outrage must have been omitted … you will have the goodness further to investigate the subject and report thereon.’¹⁵ Similarly, the police magistrate of Campbell Town was told that Arthur had ‘perused the report of the atrocities committed by the Aborigines in your District’, but that ‘it does not fully comprize the information required by the Government Order’.¹⁶ It was a peculiarity of the moment that even while government documentation seemed to be recording much discussion about conciliation, the Lieutenant Governor was actively generating evidence of past violence, focusing on the acts of Aboriginal people against colonists.

All the while the war continued. On 10 March 1831, only a few days before declaring that a conciliatory mission to the far western tribes was ‘proper’, Arthur ordered troops into the hills west of Hobart.

Colonial Celebrity and the New Norfolk Campaign

Arriving in Hobart on 27 February by the Merope from China was celebrity travel writer and half-pay lieutenant James Holman.¹⁷ He was famously blind, yet also a keen observer of events in his popular works.¹⁸ Through many old military friends stationed around the world, or simply well-wishers, he often received warm treatment. On 2 March, the day after taking a hotel room in Hobart, Holman was taken on a guided tour by ‘a lady this morning to visit the Female Factory, about two miles from Hobart Town’.¹⁹ He recorded a sudden decline in the weather on Saturday 5 March, when the thermometer dropped 25 degrees Fahrenheit and the day became ‘exceedingly bleak and cold’. A few days later, on Tuesday 8 March, Holman ‘had the honor of dining to-day with His Excellency, the Lieutenant-Governor, who entertained a mixed party of official persons, visitors to the Island, and settlers’.

On 9 March, while the Oatlands authorities were busy dealing with reports of Aboriginal people in the interior, Holman visited a settler’s house at ‘Risden Farm’, the site of the original settlement, which Holman commented was ‘A corruption of Restdown, its original name, so called from its having been the first place in which a tent was pitched on taking possession of the colony’. This piece of local storytelling prompted more, as he went on to relate ‘the first act of hostility, between the natives and a party of soldiers’ which, he thought, became the source of ‘a deep-rooted hatred for the strangers’. By the time of Holman’s visit this was the usual version of the story told in polite circles, a sort of Vandemonian Garden of Eden with its own original sin, followed by ‘cruelties’ inflicted ‘by the bush-rangers, and convict-servants in charge of sheep and cattle’. Holman then went on to relate that ‘there is but one British resident, who is enabled to hold communion with the natives’, namely ‘Mr Robinson’, capturing another polite myth. Unsurprisingly, reliant on local informants and information, Holman had effectively recorded the version of the Vandemonian War advocated by the Aborigines Committee: a distant sin and a reconciliatory conclusion.

But the very next day Holman recorded proof that the normal narrative was wrong, and that a war was continuing:

Thursday, March 10. Colonel Logan left Hobart Town to-day, with a detachment of the 63rd regiment, to scour the country about New Norfolk, twenty-two miles distant from the capital, as some depredations had been committed lately, either by the bush-rangers, or the aborigines. I dined with my friend Major Fairtclough [sic], at the 63rd mess, where there was but a small party, as many of the officers had accompanied the Colonel.²⁰

On Friday, Holman mentioned that Mount Wellington ‘is covered with snow’ and that he dined ‘with Mr. Burnett, the Colonial Secretary’, where he ‘had the pleasure of meeting my old friends, Major Douglas of the 63rd, and Mr. Hamilton, R.N.’. If they informed him of the exact nature of the military operations in New Norfolk, then he did not record it. He said nothing of the General Movement in which Douglas played such a prominent role. There were some things gentlemen did not talk about, at least in very public books.

Aboriginal people were observed in the district of New Norfolk on Wednesday 9 March, the same day that word reached Oatlands of their arrival in that district, and the police magistrate wrote to Hobart at 5:00 pm. Upon receiving this letter the next day, the Colonial Secretary ‘lost not a moment in submitting it to The Lieut. Governor’, who was unimpressed that the news had not been reported sooner.²¹ Arthur thought that this intelligence ‘should have been more expeditiously transmitted, so that measures, might have been adopted by day light this morning’. Nonetheless, his response was clear:

a Detachment of Eighty Soldiers, will march this afternoon for the Black Snake, and from thence, divided into parties, they will strike into the Tiers, and move along their summit towards New Norfolk – In the mean time the Troops at New Norfolk will, on your application to the Officer commanding, be formed into parties, and follow the course, which the Natives may be supposed to have taken – This arrangement, however you may perhaps have already adopted – I am to desire if any further information has reached you, that you will acquaint Lieut Colonel Logan, who proceeds with the Troops to the Black Snake, and will advance with them in the direction of New Norfolk.²²

Arthur even instructed ‘six active prisoners’ should be ordered ‘to carry the luggage of the officers’.²³ Their departure from Hobart was only quietly noted.²⁴ The Colonial Times made the most of the story, suggesting there were exaggerated reports behind the ‘soldiers marching, drums beating’ and ‘other demonstrations of alarm’ as the 80 troops departed.²⁵

Presumably the soldiers did their duty but the action was not reported in the press in any detail. Over the subsequent editions of the Hobart newspapers, the New Town Races attracted much more attention than the military operations in the New Norfolk district, or any other district for that matter. These scouring operations had likely concluded or diminished within a month when Holman ‘dined to-day with Colonel Logan, and the officers of the 63rd regiment’ on 14 April.²⁶ Some of his dinner companions were old friends from England, but if they told him anything of the recent excursion to New Norfolk, the conversation remained private.

Holman may, however, have started to form an opinion that all was not quite what the Hobart authorities and Aborigines Committee liked to suggest. Shortly after Logan departed Hobart for his campaign in the New Norfolk district, Holman took a tour of the interior settled districts, travelling from Hobart to Launceston and back. He commented in passing on military stations being at Oatlands, Ross and Campbell Town, although he was generally focused on the settlers and the progress of settlement. But in the Oatlands district he commented that there were ‘few settlers’, ascribing this to ‘the best land having been principally granted to the magistrate … a great favourite with the Governor’, clearly picking up Anstey’s significant role in ruling the midlands.²⁷ Holman also noted the origins of certain place names that interested him, one of which captured the sense of a landscape of conflict:

a hillock rises abruptly, with a flat summit, which received the name of Don’s Battery, in consequence of a man, nicknamed Don Morris, having defended himself on it for twenty-four hours against a number of the aborigines.²⁸

In this way Holman conveyed that phenomenon of a colony starting to tell stories about its own past.

But Holman was also faced with evidence of the colony’s often unspoken present. In Launceston on 29 March Holman visited the town gaol.

I found here also a native boy, who had been employed as a guide to some soldiers in pursuit of his black brethren, and who, having naturally endeavoured to escape, was placed here for security, and not for punishment, as appeared from his being well taken care of, and allowed to go about the jail, and amuse himself as he thought proper. He was a heavy, stupid boy, apparently little better than an idiot: he slept the greater part of his time, seeming indeed to care for little else but eating and sleeping. This description may be applied, with truth, to the majority of the aborigines, who appear to be a treacherous, bloodthirsty, and barbarous race; though the severity with which they are treated, and the provocation they have received, are, I fear, much greater than the authorities are either aware of, or willing to acknowledge.²⁹

While condescending in his description of the boy, and quick to generalise from limited personal observation, Holman was clearly starting to recognise that there were disjunctions between the official pronouncements and the attitude of many settlers. He also captured the sense of an ongoing threat, describing one track as ‘dangerous, from the chance of being waylaid, and killed, by the aborigines’, and offering his readers the story of Aboriginal people attacking a woman ‘with a child in her arms’.³⁰ This ‘barbarous murder was perpetrated by them, about this time’, he reported, meaning to let his readers know that the conflict continued at the time of his passing through. With similar purpose, when Holman stopped at the Lawrence farm on his way south, he noted that ‘Mr. Lawrence’s son is one of the best botanists in the island’, referring to the former line party leader.³¹ This proved an introduction for another comment about the dangerous bush. ‘In the course of his rambles through the woods,’ Holman added of Lawrence, ‘he has had two or three narrow escapes from being speared by the natives.’³²

Like the good colonial enthusiast and public observer that he was, Holman had hinted at the war without really detailing it. Before departing Hobart for Sydney he ‘met with the celebrated painter, Mr. Glover, who had just arrived in the colony.’³³ John Glover’s paintings of the Vandemonian landscape became significant visual evidence of the progress of settlement and the precolonial wild. He often painted farmed landscapes devoid of Aboriginal people, or bush scenes of Aboriginal people inhabiting country from which they had often already been removed.

On his departure, Holman wrote at length about ‘the system of granting land’, convict discipline, and the most desirable British emigrants for ‘the welfare of the settlement’.³⁴ His allusions to conflict, like the under-reporting of Logan’s New Norfolk operations, reflected a new focus on putting the war behind the colony – even if it was not yet completely over.

But the end was certainly approaching. Shortly before Holman’s arrival, the government had announced Robinson’s mission ‘to the Tribes resident on the Western Coast amongst whom it is desirable to distribute some presents’.³⁵ Through this government order Arthur also announced that he wanted ‘to engage the services of a few respectable persons to aid in similar conciliatory measures’:

Two or three other Missions will be made in cooperation with Mr. Robinson for the purpose of conferring with the hostile Tribes to the Eastward, and those usually frequenting the country on the banks of the Tamar, the Mersey, the Clyde, the Shannon, and the Lakes.

Concurrent with Holman’s visit, and the deployment of a large detachment to the New Norfolk district, the Colonial Secretary received letters from several prospective conciliatory volunteers. Among the correspondents were experienced party leaders like Batman and Walpole.³⁶ There were also lesser-known applicants, like a servant of ‘Mr E Lawrence of Launceston’ who knew a little of the languages of Aboriginal people he had encountered ‘about Table Cape & Rocky Cape’ in the northwest.³⁷

Like the application process for the Bruny Island Establishment a few years previously, this government order elicited evidence of a variety of colonial figures, some seemingly qualified, others not. But filed among the same batch is another letter, which captures the machinations of nineteenth-century patronage at work. Charles Arthur, secretary to the Aborigines Committee, wrote to the Colonial Secretary about clothing for ‘Tyrrell, whose services, in the undertaking in which Mr. Robinson is engaged, the Lieut Governor has notified his approval of accepting’.³⁸ The former roving party leader and ranger was joining the ‘friendly missions’.