CHAPTER EIGHT
1829–30, Spring–Summer
Southern Frontier
Robertson’s Contract Ends
Anstey was not the only person to express misgivings about the roving parties in late 1829. The Colonial Secretary also conveyed to Anstey ‘that the Lieut Governor feels much discouraged at the total want of success’.1 These records of similar sentiments were seemingly unconnected, but probably reflect a wider discussion about the campaigning to be undertaken in the weeks and months ahead. Arthur wanted Anstey to provide ‘observations or suggestions’ for a potential ‘alteration in the system’. While Anstey replied that ‘I do not think that the present plan is capable of improvement,’ thereby tacitly backing Jorgenson as the key theoretician of the plan, he also implied that there were potential issues with some roving party personnel, probably a coded comment about Gilbert Robertson.2
After tensions between Jorgenson and Robertson escalated, the Colonial Secretary increasingly queried Robertson’s success and diligence.3 For a considerable part of the spring, Robertson had been out of action with what he described as a ‘chronic distemper’, failing to fully report his or his parties’ movements with any frequency or reliability. Eventually the Colonial Secretary directly asked for Robertson’s missing ‘Quarterly Journal’, which was needed ‘in order that it may be deposited as Record in my office’.4 The government was preparing to archive Robertson’s missions, which would have been a simple task but for Robertson’s evasiveness. As 1829 drew to a close there was little serious suggestion that Robertson’s contract would be renewed.
In December Robertson recognised that he was unlikely to be employed again. ‘I do not expect His Excellency will consider it expedient to require an extension of my Service beyond the present year,’ he informed the Colonial Secretary.5 But he nonetheless advocated that the men attached to his mission should receive their various rewards. He explained that Grant would ‘petition for his conditional Pardon, And wishes to be employed again, with a view to obtaining his Absolute Pardon’. Grant was, Robertson explained, ‘heir to a small property’ in Aberdeenshire and was ‘anxious to earn his liberty to visit his native Country’. Engaging in warfare was a chance to escape the sentence of transportation, and possibly even leave Van Diemen’s Land. Most of Robertson’s rovers wanted to be transferred to the field police, or otherwise engage in future missions with the prospect of further reward.
But even the transfer of such men proved complex, in part because Robertson kept them from reporting to Hobart, but also because the bureaucracy was inflexible. Sam Robinson, for instance, wound up stuck in the Hobart Prisoner’s Barracks.6 Infuriated by his situation, he wrote to Anstey, thereby giving a subordinate’s close and unique perspective on Robertson’s mission, noting that Robertson’s ‘chief object was in looking for good Land for he seemed more interested in that than natives’, and that Robertson did not maintain daily field journals but composed them later. All these assertions likely reinforced Anstey’s suspicions, and he annotated the letter with the comment that ‘a number of the men belonging to Mr Gilbert Robertson’s late Parties are kept idle at the Coal River’. With his superiors against him, Robertson’s roving missions were effectively over.
Preparatory to Further Colonisation, the Port Davey Mission
The process of terminating Robertson’s mission left convict servants like William Grant and Sam Robinson in uncertainty, but the situation was clearer for the Aboriginal auxiliaries. On 1 December 1829 Arthur gave orders to Anstey:
give the necessary instructions for causing one of the ‘Aborigines’ who is at present with Mr Gilbert Robertson, to be delivered to the charge of Mr G. A. Robinson, who is proceeding to Port Davey, for the purpose of endeavouring to effect an amicable understanding with the Natives of that quarter.7
Later that month the captives in Richmond Gaol were also ‘placed at the disposal of Mr G. A. Robinson’ for his diplomatic mission to the tribes of the south.8
The notion of a mission to the Port Davey tribes had been around for some time. In June 1829, for instance, the Hobart Town Courier ‘wished that the present peaceable Blacks in the neighbourhood of Port Davey could be brought in before any contamination of the murderous habits of those in other parts of the island.’9 The paper advocated that George Augustus Robinson, with his ‘black family’ at Bruny Island accompanying him, was an ideal candidate for such an endeavour.
Port Davey, at the most southwestern edge of Van Diemen’s Land, was effectively separated from the settled districts by mountainous terrain. One reporter described the Aboriginal people living there as ‘a degree above those in the interior’, which mainly meant they appeared less inclined to fight the colonists.10 This ‘Port Davey mob’, as the Aboriginal people of the southern coast of Van Diemen’s Land were often collectively termed, had long been in contact with colonists right up as far as Bruny Island. As already seen, the Bruny Island Establishment gradually grew from the government’s efforts to utilise a location of regular coastal contact to encourage Aboriginal people to remain out of Hobart and its surrounds and gradually become sedentary agriculturalists.
The Port Davey people’s notional friendliness, however, reflected the colonists’ limited incursions into their territory. Port Davey itself was a stopover on voyages between Hobart and the Macquarie Harbour penal settlement, and timber cutters had begun logging along the Huon River. But where the midlands had been aggressively occupied by the British over two decades of colonial expansion, southern Van Diemen’s Land had far fewer settlers and soldiers, and so the Vandemonian War had not really extended to that part of the island.
Yet even while trying to maintain a line of demarcation between settled and unsettled districts, the colonial government was looking to a broader geographical future. Several months before Robinson’s expedition to Port Davey, efforts were being made to explore the territory in greater detail. In March the Hobart Town Courier briefly described a preliminary mission:
A small party, with two native guides, is we learn to be dispatched with the next vessel that sails to Macquarie harbour, in order to be landed at Port Davey, and to explore from thence the country up to Hobart town.11
Immediately below this, the paper contains a glowing account of the ‘little colony, or home for the Blacks at Bruné Island’. That Aboriginal people were guiding reconnaissance expeditions while others were being encouraged to farm potatoes, highlights a complex spectrum of inter-cultural interactions that has too often been overlooked in Vandemonian history.
But cultural exchanges often went two ways. During a different mission to Port Davey, for instance, one colonist apparently feigned a snake bite so that he could learn about traditional medicinal practice. He reported the treatment upon returning to Hobart:
The Black immediately took two pieces of bark with sharp points which he lighted, and rubbed, or rather drilled into the wound, until he had made a considerable cavity. He then plucked some of the soft wool of an oppossum [sic] and stuffed into it, singeing the projecting fur smooth off with the skin, which process he declared was sufficient to prevent evil consequence.12
While there may have been more to this story than appearances suggest – as it sounded a lot to bear for the sake of curiosity – this account of a field dressing shows colonists learning about Aboriginal practices with a certain enthusiasm. While not all such reports were documented, Aboriginal people revealed parts of their cultures to travelling companions across the colony and beyond. At the Bruny Island Establishment, Robinson was able to learn and record snippets of Aboriginal cultures. In the winter of 1829, for instance, he learned from one group ‘that they had some idea of a good spirit whom they called PAR.LER.DY, and that he stopped in the sky’.13 A few weeks later he might have seen or heard about another medical procedure when Boomer’s widow, again at Bruny Island after her husband’s tragic demise, treated herself for an illness. She reportedly cut gashes in her flesh and bound the wounds with plant matter.14 Although Robinson only learned second-hand that she died from the affliction, he was nonetheless relatively well placed to observe and describe some Aboriginal practices. The Bruny Island Establishment gave him access to a greater proportion of Aboriginal people than most other colonial agents. Only the Richmond gaoler rivalled him in this regard.
But in preparing to go to Port Davey with Aboriginal companions, Robinson was following a broader colonial agenda that went beyond acculturation. The early 1829 exploratory expedition returned to Hobart with reports that ‘there is a considerable quantity of good land in that direction’.15Robinson’s mission was therefore part of a land grab.
The Convenience of Committees and the Results of Patronage
Arthur authorised Robinson’s Port Davey mission on 28 November 1829.16 It came as part of a set of instructions to concentrate all Aboriginal captives at the Bruny Island Establishment, fence them in, and provide field police to guard against their escape. The expedition to Port Davey was intended to ‘effect an amicable understanding with the Natives in that quarter, and through them, with the Tribes in the interior’.17 Robinson was provided with ‘five steady men’, one of the men currently with Robertson, and ‘one of those in the Hospital’.
Like Richmond Gaol, the colonial hospital in Hobart was another institutional site where Aboriginal people were confined. In early November, five of the 14 captives at Richmond were ‘conveyed in a cart to the Hospital in Hobart town’ to help stop the spread of an illness among the rest.18Colonisation brought new diseases that afflicted Aboriginal people, particularly when they were confined. These patients from Richmond reportedly ‘shed tears at parting’ as they were taken away towards Hobart.
With the gradual development of a more centralised concentration of Aboriginal captives at Bruny Island also came questions about the conditions of such detention. After Robinson raised concerns about the rations at the Establishment being ‘insufficient’, Arthur formed a small committee to investigate the scheme of provisions and make recommendations.19 Formed in October, it was composed of the chief police magistrate, the port officer and ‘An officer of the Commissariat Dept’. A few weeks later, Arthur formed another committee to review the site of the Bruny Island Establishment.20 It was considered ‘objectionable principally from the proximity of the whaling parties at Adventure Bay’. Ironically, the very thing that made Bruny Island appealing to begin with – a locus of habitual association – had seemingly become a problem. This committee, which was composed of the Colonial Treasurer, the chief police magistrate and the Colonial Surgeon, was then asked to suggest new locations on other islands or mainland Van Diemen’s Land for an ‘Aboriginal Establishment’.
In December, Arthur added two new members to this committee, both ministers of religion. Increasingly concerned about fraternisation between whalers and Aboriginal people, Arthur tasked this expanded committee with overseeing ‘the care and treatment of the Captured Natives and for suggesting such measures of conciliation as shall appear to them calculated to bring about a permanent friendly intercourse between the native tribes and the Colonists’.21
One of the two new members of this ‘Aborigines Committee’, as it came to be known, was the colonial chaplain Reverend William Bedford of the Church of England. Bedford was an obvious choice for Arthur. As a moral leader, he had already shown an interest in the treatment of Aboriginal people. Earlier in the year, for instance, Bedford staged an experiment where ‘an Aboriginal youth’ was exposed to an organ recital in Launceston to gauge his response.22 More particularly, Bedford was already connected to the administration of the Bruny Island Establishment through Robinson.
Bedford and Robinson had a close relationship. One of Bedford’s duties as colonial chaplain was to attend to the spiritual needs of prisoners in the Hobart Gaol, especially those sentenced to death. Before his appointment to the Bruny Island Establishment, Robinson also regularly visited the confined and condemned.23 Both were committee members of the Auxiliary Bible Society, where Robinson was also a collector of subscriptions.24 It seems very likely therefore that Bedford advocated for Robinson in his application for the job at Bruny Island. Certainly he actively supported Robinson thereafter, acting as an intermediary between Robinson and the Lieutenant Governor on several occasions, and even directly relaying Robinson’s scheme for an expedition to Port Davey. Arthur’s own instructions replicated ideas and phrases from one of Bedford’s letters, including the suggestions to fence the Bruny Island Establishment and send a mission to Port Davey, which the Reverend noted was the result of ‘much conversation with Mr Robinson’.25 Bedford was, in effect, Robinson’s patron – giving the former bricklayer relatively direct access to the highest level of government in the colony.
The Politics of Conciliation
Government concerns about the treatment of Aboriginal captives overlapped with a broader focus on the moral improvement of colonial society. While having a rapidly expanding cohort of free settlers, Van Diemen’s Land was still a dedicated convict colony, where the government’s systems of punishment, training and rewards aimed at the rehabilitation of those often considered a degraded criminal class. But Hobart was also a busy port servicing sailors, sealers and whalers from a diverse range of classes and places. With that developed a seedy side that undermined the image of colonial respectability fostered by genteel settlers and urban professionals.
In their own ways, the Auxiliary Bible Society and the Bruny Island Establishment both sought to save body and soul from sin and ignorance. But there was a sense of growing urgency about Aboriginal people’s futures as the continued prosecution of the Vandemonian War made their total extermination seem ever more likely.
The Bruny Island Establishment and the Port Davey expedition therefore served as useful political counterpoints to the Vandemonian War. Both were visible signs of the government’s paternalism. The money expended on them, however, was only a tiny fraction of the costs of soldiers and roving parties. It is telling that their oversight was delegated to a committee, while Arthur personally oversaw strategic combat operations.
Although Robinson’s expedition was represented at the time as a major turning point in government policy, they were equipped with a supporting crew of armed servants and Aboriginal auxiliaries who had formerly been stationed with Robertson. The Port Davey expedition was never called a roving party, but it rather looked like one.
By late 1829 and early 1830, elements within colonial society were becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the war. Typifying this was a meeting of ‘upwards of a hundred of the most influential individuals of the colony’ in the Hobart Court House in January 1830.26 Styled the Van Diemen’s Land Philosophical Society, it reveals some of the ways that the ambiguities of British colonialism were played out in public discourse, with much attention to science, discovery and colonial improvement. ‘Our very residence in this island may be termed the offspring of science,’ one speaker announced, framing the occupation as a direct result of navigational advancement and maritime exploration. ‘The amelioration in the state of those nations of India, which have become subject to England,’ he went on to add, ‘is perhaps the most beautiful illustration of the practical effects of science that can be cited.’ This supposedly pacific control of India was, however, then contrasted with Van Diemen’s Land where ‘the brutal inhumanity of white men’ had, the speaker argued, left Aboriginal people hostile to the colonists. He hoped the Philosophical Society would focus on ‘acquiring to more intimate acquaintance with this much wronged people, with a view of ameliorating their condition, and of saving them from being extirpated’.
In part, this was a colonial narrative that had developed about the war and its origins, which borrowed heavily from Christian theology and scientific notions about humanity. This placed the cause for conflict with the distant sins of white forefathers and regretted its continuation as a function of a child-like animosity of uncivilised peoples. It was a narrative sequence later made official by the Aborigines Committee, which investigated ‘the origin of the hostility displayed by the Black Natives’ in early 1830, and came to much the same conclusion as the January speaker.27
But the deponents quizzed by the Aborigines Committee, like the members of the Philosophical Society, generally had compromised positions. Even that speaker at the Philosophical Society was deeply involved in the ongoing work of colonisation. He was Surveyor General George Frankland, who had helped survey the good land of the Huon Valley between Hobart and Port Davey.28
In early February the Colonial Times carried two adjacent advertisements that further illustrate these compromised ambiguities of colonialism. The Aborigines Committee requested ‘communication and suggestions’ from members of the public, while Frankland advertised the new ‘road having been opened and completed from Hobart Town to the River Huon’, which meant ‘parties in search of land for location, have now the power of penetrating with facility into the heart of the unexplored country in the south-western portion of the Colony’.29
Robinson’s Friendly Roving Party
Robinson’s expedition was transported into that southern country not by Frankland’s road, but rather by boat. Just as Frankland’s mapping was part of the process of colonial expansion, so too was Robinson’s expedition. While framed as a diplomatic mission, and tied to general narratives of the war, it was also clearly about opening new territory for more intensive colonial occupation. As he approached the territory occupied by the Port Davey peoples, he ‘Served out six rounds of ammunition to the party’. Robinson was more than prepared for his party to fight if needed. Such expeditions could have more than one purpose, after all. War and diplomacy are not necessarily opposites.
Accompanied by Kickerterpoller and Eumarrah – veterans of the roving parties – as well as his armed servants, Robinson started his overland journey from the area around Recherche Bay.30 On one of his first days out, some of his party found an Aboriginal woman’s body. As one of Robinson’s companions explained:
[She] had been attacked with sickness and left here by her tribe to linger and perish, as is their custom when overcome with sickness. The natives informed me that plenty of natives had been attacked with RAEGERWROPPER or evil spirit, and had died.31
Illnesses had killed many of the Aboriginal people at Bruny Island, and Robinson now surmised disease was ‘general among the tribes of aborigines’, perhaps explaining away the impact of confinement – in which he was highly complicit – in fostering infections.
After a week of difficult travel and diminishing provisions, Robinson lost part of his team. ‘The civilised aborigine Robert absconded without permission,’ he noted. But nonetheless, through his travels he learned various local words from his companions, and saw cultural practices from boating to the preparation and consumption of seal meat. Like many colonial explorers, Robinson named features of the landscape, including one range of mountains after Arthur. He also saw many unoccupied huts, much like the roving parties of the interior, and similarly climbed mountains for the heightened views, turning towards signs of smoke.
In the middle of March, Robinson found the skeletal remains of three escaped convicts laying near a small flag that had failed to attract the attention of passing ships. It was a reminder of how far from effective colonial occupation the expedition had travelled. And it was here, on that day, that members of Robinson’s party made contact with the Port Davey tribe. Four of the members with Robinson’s expedition ‘stripped themselves of their European clothing’, went ahead and established the terms of a meeting for the subsequent day. One of them, Dray, having met her relatives, spent the night with them.
Over the next few days there was periodic contact between Robinson’s party and various Port Davey people, sometimes involving Robinson himself. It all seemed peaceable enough, helped by the fact that some of Robinson’s companions were clearly related to the people they met. Moreover, the coast of Van Diemen’s Land had been a place of regular contact with outsiders since at least the 1790s, so there was much precedent for polite and curious exchanges in the area. However, Robinson noted that some of his team were ‘anxious to make captives’, and this even extended beyond the colonial servants. ‘The blacks were as eager to make capture’, Robinson added, noting that one of them named Woorrady ‘bore a mortal hatred to these people’.
Nonetheless, the mission continued, negotiating difficult terrain and complex social relationships. Over subsequent months Robinson travelled to Macquarie Harbour, then up the west coast of Van Diemen’s Land into the territory occupied by the Van Diemen’s Land Company, a sweeping circuit of those least settled coastal areas of the island. Robert returned to the party, but Eumarrah later absconded. A number of Aboriginal people joined the expedition. All throughout this journey Robinson kept a journal, detailing bits of local history, cultural traditions and providing a record of various human encounters, albeit often one-sidedly. But he was not the only colonist to have such opportunities.
Richard Tyrrell’s Wartime Ethnography
While Robinson wandered the wild and rocky southern coast, the colonial government was weighing up other strategic options and still waging war in the settled districts. Just as some of the men formerly associated with Robertson joined Robinson in the largely uncolonised south, so too did some of Robertson’s former rovers join Jorgenson’s operations in the contested interior.
On 7 January 1830, the same day he sent Kickerterpoller to Hobart, Robertson dispatched four of his rovers to Oatlands.32 The small party included the young Aboriginal man Jack. Within a week they had arrived at Oatlands, and were sent into the field under the command of Constable William Wilson at Jorgenson’s orders.33 Their excursion was relatively short and uneventful. When the report of the mission reached Hobart, the Colonial Secretary even annotated it for Arthur that ‘There is nothing in this report deserving of notice’.
But the same day the Colonial Secretary forwarded another report to Arthur. ‘The parts of this Report which I have marked with pencil,’ he noted, ‘appear to me well deserving of notice.’34 It detailed a mission conducted over the turn of the new year. This concerned operations in the highland lakes area by a party headed by Richard Tyrrell.35 The first of the Colonial Secretary’s annotations concerned a report by Tyrrell of ‘a number of native huts: some so large that one would easily shelter sixty persons’. The Colonial Secretary underlined the text, as one of the government’s key reconnaissance questions concerned the size of the island’s Aboriginal population. Robinson’s mission similarly sought to answer that question in relation to the under-settled districts. Yet there was more of interest about these huts that the Colonial Secretary thought worth the Lieutenant Governor’s notice:
Some of them, by their appearance, could not have been constructed more than six days. On the inside of the Bark within the huts were drawn striking likenesses of Kangaroo, Dogs, several men in the attitude of fighting, and the moon.
About a month later the Aborigines Committee received a similar report detailing imagery found on trees and within huts, from a convict servant named Francis Browne, who had also served on parties pursuing Aboriginal people on the east coast.36 Browne described a series of ‘hieroglyphical representations (drawn with Charcoal) of Men & animals’ and even drew pictures of some of the images as he recollected them.37 One of them, he noted, bore a striking resemblance to the broad arrow that was stamped on colonial government property. When Frankland learned of such images, he made a representation to Arthur proposing to use pictures to help communicate with Aboriginal people.38 Reportedly, some pictures were subsequently painted, albeit with a slim documentary trail suggestive of relative strategic insignificance.39
But drawings were not the only marks Aboriginal people made on the landscape of Van Diemen’s Land, and Tyrrell’s mission encountered a number of other examples. At ‘Native Corners’ the expedition found many spears ‘that had been thrown at trees’, and came to the conclusion that this was a place where ‘the natives is [sic] here frequently practicing the Spear Exercise’. This did not particularly attract the Colonial Secretary’s attention, nor the ‘fresh fires’ or the site where the group ‘found one spear and seven waddies’, or more weapons near a butchered kangaroo: ‘one spear twelve feet long, and one waddy, the largest I have even seen’, according to Tyrrell. Of more interest was the party’s observation of ‘a pile of Stones most curiously arranged’, which they ‘were induced to remove’. Digging underneath, the rovers discovered ‘the head of a woman, carefully wrapped in fine grass, and the whole remains of a child’. The party ‘took the head with us’.
Burial customs were also revealed through the correspondence to the Aborigines Committee. Browne, for instance, described quite a different practice on the east coast:
The Blacks appear to burn their dead. I am credibly informed, that when one of their companions is killed, or dies, they put the Body, into a hollow tree, and pile a quantity of Brush Wood round it, to which they set fire on their next visit; shouting and dancing round, as it burns.
But the war was disrupting Aboriginal cultural practices even while it provided the means and incentive for recording them. While Brown also detailed how ‘the full of Every moon’ was a significant time for ‘a general Corroboree by Moon light’, he also added that ‘of late they change their rendezvous etc frequently, that it is not known where or how to find them’. This was the great irony of the newfound interest in studying, documenting and understanding Aboriginal people – their society was changing faster than it was being documented.
And it was also being effaced from the landscape. Shortly after exhuming the woman’s remains and that of the child, Tyrrell’s party finally made contact with Aboriginal people near the highland lakes:
we came suddenly up to the fire. We saw twelve Kangaroo roasting by the fire, and several dogs by it. To our astonishment we could only see two natives, although by their gestures and manner we easily knew that others were close by, but the Scrub was so high and heavy that we could devise no means for capturing any. I was thus reluctantly obliged to fire at the Two, and the ball struck one of them in the breast and he dropped down instantly and expired on the spot.
Beside the report, the Colonial Secretary again underlined a key phrase, and simply wrote a word in the margin: ‘why?’ Further down the page he also queried why they had put the dead man’s body ‘on a pile of wood … and burned it’.
With his attention duly drawn to these key passages, Arthur thought Tyrrell ‘might have made greater exertion to have captured the two natives in place of firing at them’, and wanted Anstey to remind his men ‘to act with the utmost possible humanity towards these wretched people’. But such platitudes were fairly light reprimands, and rare in the documentary record.40
Tyrrell wrote an earlier description of the event, which also ended up in the file that contained his formal report. This was a letter to Captain Vicary at Bothwell, who in turn forwarded it on to Hobart. ‘Sir,’ Vicary addressed the Colonial Secretary:
I have the Honor to enclose a letter addressed to me by a person named Tyrrell stating his having killed One Native and Fourteen Dogs.41
It echoed Tyrrell’s own words, who wrote that:
I with Mr Espies Overseer followed them up and shot 14 Dogs One Native ten Miles the other side of Lake Eccho, this happened the 11th.42
Mr Espie was one of the settlers who had earlier irritated Arthur by not adequately supporting the war effort. But by loaning his servant to the roving parties, Espie had certainly now joined the campaigning, even if prompted by personal attention from the Lieutenant Governor. The lowly ‘person named Tyrrell’ was doing the fighting, but a whole social hierarchy was supporting and watching him.
Amity and Animosity in the Midlands
While scouring in the hills a few days after Tyrrell’s attack, Danvers had come to a spot where ‘we found some spears from which circumstance we thought that the natives had lately been disturbed’.43 This became another report which ‘does not contain anything worthy of notice’ for the Lieutenant Governor. Forwarding the reports of Danvers, Tyrrell and Wilson, Jorgenson suggested that if Tyrrell’s party had ‘been stronger, he might have done more good’, a sentiment that the Colonial Secretary queried, but on which Arthur made no comment.44
Aware that the roving parties could still be disbanded, in January 1830 Jorgenson provided a report on Aboriginal activity in the area to demonstrate how he was gradually learning to predict their movements. Providing information on the activities of Aboriginal people in the Clyde area, Jorgenson described one stock-keeper fleeing before a group, who was saved when a ‘Shepherd most providentially fired at a kangaroo’ nearby, clearly scaring them away.45 He also described a bloodier incident in greater detail, capturing the sorts of exchanges also taking place within the Oatlands district:
On Saturday afternoon the 2nd of January, Fisher’s hut on the Big Lagoon near Oatlands was attacked by a hostile tribe of the Aborigines. One of Fisher’s men was dangerously wounded by a Spear, but he had sufficient strength to extricate it. At that moment a stout native came up saying ‘Give me that Spear you white _____: you die!’ The man, although wounded, and weak from loss of blood, had sufficient strength of mind and courage to thrust the Spear into the Black man: the latter staggered and was assisted by some other Blacks in getting away. The wounded man, according to Dr Hudspeth’s report, cannot live many days longer, and if possible, will be removed to the Hobarton Hospital.
Jorgenson continued his list of robberies, attacks and ‘great ravages amongst the sheep’, but also noted that these ‘movements on the part of the natives have in great measure been anticipated’. While the Colonial Secretary made no comment on Jorgenson’s self-confessed prescience, he nonetheless considered that ‘This Report detailing various outrages of the Aborigines is worthy of the perusal of Your Excellency.’
As the senior officials read and corresponded, the missions continued. But the parties were now tired. ‘Danvers as well as Tyrrell look like Two Skeletons,’ Jorgenson said, and Peter Scott’s men ‘are all barefooted and ragged’. Jorgenson gave Danvers some rest, while the others were mostly sent out shortly after their return to Oatlands. Tyrrell’s party was, for instance, preparing to head towards the Ouse River, now augmented with what Jorgenson described as ‘the Black boy lately sent me from Richmond’. But down in Hobart, the day after Jorgenson mentioned this, the Colonial Secretary wrote to Anstey with a different plan in store for Jack and Mungo:
I am directed by the Lt Governor to request, that you will cause two aboriginal lads who are at present attached to the parties under Mr Gilbert Robertson and Jorgen Jorgenson to be immediately withdrawn … for the purpose of being restored to their distressed relatives under the care of Mr G. A. Robinson at the Aboriginal Establishmt.46
But the Lieutenant Governor met with a remarkable piece of insubordination. Jorgenson explained the situation to Anstey in his reply to this instruction:
I communicated on Saturday last to Jack, the Black Guide, (lately arrived from Mr Gilbert Robertson’s parties) that it was necessary he should proceed to Hobarton there to join his relations. He flatly refused to leave his party, stating that his father was killed, and that his mother lived with a white man. He said he could and would trace the Blacks, and frankly confessed (how true I know not) that he had often been on the traces of the Aborigines, but did not choose to trace them as he had on several occasions been severely beaten, but if he was not beaten he would trace the Natives with great fidelity.47
Jorgenson explained that Mungo was still out in the field, and that Jack had gone out with one of the parties. ‘This may perhaps be considered deserving of perusal,’ the Colonial Secretary noted for the Lieutenant Governor.
A few days later the Colonial Secretary learned of another Aboriginal person being attached to an expedition. John Batman, ranging throughout the east midlands and east coast in January, acquired ‘an Aborigine Native, brought up by James Cox Esqr … by permission of Mr Cox’.48 This elicited little official notice. Instead it was changes in Aboriginal behaviour that probably attracted most attention, like the fact that the Aboriginal people seemed to use ‘decoy’ fires to distract the rovers, had ‘forsaken their old hunting grounds and other places they used to resort’, and perhaps most worryingly had stolen ‘Ammunition, and Two Guns’. Such things probably prompted the Colonial Secretary’s written reaction to Batman’s letter, summarising things for the Lieutenant Governor. ‘There is little in this report deserving of notice,’ he wrote, ‘except that it tends to confirm the opinion which I had formed of the great intelligence & sagacity of the Natives.’
Among his travels, Batman also tracked an Aboriginal group but ‘considered I could not follow them’ when they were spotted in territory ‘where Martial Law does not exist’, and so headed in another direction. Arthur disagreed with this decision. He annotated the report, mentioning that he had an ‘earnest desire still to conciliate’ if communication was possible, but also declaring that Batman ‘under the circumstances he states, may follow the natives into the Territory where Martial Law does not extend’. The message was clear that hot pursuit trumped technical legality. Batman need not fear prosecution for engagements beyond the line of martial law.
The Colonial Secretary duly conveyed to Anstey the Lieutenant Governor’s quiet but tacit support for roving beyond the designated settled districts as limited by martial law.49 Moreover, he did it within days of Robinson’s departure for his ostensibly conciliatory mission to Port Davey. Few coincidences revealed how much diplomacy and warfare were not mutually exclusive options, and how the government publicised some measures and was discreet in others. The divergence highlights that while conciliation was an aspiration, clearance and capture were still the main policy objectives, and the law of the land was no barrier.