In Tasmania (17 page)

Before allowing himself to go with Robinson to Hobart, Tongerlongetter explained why his people had behaved as they had done: ‘The chiefs assigned as a reason for their outrages upon the white inhabitants that they and their forefathers had been cruelly abused, that their country had been taken from them, their wives and daughters had been violated and taken away, and that they had experienced a multitude of wrongs from a variety of sources.'

In the fens at the back of our house, Tongerlongetter had attacked hayricks and huts with spears of lighted punk, sending panic among the settlers who believed that they were in danger ‘of being ultimately exterminated by the Black Natives'. Just two months after Meredith expressed his admiration for their women, his neighbour and former employee in Wales, Adam Amos, looked out of the window at Glen Gala to see his house surrounded by Aborigines. ‘One, a woman came to the door, I made signs for her to go away. She did and in a short time about six made their appearance amongst the bush in the river close to my hut. I fired small shot at about 50 yards distance, they ran off.' On December 13, 1823 Adam sent his oldest son ‘to shoot them again but missed by minutes'. Next day, after the same group set fire to the grass near his farm, he again sent out his son, who was joined by two of Meredith's men ‘who fired at them and wounded one of the mob'. A month later, Amos organised another posse. ‘I had a hunt after the natives on Friday they appeared on my plain.' He and his sons followed 30 men for two hours to a marsh about two miles from his farm. ‘We fired they run away and left their dogs and spears which we destroy and brought some of them home and two dogs.' But he was swatting shadows. ‘The blacks are playing old gooseberry with us,' he wrote to a friend. ‘On one occasion I saw one, and, while in the act of levelling my gun at him, he disappeared as if by magic, and I could see no more of him.'

The greatest attacks came during periods of starvation. That winter, one of Meredith's stockmen had been killed on the edge of a sheltered lagoon where sometimes I walked on windy afternoons. Tongerlongetter's men had surprised Thomas Gay as he ate breakfast. He made a dash for Meredith's farmhouse and had run 200 yards when he was speared in the back. A few days later Amos came looking for him. The dogs started running around, smelling something as they approached Gay's hut. The bodies of two unskinned kangaroos and a dead cat lay by the door, and clothes were scattered about the earth floor. Amos found Gay's mangled body in a shallow pool, one hand above the surface. His eyebrows had been cut off, his nails separated from their quicks, his teeth beaten out of his head, and he had nine spear wounds. ‘The ravens had taken off part of two fingers that had appeared above water.'

Gay was the second of Meredith's servants to be killed. ‘In neither case was provocation given by the whites,' Meredith told the Aboriginal Committee that assembled in April 1830, six months before the Black Line. ‘The present feeling of the natives in our neighbourhood towards the white population is and for a considerable time has been that of
avowed
and
unequivocal
hostility.' He went on: ‘their present object is most determinedly the
death
of every victim which may unhappily fall within their power or premises without respect to either sex or age.' The worsening relationship between settlers and Aborigines was, he said, a ‘truly
momentous subject
', and he recommended ‘the earliest possible importation of bloodhounds … not to hunt and destroy the natives – but to be attached to every field party – to be held in the hand and thus to track unerringly and either ensure their capture or if indeed the alternative must be resorted to – their annihilation.'

ANNIHILATION WAS EMPHATICALLY NOT GOVERNMENT POLICY, BUT
in the backwoods of Swansea settlers made their own vicious law. Anne Rood, one of our neighbours, remembered speaking to Jackson Cotton who grew up at Kelvedon, an estate six miles away. ‘Jackson's grandfather, a Quaker, had told him with horror of farmers he knew who had given Aborigines bread buttered with arsenic.'

Poisoned bread or damper was not the only deterrent. Sarah Mitchell was raised on a farm adjacent to Kelvedon. In her unpublished memoir, handwritten in 1946, she included this abbreviated paragraph: ‘Twenty yards from the house at Mayfield there was a hut called the Black Hut and store room for the men. One of the Buxton family told me they noticed flour was stolen. They set a steel trap at night. In the morning a blackman had cut off his hand and left it there …' The next pages are missing, but the injured Aborigine was most likely Tongerlongetter, who in July 1832 revealed to George Washington Walker that he had lost his forearm when it was caught in a rat-trap set by a white colonist. In the description of the
Colonial Times
: ‘the trap was found about 100 yards from the hut, and the hand in it … The unfortunate creature must have undergone dreadful agony, as we hear that the sinews and tendons of the arm were drawn out by main force, and to use the expression of our informant, resembled those of the tail of a kangaroo.' Tongerlongetter later altered his story to say that he had been shot by white men in moonlight, but the conical stump was examined at his post-mortem in June 1837 and the doctor confirmed from the extensive lacerations that the arm had been ‘violently torn away'.

It is impossible to know how widespread was the use of such traps any more than it is possible to verify the number of little fingers cut off to be used as tobacco-stoppers. But on a farm seven miles north of Swansea I was taken to a bluestone barn known as the Cellar.

The farmer led me through a low door. White nails along the lintel were hammered into old possum claws, and inside he had hung the walls with skinned hares, their ribs pressing out through the shiny red flesh.

The door had been built this low to stop intruders from entering in a hurry. ‘They were under a few pressures,' the farmer said. He was small, with a wide nose, and two of his teeth were framed in gold. He gestured at a narrow aperture set in the massive wall, about four feet from the ground and five inches wide. The hole was no bigger than an arrow slit. ‘But narrow enough to get in the old muzzle-loader.'

I stared out between the bars. His two grandsons played on the grass where the first settler had blasted his shot at Tongerlongetter's men. The farmer said: ‘The Abos got in and pinched stores through the shingle roof. The owners used to have a big man-trap. They reckon the Abos got in here because someone was taking the grain. When they came back a foot was in it. They found a hoppy-legged Abo over in Avoca and reckon it was the same fella. I'd be running too, I reckon.'

I stepped back into the cavernous room. The wall at the rear was cut into the bank. Once, the farmer said, it was lined with barrels of cider and there was a press. The farmer remembered his father working the press.

‘Where was the coffin?' I asked. I had read that the man who built the Cellar had used his coffin as the coolest place to store alcohol.

‘He probably bloody did put it here.'

The Cellar was erected as a cider house for a deadly brew made of crabapples, Sturmers and Early Janers brought out from England. We went outside and the farmer showed me a bedraggled orchard where a creek rippled past. ‘There used to be beautiful eating ones. “Lady in the Snow” – red skin and white flesh, real sweet. And cooking apples. Mum would stew 'em or else the green parrots made a mess of 'em. But they now taste pretty woody.'

It was not only the Cellar I wanted to see. I had also read that on this property were the remnants of the oldest surviving log cabin in Tasmania. We walked down to the sheep pen and there it was, a sorry sight beside three plum trees and a rusty water tank with a hole in it. All that remained of the cabin was a stack of old blue-gum spars spattered in grey lichen; a pile of sandstone rocks; and a concrete block with a metal plaque to commemorate William Lyne's arrival on Christmas Day, 1826.

 

Lyne had managed a country estate in Gloucestershire. Then the lease ran out. He was a tall, proud man with five children and a wife who hated Tasmania for all the 47 years she lived there. Before he emigrated, he had his men make him a coffin from an old oak on the property. He packed it with lead, pewter, saucepans, five swords, six guns, and five pairs of pistols. He also took with him a church organ, keeping out a flute and violin to play on the voyage. He filled other crates with a cider press, an anvil, a bellows and a copper furnace. Then he shot his lovely saddle horse and sailed to Hobart.

On his arrival, he was told of the problems with bushrangers and Aborigines, and was recommended New South Wales. But he was a stubborn man. He walked four days to Great Oyster Bay and found 1,500 acres east of Adam Amos: a warm valley, lightly timbered, with a tidal marsh. The turf hut that he built with his wife collapsed when someone leaned on it, and so, early in 1827, they put up a log cabin, 20 feet square, made of large gums scooped out at the end.

It would not be his cider that killed him, or a ti-tree spear, but a bone that lodged in his throat while he was eating dinner. By then he was living in a Georgian sandstone house that today the farmer used as a barn. Built by convicts, it closely resembled the stately home that Lyne had looked after in North Cerney.

In the early years, he never left his low door without a gun. He made a small seat on his plough and strapped his six-year-old daughter Susan into it so close to the ground that she could smell the turned earth. One day a man panted up, a stockman who worked for George Meredith. His companion had been murdered by blacks. Abandoning his plough, Lyne ran to the valley that he had called Coombend after the estate in Gloucestershire, and found a dead man with a spear four and half feet long sticking from his back. Another time a movement caught his eye and he turned to see a large band of Aborigines 70 yards away. He raced inside and dressed his wife in a long man's overcoat and handed her a gun. When he led her outside, the Aborigines scattered at the strange spectacle. But he could not always be there to protect his family. In February 1828, Susan and her ten-year-old sister Betsy were guarding a herd of calves near the tidal marsh when they failed to see a group of a dozen Aborigines who had concealed themselves behind a large rock. Betsy ran screaming to the cabin. Susan fell unconscious in the shallow lagoon, struck by an Aboriginal weapon – a spear or the heavy stick known as a waddy.

 

The farmer leaned against the remains of Lyne's old hut and hesitated. ‘When I was a kid, this was still a square block. A door here, walls this high' – and he rebuilt them in the air.

‘What do you feel,' I asked, ‘standing there?'

He rested his hand on the spars of wood carelessly heaped up. ‘Probably like to know what went on.' He nodded at a slope once covered in white gums, a folk memory returning. ‘Over that bank, by the large rock, one of the girls got speared in the side.'

We walked over. The rock was large – about ten feet high, the size and shape of an obelisk.

He went round the back. ‘See that ledge, reckon that's where he was sitting when he speared her.' He went on gazing at the rock, and on a sudden it was not an Aborigine he was seeing, but himself. ‘It's a beautiful place to sit. As a kid, I used to sit there playing cowboys and Indians.'

IN
Medical Hints for Emigrants
,
I FOUND THIS ENTRY FOR SPEAR
wounds: ‘These are more serious than mere cuts. If any vital part is injured, you can do very little except keep the patient quiet and send for the clergyman and surgeon. If a shot or spear has passed through or into one of the limbs, bind it up, and treat it as you would a cut.'

Whether Lyne's daughter had been struck by a waddy or a spear, she recovered. So did Edith Stanfield's great-grandmother.

Edith lived two miles from us, in a white weatherboard house off the road into Swansea. She told me that her great-grandmother as a little girl was speared in the back not long after arriving at Plassy, under the Western Tiers north of Ross.

Her mother, she said, was often shown the wound. ‘My mother was allowed to put her hand on it. It was a deep scar in her back, in the fleshy part below the shoulder, and deep enough to feel through her clothes.'

‘She felt it through a dress?' I thought of a young girl performing her Braille, mapping the bloody history of this island on her grandmother's back.

‘No way would she have shown her flesh to her grandchildren – not like mine, who wander in when I'm having a shower.'

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE BEST HUNTING GROUNDS, MOUNT VERNON
was a prime target. Kemp told Bonwick that in 1821 he saw about 300 Aborigines ‘poking' after bandicoots. ‘He immediately guessed that his hour had come and thinking, he said, that he might as well die with a good heart as a bad one, he started his dogs into the mob, and on their flight, took himself heartily off.' The attacks escalated after a sawyer was speared to death within half a mile of Kemp's property. In 1826, 60 natives pursued Kemp's servants and tried to plunder Kemp's hut. In one raid, Aborigines surrounded a hut and dared the settler inside to shoot at them, threatening in good English ‘to put his wife into the bloody river'. It was hard to resist the conclusion that the Aborigines were directing towards settlers' wives the frustration they felt over the fate of their own women and children. A few miles from Mount Vernon, Ann Geary was killed by an axe through the skull. Geary's neighbour Esther Gough fell to her knees shortly before her own death. She begged: ‘Spare the lives of my Piccaninnies.' One of her attackers responded: ‘No, you white bitch, we'll kill you all.' In October 1828, 15 Aborigines ambushed Mrs Langford in the heart of Kemp's township. They speared her small son to death in her arms and also his 14-year-old sister. The girl and her mother survived. This last group was rumoured to include two white men. One of those who pursued them, Zacharias Chaffey, recognised a former convict servant of his father named Green, who had blackened his face and wore only a striped shirt. No longer taken by Aborigines for the spirits of their dead, these convict fugitives were welcome allies in the resistance against invaders like Kemp.

The gradual deterioration of Kemp's relationship with Bennelong's people was dramatised in a three-hour play that opened in London on February 10, 1830. In
Van Diemen's Land; or Settlers and Natives
, William Moncrieff transposed Bennelong from Sydney and promoted him chief of the Broken Bay Tribe. Those who watched the play in the Surrey Theatre were given a picture of Bennelong that more accurately resembled a North American Indian than an Aborigine like Tongerlongetter. But if his taste for yams and canoes struck a false note, his fury at Kemp's type was authentic. He called for ‘just revenge' on the colourless strangers that had ‘usurped our plains, and would fain extirpate our race'. He pointed out: ‘These white men can speak fair and promise well. But what has the dark chief ever found from them, save this, that they have striding legs and grasping hands – have over-run our isle, and seized our all, because he wore not the same hue with them.' And he spoke of his visit to England in 1792. ‘I went far over sea, to white man's lands, where their King dressed me in his warrior's dress, and gave rich gifts, then smiled on the dark chief, and bade him make his people like to them.' But what had Bennelong found on his return with Kemp? ‘He found the white man chief – he found his lands all seized, and he, their prince, the white man's slave.' Before the arrival of the white man, his people had coveted nothing, taken nothing. ‘They've taught me something; I will profit by it – taught me to plunder and deceive.'

His sister Kangaree echoed his distress: ‘Caffres have black faces but white hearts; but white men's faces white, their hearts black.'

Crude though Moncrieff's drama was, it captured a truth about the Aborigines' new attitude. Num were no different to other men. In fact, they were worse.