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Chapter 6

War against Aboriginals

Tasmania and Australia are built on racism. It has been the founding principle our national existence has depended upon. There was a grand moral assumption that Aboriginals were unequal as people

to their white British superiors, and that therefore they had no legal rights as human beings to the land they had lived on for thousands of years.

This racism was an extension of British attitudes towards class and was the justification for use of military force in taking Australia.

The same principles of liberal economic rationalism that drove British enclosure, strengthened with a profound racism, also drove the attempted genocide of Aboriginals in Tasmania and their dispossession from traditional hunting grounds. It was these premises upon which Tasmania and, later, the whole nation were built.

These racist attitudes are clearly evident in British government actions, actions of the early governors, actions of the general populace and in the scientific views of the day. They are consistently present in the newspaper records.

On 1 December 1826, the Tasmanian Colonial Times declared that: “We make no pompous display of Philanthropy. We say this unequivocally SELF DEFENCE IS THE FIRST LAW OF NATURE. THE GOVERNMENT MUST REMOVE THE NATIVES—IF NOT, THEY WILL BE HUNTED DOWN LIKE WILD BEASTS, AND DESTROYED!”

Rosalie O’Hare, a ship captain’s wife, referring to the staff of the Van Diemen’s Land Company in north-west Tasmania, confided in her diary in 1828, they … ‘consider the massacre of these people an honour’.

Racist attitudes lived on in the White Australia Policy and still exist in the Australian Constitution. They have impacted the Tasmanian psyche and physical environment in a fundamental way.

Land values, the potential for saleable produce and subsequent personal and national profits were significantly increased when properties, granted as private property, were cleared of Aboriginal occupation.

Those socially connected at the top end of society who were favoured with land grants, including the

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governors, were quick to realise this bonanza and took advantage, establishing a clear pattern, recorded in government documentation. From 1823 to 1831, free land grants ‘gave away’ 1,899,332 acres of land that Aborigines were living and depending on for their livelihood.

Among latter day historians who have examined the evidence, there is overwhelming broad agreement about the war of murderous ethnic cleansing that was British colonisation in Van Diemen’s Land. Each district of Tasmania has its own dark, blood stained history that has been in many cases deliberately supressed or at best ignored.

The basic fact that out of 8000 people less than 100 were left alive and all the land they occupied had been ‘claimed’ after 30 years of settlement, is stark enough in itself. There are volumes of recorded details as to just how the mass killings, kidnappings, sexual crimes, and cruel and inhuman treatment were perpetrated, and who did it, in every district within the state.

The first recorded mass killing was the Risdon 1804 massacre on Hobart’s eastern shore at Risdon Cove where the first settlement occurred in 1803.

“What is definitively known is that the soldiers under Moore’s command opened fire on a large group of Aborigines that included women and children. Muskets and a carronade (a ship’s gun being deployed in the settlement) were used.

The shooting started at 11 o’clock in the morning and continued for three hours until the carronade was fired and the Aborigines finally fled. Three bodies were eventually collected by the British, but a precise fatality figure is impossible to estimate as it is not known how many of the dead or fatally injured were removed.”

“……the one direct witness to the 1830 inquiry, the convict Edward White, claimed that the Aborigines approached peacefully and that there were “a great many of the Aborigines slaughtered and wounded; I don’t know how many.”

‘Van Diemen’s Land’, James Boyce, 2008,

An artist’s map of some recorded Aboriginal deaths in Tasmania, perpetrated as part of the process of

claiming the land.M John Latham

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With a government policy of pastoral invasion and orders to ‘expel by force,’ mass killings were recorded at the following Tasmanian places in the following four years alone:

1826Bank Hill Farm (just past Sorell heading south east), December.

1827 Great Swanport (near Swansea, an 80 minute drive up Tasmania’s east coast from Hobart), March.

Mount Augusta (a few kilometres south of Campbell Town and visible just to the west of the Midlands Highway), April.

Sally Peak (up Sally Peak road near the church at Buckland), May.

Dairy Plains (south of Deloraine), May.

Laycock Falls (near Whitemore in Meander Valley), June.

Quamby Brook (Meander valley), June.

Quamby Bluff (Meander Valley), June.

Blackman’s River (15 km north west of Oatlands along Interlaken Rd), June.

Sorell Valley (north of Sorell up Tasman Highway), December.

Brumby’s Creek (near Cressy), December.

Dairy Plains (south of Deloraine), December.

1828Miles Opening (near Bothwell), March.

Bullock Hunting Ground (just north of Launceston), March.

Elizabeth River (south east of Campbelltown), April.

Eastern Tiers (the Ranges in between Ross and Swansea), April.

Jordan River (north of Hobart near Bridgwater and Brighton), October.

1829Tooms Lake (in the tiers between Oatlands and Swansea), January.

Break O’Day Plains (just out of St. Mary’s to the south west), January.

St. Paul’s River (along Royal George Road south east of Avoca), January.

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West Tamar (north west of Launceston), February.

Cataract Gorge (near Launceston city), March.

Pitt Water (near Midway Point east of Hobart), June.

Ben Lomond (east of Launceston), September.

Ouse River (up the Derwent Valley 1 hour from Hobart near Ouse), October.

1830Clyde/Ouse Rivers (east of Ouse), February.

The four years above, known as the Black War, were also characterised by Aboriginal resistance and the killing of white people as the ethnic cleansing from traditional hunting grounds reached its final stages. There were many other reported cases of mass killings of Aboriginals outside these four years.

In 1948 Clive Turnbull summarised what occurred during the ‘settlement’ of Tasmania with evidence he found at that point in history;

“In the depths of the bush with none to call them to account, the Europeans, to be numbered with the “pioneers of civilisation,” were able to treat the natives as they pleased. To rape of the women, it was revealed in later years, were added their flogging, with kangaroo hide cats, burning with brands, and even roasting alive.

Men and women were emasculated and otherwise mutilated. Women were enslaved; men were shot, children were destroyed by dashing out their brains. These practices continued for thirty years. “The wounded were brained, the infant cast into the flames; the musket driven into the quivering flesh.“

‘Black War-The Extermination of Tasmanian Aborigines,’ Clive Turnbull

In ‘Van Diemen’s Land,’ written in 2008, James Boyce provides further details of a series of these incidents;

Augustus Robinson, the Government ‘Conciliator’ recorded in his diary, “similar stories of mass slaughter in the upper reaches of the Emu and Jordan Rivers,”

Just out of Hobart, “field police based at Richmond killed 14 Aborigines in a single incident in 1827,”

Macquarie River, Tooms Lake near Oatlands, “… at daybreak we formed ourselves around them, …we immediately fired and repeated it…” The Hobart Town Courier’s informant claimed that 10 Aborigines were killed in this incident” in 1828,

Richmond, Police Magistrate Lascelles reported in June that “eight or ten of the natives were severely wounded in a skirmish” 1829,

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Northern Van Diemen’s Land, “In September of that year (1829) the, ‘the founder of Melbourne,’ John Batman gave a final vivid account of the level of indiscriminate slaughter that was possible while whole communities of Aborigines, not small bands of warriors remained the enemy,“

“... as the last man was coming up, he struck his musket against that of another party, which immediately alarmed the dogs, they came directly at us (in number about 40), the natives arose from the ground, and were in the act of running away into thick scrub, when I ordered the men to fire upon them, which was done, and a rush by the party immediately followed, we only captured that night one woman and a male child about two years old…

Next morning we found one man very badly wounded in the ankle and knee, shortly after we found another 10 buckshot had entered his body, he was alive but very bad,

…there were a great number of traces of blood in various directions and we learnt from those that 10 more were wounded in the body which gave us to understand that they were dead or would die, and two women in the same state had crawled away, besides a number that were shot in the legs…

We shot 21 dogs and obtained a great number of spears, waddies, blankets, rugs, knives, a tomahawk etc.

On Friday morning we left the place for my farm with the two men, woman and child, but found it impossible that the two former could walk, and after by every means in my power, for some time, found I could not get them on … I was obliged to shoot them.” P200-1

“Batman’s own estimate was the band they had fired on had numbered 60 to 70 men, women and children, and about 15 had been killed or would die from the wounds.”

Governor Arthur’s observation was that Batman, “had much slaughter to account for.”

An artist’s impression of the common means of mass killing, the early morning ambush

around the campfire used as a means of staking claim to the land.

M John Latham

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Batman’s boldfaced account is recorded like a hunting expedition and also provides an example of the tactic commonly used in mass killings across Tasmania, that is, the ambush around the campfire. Typically this was pre-dawn and planned with the knowledge that Aboriginal family groups camped and slept around their fire which burned all night and which they were reluctant to leave.

By 1830 “Efforts at conciliation were now largely abandoned, and while Robinson’s party continued its isolated journey up the west coast, the level of fighting elsewhere remained intense. There were 222 documented incidents during 1830…”

Genocide on the North West CoastIn ‘Beyond Awakening: The Aboriginal Tribes of North West Tasmania,’ by Ian McFarlane, 2008 and ‘Van Diemen’s Land,’ by James Boyce, 2008, p197-205, details are provided of a deliberate policy, put in writing by the Chief Agent of the VDL Company, to exterminate the Aboriginals living in the north-west of Tasmania.

On the Van Diemen’s Land Company’s land “…between 1832 and 1835, the number of Aborigines had dropped from an estimated 600-700 before the company’s arrival, to about 100.”

Cape Grim Massacre: “Despite Edward Curr’s official status (Chief Agent of the Van Diemen’s Land Company and the sole Magistrate), it was November 1829 before Arthur finally heard an account of what had occurred at Cape Grim on Woolnorth two years before.”

“The lieutenant governor asked Robinson to look into the incident, and one of the shepherds involved in the killing informed the emissary that they threw the Aborigines bodies “down the rocks where they had thrown the sheep.”

“An Aboriginal woman claimed that the shepherds had taken “by surprise a whole tribe” and “massacred 30 of them and threw them off a cliff.” The Van Diemen’s Land Company superintendent, Alexander Goldie, separately confirmed to Arthur that the Aboriginal losses were, ”very high.”

“Goldie’s admission came after it had become widely known that he had been involved in the shooting and butchering with an axe of an Aboriginal woman on a north-west coast beach (Cooee) in September 1829 …Goldie informed Arthur of other incidents involving the company, including the Cape Grim massacre, so as to legitimise his claim that he had killed Aborigines with the sanction of his employer.”

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The Cape Grim massacre site of Aborigines in North-

West Tasmania.

“He also informed the company directors that even while supposedly conducting an inquiry into the woman’s death, Curr had personally encouraged the killing of other Aborigines – offering rum to any man who could bring him Aboriginal heads”. “Curr freely admitted this charge, and defended his determination to kill Aborigines in a letter to the company’s directors.”

The reality of British colonial racism, intentional genocide and injustice is chillingly clear when the VDL Company Chief Agent, who also administers the law as Magistrate for the NW Coast, writes,

“My whole and sole object was to kill them, and this because my full conviction was and is that the laws of nature and of God and of this country all conspire to render this my duty.”

Van Diemens Land Company Chief Agent and Government

Magistrate for the North West Coast, Edward Curr.

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White men and black women

In his book ‘Black War-The Extermination of Tasmanian Aborigines,’ Clive Turnbull provides an idea of the individual horror experienced by individual Aborigines with Trucanini’s example, the scope of which was repeated many times with others.

“The “beauty of Bruny” as Mr Bonwick described her, …the daughter of Mangana, “chief” of Bruny Island, …told her story to Alexander McKay.”

“Her mother was stabbed to death by a European. Her sister was carried off by sealers. In her girlhood, accompanied by her intended husband, Paraweena, and another native man, she was once on the mainland of Van Diemen’s Land. Two sawyers, Watkin Lowe and Paddy Newell, undertook to row the party to nearby Bruny Island.

In mid channel the white men threw the natives overboard. As they struggled to the boat and grasped the gunwale, Lowe and Newell chopped off their hands with hatchets. The mutilated Aborigines were left to drown and the Europeans were free to do as they pleased with the girl.” p100

In ‘Van Diemen’s Land’, James Boyce writes that, “The subject of … (sealer’s) relations with Aborigines is one of the most complex and sensitive in Tasmanian history.” p89

“Sealers were often brutal men, capable of extreme, wide ranging violence against the women and their communities, but they also offered a refuge of sorts from the British conquest of mainland Tasmania from the mid 1820’s” p90

Boyce also outlines the widespread practice of kidnapping Aboriginal children:

“The value of Aboriginal children to the British was particularly significant in the period before 1818, when there was a pervasive labour shortage.” P86

“Governor Davey, who concerned at the ‘very marked and decided hostility …lately evinced by the natives in the neighbourhood of the Coal River,’ issued a proclamation in mid 1814, expressing his most “extreme concern” that the “probable causes” of this were …the robbery of their children.”p87

“At Richmond gaol …Robinson met with another Aboriginal woman who was in “extreme distress” at the loss of her son. Robinson noted that “this is not the first time I have had occasion to deplore the pernicious custom which prevails of separating children from their parents. This “custom”, it seems was by then longstanding.” p86-89

Very rarely in British Empire history has war been formally declared against its own people, but this was the case in Tasmania when the Frontier War became ‘legalised’ with the Declaration of Martial Law by Governor Arthur in 1828.

This legalised the hunting, killing and dispossession of Aboriginals with the active support of the military and was resourced by the government out of the bond store in Hobart, now ironically the site of the ’Black War’ display at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.

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When the scale of the catastrophe became apparent there was a belated attempt by Governor Arthur to avoid a total genocide, something that would bring shame to the British Empire which, in its narratives, liked to depict

itself as being ‘noble.’

Governor Arthur had given undertakings to Aboriginal people that there would be a place of resettlement on the Tasmanian mainland. In a move that was a deceitful twist on these undertakings, Arthur decided to direct Robinson, a paid reconciler who expressed some Christian sensibilities towards Aborigines, with another destination in mind.

Robinson’s job was to go around the state with the aim of gathering the remaining living Aborigines to exile them on Flinders Island. The 350 taken there to Wybalena tragically and rapidly died, leaving under 100, from an estimated 8000 who had lived in Tasmania 30 years before.

Significantly, a robust Aboriginal community, descended from tribal chief Mannalargenna’s daughters, thrived among sealers on the Bass Strait Islands and were to keep the culture and spirit of the people alive.

There are no other words in the English dictionary which more accurately and honestly describe Tasmania’s history than ‘invasion’ and ‘attempted genocide’. The detailed story recorded of attempted genocide for economic gain however does not fit the dominant British ruling class narrative of the Empire being a civilising influence on the world, and therefore has remained taboo or has been rationalised away in public consciousness.

Tasmania has been guilty, along with the rest of Australia of inventing a benign, fictitious and glorified account using the euphemisms of ‘pastoral settlement’ and ‘dispersal’ of Aborigines, an account described in the 1800’s by Henry Lawson as ‘lies.’

This institutionalised fiction is apparent all over the state, for example, in history rooms, local council signage, on tours, tourist signage, in historical societies, and the Heritage Highway story along the Midlands Highway. It is most notable because of the profoundly disrespectful conspicuous absence of any reference to Aboriginal people ever having been here, or to what they endured.

Acknowledgement is not entirely absent, many Tasmanian’s know these truths and there has been an attempt to acknowledge them in school curriculums, government land rights legislation for small areas and in some local government initiatives. Paul Keating’s Redfern address gave a general acknowledgement at a national level. However in the dominant narrative, in the culture and in terms of visual representation the War against Aboriginals and their subsequent suffering is not acknowledged.

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There were approximately 1000 Aboriginals killed in the ‘settled districts’ in the four years of the Black War, (Lyndall Ryan, Professor of History of Humanities at University of Newcastle, in ‘Tasmanian Aborigines: A History since 1803, 2012, page 146), plus a conservative 200 in these districts before 1826, and also many more beyond, in the west and north-west, as recorded on Woolnorth, for example.

To put the death toll in perspective, there were more than twice as many Tasmanian Aborigines known to have been killed in the Frontier Wars than there were all Australians killed in the Vietnam War, (521).

Added to this can be the thousands who died from disease and post traumatic psychological depression they suffered as a result of the British invasion with its decimation of family, social and cultural support structures, as well as loss of traditional food supply.

The economic benefits of mass slaughter to clear broad acres of land of their Aboriginal inhabitants were demonstrated across Tasmania. Having experienced these benefits to personal wealth of dispossession and the increase in land values and potential for agricultural profit that resulted, Tasmania’s landed gentry invested in using the same methods to reap profits on the mainland, through the establishment of Melbourne, Victoria and beyond.

Documented in ‘1836 – The Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia’, 2011 by James Boyce, mass murder to enable occupation of the land, proceeded, property by property, district by district, out from Melbourne, up the Murray and Murrumbidgee River valleys and into present day NSW. This was followed by the extreme excesses of the Native Police in Queensland and eventually up to the Gulf Country and Arnhem Land.

This linked up with the push out of Sydney which, though it took longer to gather momentum, saw the same methods used in the Goulbourn district, where martial law was declared, and over the entire inland Australian basin as recorded in ‘Blood on the Wattle’ by Bruce Elder, 1988. The NSW Northern Rivers coastal district massacres are recorded in ‘Rivers of Blood’ by Rory Medcalf, 1989.

In Tasmania, NSW and Queensland alone, the toll of Aboriginals killed was 27000, (Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines A History since 1803, 2012, page 146), plus the many more killed, particularly in the Gulf of Carpentaria District, Arnhem Land and the Perth and Kimberley districts of Western Australia. This means that Australia-wide there were more Aboriginals killed in the Frontier Wars than all Australians killed in World War 2, (27000).

Australia’s history is much like the USA testimonies to the Congressional Inquiry recorded in ‘They Buried My Heart at Wounded Knee,’ describing systematic genocide of American Indians. The stark, painful evidence is that Australia’s existence as a nation is substantially built on racism and the British Empire’s crimes against humanity.

The attempted genocide of Tasmanian Aborigines stands as stark evidence of the extreme suffering that can occur when one group of people regard others as less equal. Most Tasmanians remain emotionally numb to the attempted genocide of Tasmanian Aborigines, but the gross happenings of the Frontier War remain as unresolved injustice.

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Sacred SitesThere are numerous sites around Tasmania which serve as reminders and places of contemplation and showing respect, and which also may educate with a view to future reconciliation with Aboriginal people.

Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery: The narrative on display in the top floor of the old Bond Store is the most truthful and socially progressive public narrative of the ‘Frontier Wars’ in Australia, and has been awarded as such.

Rosny Reconciliation Bench: which is near Rosny College on the walking track near the foreshore

Trucanini Reserve and plaque: begins just south of the Mount Nelson lookout

Trucanini Steps: located on the neck between north and south Bruny Island

Risdon Cove: which is returned Aboriginal land, the site of first white settlement and the Risdon massacre

Cape Grim: is the scene of the documented Cape Grim massacre, accessible on a tour of the Woolnorth Property. The massacre site is known locally and cynically as ‘Suicide Bay’, with ‘Victory Hill’ the highest point. The Aboriginal history is well known to the tour guides because of research visits by historians such as Henry Reynolds, James Boyce, Lyndall Ryan and Ian McFarlane, but is not mentioned on the tour.

If you ask the guide away from other visitors they will describe what happened, it is not VDL Company policy to discuss it.

Wybalena: which is on Flinders Island

Oyster Cove: which is located south of Hobart

The Mouth of the Arthur River: is where Robinson recalls his escape from being speared to death at the hands of ‘free’ Aboriginals from south of the River, and being guided across the treacherous river mouth by Trucanini floating on driftwood, to rejoin Mannalargenna waiting up the coast. An Aboriginal interpretation is available with a local tour guide.

Meditation 1The following is an account by James West, a clerical historian based in Launceston in 1852 as recorded in the TMAG display in Hobart:

Let your imagination conjure up the imagery with an attitude of empathy as to the suffering endured by Aboriginal families…….

‘The smoke of a fire was the signal for a black hunt. The sportsmen having taken up their positions, perhaps on a precipitous hill, would first discharge their guns, then rush towards the fires, then sweep away the whole

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party………the social fire, around which the natives gathered to slumber, became, before morning, their funeral pyre’.

Meditation 2

‘…white men have stolen our country, driven us into the forests, killed our game and robbed us of our chief food. They have raped our women, and murdered and butchered our people.’ (Aboriginal account at TMAG

display under the heading ‘Legalised Plunder’)

How does this account sit against the idealised Christian account of Tasmania as part of the prophetic, Australian ‘South Land of the Holy Spirit’, or the more common benign ‘settlement’ account?

John Glover