In October 1830 the surviving Aborigines of Tasmania were threatened with annihilation. Colonel George Arthur, the military governor, conceived a surreal plan to use the white settlers and the convicts as a broom to sweep the Aborigines off the island. Mobilising 3,000 people - nearly one quarter of the European population - he spread them out in a long ‘Black Line’ across the south-east region of the country. The aim was to drive the Aborigines southwards in front of the line and then to corral and secure them on Tasman’s Peninsula, south of Hobart.
Martial law, imposed in November 1828, was still in force, so mobilisation was simple. Present on parade on 7 October were policemen, rural settlers and urban inhabitants, as well as the island’s military force of 1,000 soldiers. Some 700 convicts on parole, referred to as ‘servants’, who worked as slave labour for the settlers, were also summoned. Only those held permanently behind bars were exempt from the general mobilisation. The costs of the expedition, some ?30,000, or ?100 for each of those who took part, were paid by the British exchequer.
Projects for removing Aborigines from ‘settled’ areas occupied by the whites had been discussed through the years of resistance in the 1820s. Proposals had been made to drive them into controlled reservations, or to move them from the island entirely. If they are not removed, the Colonial Times, the settler newspaper, had suggested in 1824, ‘they will be hunted down like beasts and destroyed’. Colonel Arthur’s ‘Black Line’ was designed to test this proposal.
The Aborigines of Tasmania had already been decimated by the actions of the settlers during three decades of military occupation. Three-quarters of the original population had been exterminated by the 1820s. A native presence of some 7,000 people in 1803 had dwindled to barely more than a thousand. Yet the survivors courageously maintained their resistance to the seizure of their land, and to some effect. ‘The total ruin of every establishment’ was likely, according to a government report in 1830, unless something dramatic was done to halt Aborigine attacks on settlers. The report referred bleakly to the island’s ‘unparalleled’ devastation.
Colonel Arthur, a veteran of colonial law enforcement in British Honduras during the rebellion of 1820, felt called upon to act. ‘The hostile spirit of the natives’ was on the increase, he wrote to London in April 1830. ‘Their exploits in the pursuit of plunder have rendered them much more daring and robust during the last two years.’ He requested reinforcements from Britain to deal with the increased threat, asking for more soldiers and at least 2,000 more convicts. In a subsequent note, expanding on his theme, he described how ‘the savages’ had become ‘more expert’, and ‘more bold and sanguinary’ They would undoubtedly ‘murder every white inhabitant, if they could do so with safety to themselves’1
The colonial secretary in London since 1828 was General Sir George Murray, an officer and a Tory politician, with an extensive military career in the West Indies, the Peninsular War, Canada, and most recently in Ireland as commander-in-chief. Yet he was more cautious than Colonel Arthur, and expressed concern about the eventual fate of the natives. ‘The great decrease’ in the Aboriginal population, he argued, might mean that ‘the whole race of these people may at no distant period become extinct.’ Whatever the settlers might think, wrote Murray, ‘it is impossible not to contemplate such a result of our occupation of the island as one very difficult to be reconciled with feelings of humanity, or even with principles of justice and sound policy’ Any line of conduct leading to ‘the extinction of the native race’, General Murray continued, could not fail to leave ‘an indelible stain on the character of the British government’ He told Arthur he had no troops to spare, but promised to send out more ‘criminals’ sentenced to forced labour.
Colonel Arthur had to make do with the forces he had at hand and, in spite of Murray’s warnings, he went ahead with his ambitious plan to drive the Aborigines into the sea. The initial ‘line’ was formed a third of the way down the island, from St Patrick’s Head on the east coast to the Great Lake in the centre. In October 1830, the 3,000 marchers were assembled and positioned forty-five yards apart. Moving slowly forward, they advanced over the next two months towards the south-eastern corner of the island. When their ‘Black Line’ finally reached the neck of Tasman’s Peninsula, their expectations of a large haul of Aborigines were high.
Yet the Aborigines had conducted their retreat across the island with considerable skill, taking advantage of hill and forest and the protection of darkness. During the course of the long trek south, only one small Aborigine band, five men and a boy asleep in their camp, was found by the marchers. Two of the five men were shot, and the boy was taken prisoner by the settlers. ‘Plenty more black fellows in scrub’, said the boy as he begged to be released, and indeed there were. The Aborigines had all passed silently through the advancing line - and lived to fight another day. When the settlers arrived at the furthest end of the peninsula, ‘not a native was to be seen; not a sound was heard; all was as silent as the grave’.
The Conciliation, a painting by Benjamin Duterrau of Aborigines in Tasmania in 1835 with George Augustus Robinson, a settler charged with looking after them and transferring them to Flinders Island.
The Black Line had proved a failure, and Colonel Arthur now put a second and more successful plan into operation. Where force had failed, the blandishments of a religious leader might succeed. George Augustus Robinson, a Methodist settler, was asked if he could persuade the surviving Aborigines to leave Tasmania peacefully. The plan was to transfer them to a small concentration camp on Flinders Island, off Tasmania’s north-east coast. Robinson went to work, and by the end of 1834 he had rounded up most of the Aborigine population. One hundred were eventually relocated on the island, although many died in makeshift transit camps. The conditions on Flinders Island were so bleak that Robinson transferred the survivors to the Australian mainland four years later, in 1838. Some forty years after the white settlers had first arrived, Tasmania had become an Aborigine-free zone.
Far to the west of mainland Australia, close to the new white settlement at Pinjarra, in the Murray River district of Western Australia, a group of seventy
Aborigines were gathered in October 1834 to protest against the invasion of their tribal lands. They were attacked by an expedition of twenty-five settlers and soldiers organised by Captain James Stirling, the military governor of the new colony. A naval officer by origin, Stirling had taken part in the recapture of Cape Colony in 1806 and the failed expedition to Buenos Aires in 1807. He was now an ambitious landowner, and his military skills were to be deployed against the Aborigines.
Earlier, in the 1820s, Stirling had explored the region of the Swan River, and had persuaded the London government to allow him to establish Australia’s first non-convict colony, with him as the governor. Arriving at Fremantle in 1829, he established a capital at Perth, a few miles inland. Some 3,000 British settlers arrived in the first two years, but in taking over what they thought of as ‘virgin’ lands they had immediately encountered Aborigine resistance. The Aborigines, rightly, saw the settlers as a threat to their survival, and they forced half the settlers to abandon their farms in the first year of settlement.
Stirling knew exactly what had to be done. ‘The one way for 2,000 white people in those scattered settlements to prevent 50,000 Aborigines waging a bloody war of attrition with their primitive weapons was for the white man to display and make use of his superior firepower until such time as he outnumbered the Aborigines.’
Faced with the Aborigine crowd at Pinjarra, Stirling embarked on a vicious attack. It was an unequal battle, for although the Aborigines killed Captain Ellis from Stirling’s squad, more than thirty of them were killed. British war veterans among the settlers in Western Australia were notably merciless. Captain Richard Meares, one of Stirling’s killer party and a survivor of Waterloo, had a mural of the ‘battle of Pinjarra’ hung on his dining room wall, opposite one that depicted the battle of Waterloo.2
Having slaughtered the Aborigines, the new settlers in Western Australia were soon short of labour. Although established as a non-convict colony, the settlers were forced to ask London to send out some prisoners. Later, in the years between 1850 and 1868, when the rest of Australia had turned against the use of convict labour, Western Australia was pleased to receive no less than 10,000 male convicts from Britain, to people the land seized from its indigenous inhabitants.
In New South Wales throughout the 1830s, the sheep and cattle of the settlers had been moving far beyond the frontiers of established settlement in search of fresh pasture. ‘While nature presents all round an unlimited supply of the most wholesome nutriment’, wrote the governor, Sir Richard Bourke, in 1835, it would be ‘a perverse rejection of the bounty of providence’ to prevent this development. Yet he knew well that this land of ‘unlimited supply’ was the territory of
Aborigines who maintained a steady resistance, constantly coming into conflict with the invading shepherds and cattle hands.
Cattle stations had been established on a branch of the Big River, near Inverell, some 350 miles north of Sydney, and on Sunday 10 June 1838 the cattle hands engaged in what became an emblematic slaughter of the local people. A group of Aborigine families were camped that day on the banks of Myall Creek, mostly women and children and a man known as Daddy. The Aborigine men had left the camp that morning. In the afternoon, a dozen white labourers on a farm owned by Henry Dangar, all but one former convicts, set out to attack the camp. One of them, John Johnstone, was not white at all, but a former black slave transported from the West Indies. The gang rounded up the thirty-three Aborigines they found at the camp, ‘of all ages and sexes, though for the most part women and children’.
The labourers ‘tied them all to a rope’, Major-General Sir George Gipps, the new governor, subsequently reported to London, ‘in the way that convicts are sometimes tied in order to be taken from place to place in the colony’3 The Aborigines were slaughtered with cutlasses and musket Are, and their corpses were burned on a Are. Only four children and one woman escaped. The convict gang scoured the country on horseback, searching for the dozen survivors. ‘It is doubtful to this day’, recorded the governor, ‘whether they were not overtaken and murdered also.’
Gipps was a recent arrival, from Canada. He momentarily brought a change of attitude towards the decimation of the Aborigines, hitherto tacitly approved. Another veteran of the Peninsular Wars (he had gone on in the 1820s to serve in the West Indies), he hoped to abolish ‘lawlessness’ on the frontier, and to curb the appetite of the frontier settlers for massacre.
Eleven convict labourers were brought to trial in Sydney in November, charged with ‘the murder of an Aboriginal black called Daddy’, the only adult male who could be identiAed out of those slaughtered at Myall Creek. One of the original dozen labourers had turned informer and testiAed against the others. The labourers were acquitted and a second trial took place. This time only seven men were charged, with the murder of women and children and ‘an Aboriginal child called Charley’. They were nearly acquitted a second time, on the grounds that proof was lacking of the child’s name; but eventually all seven were found guilty and sentenced to death.
In prison, awaiting execution, they admitted their guilt, though ‘they all stated that they thought it extremely hard that white men should be put to death for killing blacks’. Seven men were hanged on 18 December, while the four who had survived the Arst trial were never brought to justice. ‘It is now pretty certain’, Gipps recorded regretfully, ‘that one of the four men, who have for the present escaped, was the most guilty of the whole.’
The Myall Creek massacre led the government to reconsider its policy of benign neglect of the frontier. ‘The only question, noted Gipps in 1839, ‘is whether we will abandon all control over these distant regions - and leave the occupiers of them unrestrained in their lawless aggressions upon each other and upon the Aborigines - or make such efforts as are in our power to preserve order amongst all classes.’4
The chief ‘effort’ made was to establish a Border Police Force. Yet its aim was to assist the settlers, not to protect the Aborigines from settler attack. This was the pattern when colonisation was extended into the neighbouring territory of Queensland in the 1840s. Some thought was given to the formation of a ‘Native’ police force, recruiting Aborigines for use in frontier policing against the resistance struggles of their own people. Some civilian bureaucrat remembered that Cape Colony in South Africa had had some experience of this, and the police magistrate in Melbourne, Captain Lonsdale, had tried an experiment in 1837. He engaged a South African, Christian de Villiers, who had served previously with the Khoi-Khoi regiment, to organise such an Aborigine force.
These were the new means of Aborigine control introduced in the wake of the Myall Creek massacre. Another one was yet more effective, echoing the experience of British officers in North America in the eighteenth century. ‘Many pastoralists and labourers’, writes Jan Kociumbas, ‘now turned to the distribution of poisoned flour, a deadly technique that was almost impossible to prove in court.’5 This was to become a favoured method of ensuring Aborigine destruction.
World History
