CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
1831, Spring–Summer
East and West
Terminus 7578
Anthony Cottrell’s correspondence provides the last comprehensive batch of letters filed as 7578 roving party war reports. They capture the movements of Cottrell’s roving party in considerable detail, like many other rovers before him, giving one last cohesive look at the Vandemonian War in its final stages. On 29 October 1831 Cottrell reported directly to the Colonial Secretary on his recent movements, illustrating the government’s close surveillance of his operations:
I beg leave to acquaint you, for the information of His Excellency, the Lieut Governor, that on the 13th inst, I received instructions from Mr Robinson, and on the 14th proceeded with the Sydney blacks across the tiers towards St Paul’s plains. On the 15th, 16th, 17th, and 18th, travelling through the tiers towards the East Coast, and on the 19th made the Coast about twelve miles north of the Schoutens, without having seen any traces of the Aborigines.1
Even such tersely recorded movements allow Cottrell’s expedition to be seen in connection with other expeditions, all of them part of a larger and coordinated whole. Further south, for instance, Robinson’s party was also heading east into the hills of the eastern midlands. Eumarrah told Robinson a story of being attacked at a certain spot, and as Robinson put it, one of his servants ‘behaved in a rude manner towards me’. The Aboriginal expedition members hunted, more servants were rude, and on 20 October Robinson found ‘a native hut and the skull of a female aborigine’. Reportedly the Aboriginal people were ‘alarmed when I laid hold of it’.2 The country was being scoured so thoroughly that even the dead could not rest.
Cottrell spent 20 October ‘looking for tracks’, and then headed further north:
on the 21st, according to instructions received from Mr Robinson proceeded towards St Patricks head beating to and from the coast. On the 24th reached Dr Andersons farm, and learnt that the Blacks had been seen in the neighbourhood of Georges river. On the 25th, proceeded towards the head of Georges river, and on the 27th fell in with the tracks of the natives and followed them til dark. On the 28th continued on the tracks round the South East end of Benlomond when owing to the heavy rain fallen during the day lost all traces.
With that, his party returned to Batman’s farm hoping for ‘further instructions’.
To the west, yet to receive his orders to return to Campbell Town, McKay was having more luck. George Robson, superintendent of the Van Diemen’s Land Company, reported McKay’s success to Charles Arthur:
On Friday October the 21st about midnight McKay, the two female trackers and my own two Men, perceived the native fire and Hut, in a ravine of dense forest and remote from the settlement.3
McKay’s party rushed the camp, ‘and the struggle between the two parties was a desperate one’. Six people and two dogs were caught. But then one of the men got loose and ran, so one of the servants chased him down, ‘caught him after another struggle, and brought him back’. To remedy such attempts, Robson reported, ‘McKay proposed that my men should suffer themselves to be lashed hand to hand to the captured natives’. Now inhibited, McKay’s own party fought a running battle through the night to escape ‘an infuriated, and savage tribe, clamorous for the rescue of their captured friends’.
McKay’s party was ‘pursued during the night’. Two of the captives were in fact rescued, but McKay kept going, and reportedly ‘considered it better to let them have two, than run the risk of losing the whole.’ He reached the company settlement with two men, a woman and a boy. Reporting this to Hobart, Robson mentioned that McKay was ‘with other men again in pursuit of the committers of fresh attacks’, before recommending his two servants for reward. An annotation by Arthur asking for their police characters shows he considered this, and tickets of leave were soon granted to these servants, Thomas Ward and William Wells.4 Arthur was publicly supporting conciliation, but privately still rewarding more blunt forms of capture. Meanwhile, in the public press McKay was praised for ‘being persevering, intrepid, and humane’.5
The Schoutens Operation
That October Arthur also discreetly launched another military campaign. While Robinson, Batman and Cottrell were strategising at Campbell Town on 13 October, the Colonial Times reported that Aboriginal people ‘attacked and plundered the premises of constable A. Reid’ in the Great Swan Port district.6 Reid and his men had been ploughing a field when their weapons, hidden nearby while they worked, were stolen by an Aboriginal group. The frightened and disarmed men fled to a neighbour, chief district constable Amos, who promptly formed a pursuit party. It was the trigger for the last major campaign in the core settled districts.
Word shot through the district as Reid’s men informed Captain Watson, who visited Mr Lyne. That much is clear. The remainder of the story is less so, as over subsequent months several different printed accounts of the incident surfaced, slightly at odds in some details, but essentially the same in broad outline.7 The first of these was by a ‘Subscriber’ of the Colonial Times that was written 17–19 October. John Lyne told his version of events on 15 November, and Thomas Watson Junior – one of the men robbed of their guns – wrote his account on 16 December. Another letter detailing the events survives, which was penned for Arthur by the settler George Meredith on 21 October, was quite similar to Subscriber’s, and also later became public.8
Basically, news of the Aboriginal arrivals reached Lyne’s hut in the evening of the raid at Reid’s. Further afield were more men who needed to be warned. These were stationed in a remote hut occupied by Amos Junior with two soldiers, although another account claimed they were Lyne’s stock-keepers. Either way, these outlying men remained unaware of the return of danger to their district. As John Lyne wrote:
I set off with one soldier, but upon second thought, I could not see any good to be done in going, for if the men were hurt in the bush, it was not possible for me to find them, as they roved near forty miles distant after their stock.
Precisely when Lyne set off was a matter for dispute, with multiple reports affirming unnecessary delays, which left the men at Amos Junior’s undefended.
Following the Aboriginal trail, the initial pursuit party from Amos’s found the distant hut ‘plundered of every thing’. These pursuers then headed back to Lyne’s hut, possibly prompting Lyne’s own brief excursion. All agree that some soldiers got a guide and went off themselves. Apparently, this group ‘happily found the men safe’. In short, there was local confusion and a haphazard response among the settlers, but there were also soldiers stationed throughout the district responding to developments. On Saturday 15 October, a report of recent events was sent to Francis Aubin at Waterloo Point.
Meanwhile, the prominent settler George Meredith was organising a plan. Having learned of the Aboriginal arrivals and thinking that they would make for the Schoutens, he requested a military party be sent to the peninsula. He had a whaling station there, and likely was hoping for some protection for his men and business, ‘but no party was sent’. Aubin apparently wanted to wait for some of the soldiers to return to base before sending another party out. Nonetheless, Meredith’s son Charles ‘went over immediately, and established a signal with the persons there, in case of the arrival of the natives’. They needed a signal so they could spring a trap.
On Wednesday 19 October the whalers gave the signal. This information was sent to Waterloo Point for Aubin’s attention, but he had gone to Richmond, leaving a sergeant in charge. Some correspondents scoffed at Aubin’s absence, and also at reports that the government boat was under repair and under-crewed. Nonetheless, the military responded, and Subscriber had time to append the details to his letter to the Colonial Times:
the Sergeant in command, ordered a small party to be in readiness, and they were sent off without loss of time, in the best way, the boat and remaining crew admitted. The natives are now at the place where they might all have been captured in Capt. Hibbert’s time, had the Government proclamations been such as to have justified that officer in acting as he was inclined to do; and the whole district would now rise as one man, and act cheerfully under proper authority and guidance.9
The next day two more parties went to the Schoutens. One was sent by Amos, another led by Charles Meredith. The Meredith party prepared to take up positions on the neck near the whaling station, trying again to seal the Aboriginal people in the peninsula.
Friday brought evidence that the trap was sprung. Rushing home to tell his father, Charles Meredith had news from the whaling station ‘that the natives were in the vicinity’, but also mentioned that the troops had already returned to base at Waterloo Point. A 14-man party of civilians comprised the only force holding the position. Meredith immediately wrote to Amos for aid:
[T]he ‘NATIVES’ are now between my Fishery and the Passage … the party which went over yesterday will keep guard at the neck, at the head of Fishery bay to-night, waiting for assistance to be sent over to-morrow; and it is highly proper, that either yourself, or some other constable should accompany the additional party, and I am sorry to find the constable and few military we saw go over on Wednesday, returned again to Waterloo Point yesterday; and the duty of keeping the Aborigines in their present long-wished-for situation, appears to devolve wholly upon the settlers and their servants. Under such circumstances, I intend to send off an express to the Government; and until some military or civil force arrives, I am ready to furnish boats and provisions, with every man I can spare from the needful protection of my different establishments, but we have no arms for them.
He also wrote ‘To the person in command at Waterloo Point’, remonstrating about the untimely withdrawal of military forces from the Schoutens. Meredith then composed a lengthy account of the situation for the Lieutenant Governor. He sent the letter to Hobart and circulated the news throughout the district, asking the settlers to help hold the new line until the government could respond.
By Monday 24 October there were reportedly ‘between seventy and eighty persons’ forming a line across the peninsula. This soon rose to ‘ninety-eight’ by one count. The force included at least a corporal and a ‘few military’, as well as a ‘prisoner constable’, likely from the field police, giving some impression of civil authority.
Dr George Fordyce Story, the government storekeeper at Waterloo Point, consulted with Meredith to ensure the force was adequately provisioned.10 Once again colonial forces were maintaining a static perimeter against Aboriginal movements. The line of men ‘was not quite 1700 yards’ across mostly flat ground, one participant noted, which was clear of scrub. He added that ‘there were about forty huts, with two men stationed in each, the remainder being placed along the beaches, to prevent a possibility of their swimming round’. Following the precedent from a year ago, ‘good fires were kept in advance of the line’.
In the peninsula were an indeterminate number of Aboriginal people. Meredith reported to Arthur that ‘only two have been seen, and not more than twelve or fourteen footsteps have been counted’. A firsthand report said much the same, adding ‘one child’ to some 16 pairs of adult footprints noticed on the beaches. There were still high hopes that the scheme would work.
News of these developments on the east coast reached Arthur in Hobart the following evening, Tuesday 25 October.11 Arthur’s response was swift. As he directed the police magistrate at Richmond:
use every possible exertion with the utmost promptitude to aid the Assist Police Magistrate, at Waterloo Point, with the Civil and Military force of your district; as the situation where the natives are reported to be, is supposed to afford great facilities for their capture.
At Waterloo Point, ‘in conjunction with the Officer commanding at Spring Bay’, Aubin was similarly ordered into action. Just as the ‘friendly missions’ were supposedly heading towards the east coast, the Colonel Commanding had ordered three military stations to deploy to the Schoutens.
But Arthur’s reaction came too late. The same night he learned of the new line, it reportedly failed. According to Meredith, ‘the Aborigines succeeded in passing through the line of posts … on the night of the 25th instant, near the centre of the line where the military were stationed’. He added that a volunteer party had gone in pursuit. Subsequent commentators implied that military pursuits also continued in the area over following weeks.12
Like so much of the Vandemonian War, the broader outcome of this short-lived Schoutens campaign fell into documentary oblivion. The newspapers falsely reported that Aboriginal people had ‘been secured on the Schouten island’ after their escape. Accounts of the escapees ‘making a sudden rush through the line’ were published later still.13 Some witnesses supposedly characterised this charge as ‘equal to that of a mob of wild cattle’.14 Certainly the Aboriginal people on the Schoutens appear to have been alert to the danger. A few days after escaping this trap ‘sixteen adults and one child … were seen passing from the direction of Swan Port in great haste, towards the Break-o’day-Plains’. With a major military deployment behind them, they were now heading towards the area being patrolled by Cottrell.
Interceptions
News reached Cottrell on 31 October, relayed to him via Simpson at Campbell Town, ‘that a tribe of the hostile aborigines had a few days previously escaped from the settlers on the Schoutens’.15 Cottrell immediately made for the coast, hoping ‘to intercept them’. It was 13 November before he ‘received information that sixteen Blacks had been seen near Dr Brock’s farm on St Paul’s plains’. Heading that way, the next day he ‘found tracks of the Natives, apparently making for B’lomond’. He kept on these tracks for four days but ‘lost them between the South Esk and Benlomond’ on 18 November. ‘On the 19th went to the station at Mr Batman’s,’ he explained, ‘the party being in a wretched state from want of shoes and clothing’.
At Batman’s he received further help, an Aboriginal woman named ‘Timbrunah’, who joined him when he headed off in later November. Cottrell was aiming to try his luck in the territory northeast of Ben Lomond. He again found traces of Aboriginal people:
In the course of this route I fell in with natives’ huts, and fires, and continued on their tracks in active pursuit until the 4th inst when a smoke which I had made on an eminence to the East of Benlomond was recognised and answered by the Blacks. On the following day I succeeded in coming up and establishing a friendly intercourse with the natives consisting of two men and one woman[.] One of the former is the man that escaped from Campbell Town Gaol. Having adopted every precaution to prevent their escape I was happy to find that no resistance was offered on their part and that I was enabled to lodge them here [at Batman’s farm] without having recourse to force or violence.
Once again, the use of Aboriginal auxiliaries seems to have assisted effecting a colonial capture. Although Timbrunah’s role was not described at length, she was attached to Cottrell’s party shortly before he began using smoke signals, which suggests she assisted in such decoying operations. Similarly complicating his brief synopsis of peaceful surrender, Cottrell mentioned that ‘I possessed myself of their offensive weapons consisting of a Musket, with ammunition, & shot belt, and a bundle of spears.’ Surrender did not just mean detention, it meant disarmament.
Yet these new captives seem to have opted to assist Cottrell make further captures. He notified the authorities that he planned to go towards ‘the North Esk in consequence of information … that a man had been speared in that quarter’. ‘I shall be accompanied on this occasion by the three Natives I have recently captured,’ he said, ‘as they are very anxious to bring in the remainder of their tribe consisting of six men & one woman, some of whom are their relations’. When he read Cottrell’s report, Arthur’s response was to note that ‘I am very apprehensive that Mr Cotterel [sic] may lose the natives he has already taken, and I trust he will take the greatest precautions, to prevent their escape.’
Further north, another roving conciliatory capture party also had success. Robert Surridge, one of the servants attached to the Aboriginal Establishment like Tyrrell, had led a party with Aboriginal auxiliaries helping him make contact on the coast directly north of Ben Lomond.
[The party came upon] a tribe of Natives near Waterhouse Point after fourteen days pursuit tracing them all the time by their smokes, & by means of the native women who accompanied them succeeded in bringing about a conference on sunday last [18 November], & on the following day placed them all, ten in number – 8 men & 2 women – by persuasion & force, in security on the Island.16
This party was similarly disarmed of their spears. Arthur thought this was ‘very satisfactory!’.
Other accounts of this incident reveal yet more tactics. One of the servants went out with the two women to make initial contact.17 When Aboriginal people surrounded and threatened these three, one of the women ‘screamed out … recognising her own husband’. Once again, interpersonal and familial relationships had facilitated contact. While colonial commentators rarely recognised it, such kinship relations appear to have been among the most significant factors aiding the conciliatory capture missions. Either way, with hostilities averted, the women attached to Surridge’s party gave the new group ‘Bread Blankets & many fine things if they would come down to the Boat’.
Waiting with the boat was Charles Scott, another of the men attached to the Establishment, who penned an account of what followed:
they came back the next morning bringing a party of natives with them[.] we told them we was a Sealing Boat and if they would go in the boat we would get them plenty of eggs[.] five of the men agreed to go with us and the others agreeing to remain till they came back[.] we immediately made for waterhouse Island where we landed them and returned to the others but they would not be enticed in the boat so we slept on the main all night keeping a man on the look out till day light when we asked the natives to help us to launch our boat and we would bring the natives back[.] they consented and as soon as we got the boat in the water we rushd [sic] upon them and after a struggle of some minutes we overpowerd them and secured them in the boat and landed them on waterhouse Island[.]18
Afterwards, they returned to the site of the capture and found 17 spears.
Cottrell meanwhile had continued prowling around Ben Lomond and the upper rivers in that area, targeting the occasional signs of smoke, and sometimes following Aboriginal tracks.19 Eventually, after spotting a campfire in early January 1832, he had another success:
I then sent forward three of the Sydney Natives and one female aborigine of this Island to communicate and explain the intention of Government towards them. Some time after the party returned bringing with them one aboriginal female who readily agreed to join the party & return with us. I returned to the station [Batman’s farm] the same evening. This woman calls herself ‘Toolamworrah’, and had been formerly in Launceston jail and had been taken from there by Mr Robinson from whom she states she ran away some short time since, Eumarrah and Black Tom having beaten her, she says she came over to this side to join a small tribe that she knows to be to the Eastward.
Toolamworrah now joined Cottrell, helping him find some Aboriginal huts, more tracks, and although he made no more immediate captures, he did get close enough to hear some of them hunting.
Within a few weeks Cottrell expressed an interest in going ‘to the westward … having been informed that there are a considerable number of Hostile Aborigines in the neighbourhood of Port Sorell & along the next coast towards Circular Head’.20 It reflected something of a strategic shift. By the end of 1831 the old settled districts were increasingly clear of Aboriginal people. Certainly the opportunities for capture parties were diminishing in the midlands and east coast districts. Even the Schoutens campaign, ill-documented as it was, suggested that tribal groups were small and scared.
Moreover, the documented encounters highlight the ways that tribal social structures were observably distorted. Capture parties tended to bring in groups that were disproportionately male, and with very few children, which both pointed to the collapse of anything approaching demographic normality. Moreover, new captives and auxiliaries facilitated further captures, making the process of ‘conciliation’ relatively organic, growing from those early pursuit and roving parties of the late 1820s into the ostensibly conciliatory capture parties of the early 1830s. But as the opportunities for capture diminished in the settled districts of the east, contracted rovers looked to the west where the colony was expanding through the business interests of the Van Diemen’s Land Company.21
McKay helped lead this drive to the west in early 1832. With him was an Aboriginal woman and a party that included the recently rewarded Thomas Ward and William Wells, as well as another man named Richard Dagnell, one of Robinson’s former servants.22 McKay reportedly left Launceston on 1 December 1831 for the Hampshire Hills, which he only reached near the end of the month because of ‘the rivers being overflowed’. Roving into early January 1832, they eventually ‘saw a native smoke’, which gave them a target to approach. On 3 January they ‘halted at the edge of a plain to have breakfast’. Hearing ‘the natives Hunting’ in the area, they quickly extinguished their fire, and McKay and the woman cautiously approached, followed by the remainder of the party, and all hid in the bush. McKay and the woman then advanced alone. McKay ‘made the woman to take off her cloathes’ as part of their approach. Although the Aboriginal people ‘ran off a little way’, they were stayed from full flight because ‘the woman went forward and addressed them in the Native language’. Promising kindly treatment and bread, two were enticed to come over and sit, and gradually more joined until there were eight sharing tea, tobacco and food with McKay’s group. The rest of McKay’s party also joined them, although making sure to keep ‘the arms out of sight’.
Meanwhile, McKay reported, ‘our woman learnt by the native language that their intention was to rush us’. McKay reached for his pistol, but in a reverse of his own plan was seized instead. An old man grabbed McKay, other men grabbed his fellows, and a ‘great scuffle’ ensued. Meanwhile, more Aboriginal people armed with ‘spears and waddies’ were seen approaching.
Scrambling with each other, McKay and his combatant ‘fell into the fire’. The captor released his grip, McKay got his pistol, and pointed it at those approaching, slowing their advance. He then quickly turned to help his own companions, clubbing one of the men ‘with the butt of the pistol which laid him senseless on the ground’. Then he got a musket. The woman had retrieved it from its hiding place and ran with it to McKay. At this, the assailants ran away. Packing their goods, and securing the unconscious Aboriginal man, the party beat a retreat to the settlement at Emu Bay. ‘I hope that we will be successful in capturing a few more natives before my return to Launceston’, he wrote towards the end of his report to the Secretary of the Aborigines Committee. But unbeknown to McKay or Cottrell, the Vandemonian War had already ended.
Surrender
On 4 January 1832 Captain Wentworth, the police magistrate of Bothwell, reported to Arthur ‘the surrender of the whole of the Big River and Oyster Bay tribes to Mr Robinson’.23 The Colonial Secretary coded Wentworth’s letter 7578/1056, and Arthur insisted that ‘Every precaution sho[ul]d be taken to prevent their escape!’ Reportedly 26 people had surrendered, comprising ‘16 men 9 women and one child’. After patrolling the eastern midlands about the time of the Schoutens campaign, Robinson and his party had gradually headed west into the highlands and lakes districts. On 31 December 1831, he made contact with the combined relic of these two tribes in the usual fashion, with several of the Aboriginal members of the ‘friendly mission’ going out first ‘as an embassy to the hostile natives’.24 Once contacted, these tribes then approached the remainder of the expedition, Robinson shook some hands, and they all conversed. Robinson ‘promised them a conference with the Lieut Govr and that the Governor will be sure to redress all their grievances’.
The capture of this group was a tremendous political coup, and served to help the colony believe that the war had been concluded through negotiation. When Robinson ‘made his triumphant entry’ into Hobart on Saturday 7 January 1832, as the Hobart Town Courier reported, it was with a party of 40 Aboriginal people.25 One of the men was singled out for mention, because he had ‘lost his arm … in the rat trap that happened to be set in the flour cask in Mr. Adey’s stock-keeper’s hut’ a few years previously. But for the most part the description was pure propaganda:
They walked very leisurely along the road, followed by a large pack of dogs, and were received by the inhabitants on their entry into town with the most lively curiosity and delight. Soon after their arrival they walked up to the Government house, and were introduced to His Excellency and the interview that took place was truly interesting. They are delighted at the idea of proceeding to Great Island, where they will enjoy peace and plenty uninterrupted. … After, in the greatest good humour and with an evident desire to make themselves agreeable, going through various feats of their wonderful dexterity, they proceeded on board the Swan river packet.
‘The removal of these blacks will be of essential benefit both to themselves and the colony’, the Hobart Town Courier argued, before turning to the problems caused by ‘dogs which these poor people have nursed and bred up’ and ‘ravages committed by the opossums in like manner … equally ruinous to the hopes of the farmer’. Elsewhere on the page the newspaper casually reported that ‘Aborigines were very troublesome at Bathurst, carrying off whole flocks of sheep.’ There were other fights in other colonies, but no more in Van Diemen’s Land.
Of course the contest for Van Diemen’s Land did not stop, and the harrying, capturing and removing of Aboriginal people continued. Robinson, Cottrell and others pursued the remaining tribes of Van Diemen’s Land across the west coast. For instance, more than a year later, in February 1833, Cottrell informed the Colonial Secretary about an encounter on the west coast near Macquarie Harbour:
again fell in with traces of the natives and on the following day came up with them and succeeded in inducing eight (having five women two men and boy) to join us. The remainder of the tribe would not allow us to come up with them but evinced a hostile feeling shaking their spears at our people when they advanced towards them.26
Nonetheless, despite the relative isolation of this region and the obvious unwillingness of these people to be taken, more roving conciliatory capture expeditions followed in the remote west.27
Some of the veterans of the Vandemonian War were there, too. The former volunteer party leader Henry James Emmett – who also claimed to have witnessed the Big River and Oyster Bay tribes ‘regaled on the lawn at Government House’ by ‘the band of the 63 reg’ – moved to Circular Head at the far northwest of the island, and subsequently remembered conflict in that region. ‘Since I have resided at Circular Head poor Neil McDonald was speared by the natives at the Surry Hills,’ he later wrote, before listing several hut raids. He also recounted the time ‘at Woolnorth when the men gave chase and caught one young woman who was taken to Launceston’, and the final well-known capture in the colony: ‘the remainder of the natives were decoyed by some halfcasts [sic] beyond Woolnorth and Captured … for which the party who caught them received £100.’
These seven Aboriginal people were captured in 1842 – over a decade after the war-ending surrender – through the agency of some sealers’ wives. They were temporarily lodged in Launceston Gaol before being exiled.28 Old William Coventry, another veteran volunteer of the General Movement, also remembered this capture into his later years.29 But these recollections, like this supposed last capture, in some respects reflect the blurring of the colonial frontier into the historiographical one. Only a couple of years after this capture, in 1844, the Launceston Examiner was discoursing on the ‘formation of a yeomanry corps’, and in doing so referred to the military exertions of the past, asserting that ‘the black war will not soon be forgotten by those who shouldered the musket and kept watch during the campaign’.30 It is an eerily familiar concept about sacrificial effort and never forgetting.
Afterword
The surviving Aboriginal people of Van Diemen’s Land mostly died in exile and the Vandemonian War disappeared from public memory with them. In its place, coincident with a rising fascination with ‘race’, grew a scientific obsession with their physiognomy and culture. The Aboriginal Vandemonians were studied into absurdity with unwittingly circular chains of evidence that corrupted the intellectual integrity of the whole process. By the end of the nineteenth century scientists believed that these people could not make fire on their own, did not eat fish, and that their women had suckled puppies.
Commentators believed that the conflict was mostly about wild convict stockmen, that the roving parties were a short-lived experiment, that military manoeuvres had little effect, and that ‘conciliation’ won the day. Kickerterpoller and Mungo-Jack largely faded from memory, their significance deliberately underplayed and then quickly and genuinely forgotten. The Vandemonian War was too ambiguous for the binary politics of race and culture. It did not meet narrative conventions of clear goodies and baddies, winners and losers, whites and blacks. A different story replaced the truth.
In the meantime, Robinson’s fame continued to grow, Arthur earned international acclaim as a great humanitarian, and Batman was feted as a treaty-maker and the founder of Melbourne. These great men of the age passed into the canon of Australian history, reputations largely intact. Danvers, Tyrrell, Scott and hundreds of others like them passed into oblivion, marrying, settling and conveniently disappearing. So too did an indeterminate number of non-exiled Aboriginal people, living as members of the colony by the war’s end. It was never about race, until later it was, retrospectively warping the whole story with yet more bad history and even worse science. Some families kept stories, some even made up stories, but most just got on with life until the documentary darkness gradually covered their own roles or structural complicities. For as long as the war was remembered it was mostly unwritten. Like the First World War, it took the passing of a generation to make it an appropriate subject for entertaining and populist history.
By then the intensely militaristic past had been trumped by stories of largely peaceful civil settlement. Thousands of tourists flock to Tasmania without realising that many convicts fought for the prospect of freedom from bondage. Visitors use roads built to carry armies, cross the site of the line on their way to Port Arthur, and photograph gaols that held Aboriginal prisoners of war as well as colonial captives. In part this is because the red-coated soldiers left to fight other wars, guard other colonies, and eventually never returned. Their absence from the landscape left room for the frontier wars to become gradually de-militarised in favour of a narrative focused on sporadic frontier skirmishes. The embarrassingly named ‘History Wars’ of recent times, at least pertaining to Van Diemen’s Land, turned not so much on the evidence or actuality of history as on different versions of the same lie.
Such contestation is not new. Stories of the ‘Black War’ in Van Diemen’s Land proliferated for the better part of two centuries. Such tales grew and changed with the telling, but the characters, scenes and plot lines largely derived from the early 1830s when the colonial government and newspapermen articulated them. Falsehoods became facts and coincidences became causal.
In trying to make sense of the past, even chronological sequences became fluid, and were sometimes made subject to narrative necessity. All genuinely became oral tradition as people heard and read falsehoods and told them to their children who passed the half-truths on as history and tradition. The past was soon populated with heroes and villains, making a folkloric tableau, a sort of Tasmanian Iliad. It was clumsily and simplistically drawn from old propaganda and wartime obfuscations, and effectively mashed with elements of Genesis and
Exodus to attempt to speak in the familiar languages of original sin and salvation. Risdon became a serpent, Robinson a messiah.
Even in text this master narrative influenced each subsequent telling down the ages, gradually strangling history with mythology. Out of this mix, lived history coalesced into narrative history, national history and then nationalist history. As it did, it grew but became a diminished truth. Whole campaigns fell into void and silent amnesia. Rewards for captures and records of killings dropped out of biographies. Despite avid antiquarianism and persistent historical nit-picking, the real story was lost, buried by habits of mind. Van Diemen’s Land became Tasmania, and Tasmanian history had no room for the Vandemonian War.
Precisely how this all came to be is most easily discerned through brief reference to a select group of writers. First among these is Jorgenson, who hoped to write a history of the Vandemonian War even before it terminated. Writing to Charles Arthur on 30 November 1830, as Arthur’s campaign waned, Jorgenson asked Charles:
would you be so good as to solicit your honoured uncle to permit me to have a sight of all the various reports I have from time to time addressed to Mr Anstey concerning the Aborigines, and the movements of the Roving parties against them. … I intend to write a work on the Subject of the Aborigines, and the history of the late warlike movements against them.1
Perhaps recognising that his own period of service was nearing its end, Jorgenson admitted there might be some financial profit in such a work. The war had been lucrative for many people, who afterwards all had to turn to other things.
Understanding his proposed book’s potential military import, Jorgenson hoped ‘to dedicate it to the King of Prussia’. With its coordinated formations and sweeping drives, Jorgenson seems to have thought that studying the Vandemonian War could be useful for future armies and empire-builders. Sometime after his retirement from the roving parties, Jorgenson did write an account of Aboriginal cultural practices and narrated a short history of the conflict, but it was far from this early proposal. A draft manuscript survives in the State Library of New South Wales.2
Curiously, Jorgenson glossed over the roving parties, and much of the war to which he was privy, but repeatedly stressed that he had examined manuscripts in the colonial archive, some of the same ones used for this book. It was quite a bizarre document, more revealing of Jorgenson’s persistent jealousies than reliably illuminating the past, perhaps reflecting the way that the profits from victory tended to benefit higher classes of men than this ex-convict and his fellow rangers. It is tempting to see his references to these government-held documents as a coded pointer to the truth he was overlooking, but that could be giving him too much credit. No longer of great utility to his government, Jorgenson was now severely limited by class and a lack of patronage, and was not well placed to challenge the already-strong master narratives. ‘The reports written by Mr Jorgen Jorgenson are very voluminous, and embrace every object’ he made sure to state, adding a prefix to his name that the original reports lacked. He was never Mr Jorgenson to his masters, only Jorgenson. An ex-convict could not challenge what the Lieutenant Governor had authorised as truth.
Although unpublished under his own name in his lifetime, parts of Jorgenson’s manuscript were used in James Bonwick’s The Last of the Tasmanians; or, The Black War of Van Diemen’s Land of 1870. Bonwick constructed his history from some government records and populated it with colourful and often fanciful anecdotes. One of Jorgenson’s unattributed contributions was an absurd version of Dalrymple Briggs’s defence of her children at Stocker’s hut.3 Similar stories had similarly stupid trails of transmission into the historical and literary canon – even surviving into present times. When Louisa Ann Meredith wrote of her husband’s experiences of the war, she entirely omitted the Schoutens campaign, despite his prominent role and it being his father’s idea.4 Some of the Cottons insisted they kept Aboriginal people safely and secretly on their property into the years of exile, possibly misunderstanding family traditions that hearkened back to their very real collection of Aboriginal skulls, which was well known to the scientific community.5 The war served later colonial audiences as a sort of gothic whimsy, offering terrible tales from yore, and it has often continued to do so.
This old story of the Aboriginal peoples of Van Diemen’s Land has also frequently served as a morality tale. As Bonwick wrote to his friends when he first conceived of his work in the 1850s:
it is the desire of my heart to write a full & particular account of that melancholy period, the Black War; it is not mere curiosity nor thought of money making, badly as I want cash. Mr West, in his history, has not detailed the events of that sad story. The race is passing away & no proper memorial of their struggles exists.6
For Bonwick, this story was intended to elicit ‘the sympathy of philanthropists’, popularising notions of racial extinction and historical tragedy, thereby contributing to contemporary debates about the nature and behaviour of empire. ‘Have we not often been, in our civilizing processes,’ Bonwick asked in the condensed reprint of his book, ‘more savage than the Savages?’7 The Vandemonian War thereby became a cautionary lesson for the empire drawn from its own genocidal past.8
But the people who helped inform that story were often tainted as participants, either in the war or in its misremembering. The timeless and savage Aboriginal tribes, violent and criminal stockmen, humane administrators, and absent soldiers of the old ‘Black War’ narrative were products of this later moment of gentile reflection. This unfortunate and unofficial war of previous memory, this accidental genocide, was a classed construction, a shared fantasy, the direct result of wartime propaganda and mutual interest.
Until now, the real Vandemonian War was hidden by the strength of this antiquated ‘Black War’ tradition obsessed with race and reputation, and made resilient through repetition. But there is great irony here as well. Certainly, the colonial government constructed a public narrative of what happened and why, massaged at times to suit circumstances, which persisted beyond its immediate context and political purpose. But the orders to troops, the cataloguing of arms and ammunitions, the mission reports of movements, captures and killings derive from the documentary by-products of that same misrepresented history. They capture history as it happened. The Vandemonian War was written as it was fought.
It would be easy to fall into the old habit of the ‘Black War’ narrative and turn a complex war into an ethno-cultural morality tale or resistance fable. A final platitude about fallen warriors, the shared experiences of war, the survival and renewal of culture and identity, or any other cliché could help conform this work to narrative convention and round it to a fitting end. But the Vandemonian War has a grimmer message more pertinent for the present – this age of half-truths, cultural and ethnic partisanship and the intellectual vacuum left by that great postmodern conceit that all truth is relative. Unearthed after nearly two centuries of established history, the Vandemonian War allows us to see that a society can be led to do almost anything – and then come to believe it did not do it at all.