James Erskine Calder

“ Then one of these parties, which was prepared for instant retreat, made its presence known, either by setting fire to some shed or bush fence, or by sending a flight of spears in at the window, shouting their well known war-whoop at the same time. This never failed of bringing out the occupants, who, seeing the authors of the outrage, now at a safe distance, but in an attitude of defiance, incautiously pursued them; and no experience of the artifices of the savage, ever taught the assailed a lesson not to continue this insane practice. ”

“ To the first of these questions I have often thought it might be replied, forcing on them too suddenly our own habits, as if the savage could at once adapt himself to the ways of civilised life; in fact, requiring a people whose whole lives had been passed in the open air, to dwell as we dwell, and live as we live. Into this error Robinson himself fell, for when he first drew the Bruny Islanders together around his dwelling, several died almost directly. ”

“ In the long warfare that ensued between black and white, after their disconnection, as described foregoingly, the aboriginals, with some, but not very many exceptions, began every skirmish, our own race having generally by far the worst of the fight; and if during the historic age of Tasmania, the blacks diminished from several thousands to a very few hundreds, it was owing far more to sickness than strife that they were thus thinned out—sickness, taking the form of fatal catarrhal complaints, that sent them by thousands to the grave. ”

“ When Thomas and Parker come down to the port, the blacks, though bent on mischief, appeared to be perfectly quiet and friendly with their new acquaintances, which the former who was as guileless and confiding as a child, quite mistook the meaning of. He was one of those kindhearted fellows who never suspect others of being worse than themselves, or of entertaining designs that have no place in their own thoughts. ”

“ George Augustus Robinson, they meant to have done so, but to the last they seem to have preferred their own arms in both fight and chase—namely, the spear and waddy.
Of firearms they had learned the use from both men and women of their own race, who, having been taken in early infancy by the settlers, were brought up in their own families, mostly as their own children; but they invariably left them when they grew up, and rejoined their own people, just like wood-pigeons, whose natural instincts can never be repressed. ”

“ How, indeed, should it be otherwise, when we know that within the walls of that desolate-looking shealing are all who now remain of a once formidable people, whom a "thirty years war" with our own countrymen have swept into captivity, and their relatives to the grave; a war which, notwithstanding our ultimate success, we derived little credit from.
The glen in which they vegetate, rather than live, derives its name from the little inlet in front of it. Oyster Cove, a small arm of D'Entrecasteaux Channel, so abounding in mud-flats that a row-boat cannot reach the shore, except at high-tide. ”

“ This gentleman thus wrote to the Colonial Secretary on the 9th June, 1835:—"The greatest drawback to a perfect civilisation is the determined hostility of the Ben Lomond and Big River tribes to each other. The Western natives have attached themselves to one or other of the two tribes, as their inclination led them; thus virtually making the whole body for the purposes of war to consist of only two tribes. It requires great vigilance to prevent them from breaking out into open hostilities: a very little would set them in flame, they are so very jealous of each other. ”

“ And those who saw the aborigines after their removal from Wyba-Luma to Oyster Cove could never believe them to be part of the same people, who ten years before had given such goodly proof of rapid emergence from barbarity.
A plausible successor of Robinson's, a man of the pseudo dilettante class (a class that flourishes very luxuriantly in Tasmanian soil) , probably sick of his isolation, persuaded the headstrong Governor of the colony to transplant the black establishment from Wyba-Luma to Oyster Cove; the worst and most dangerous neighbourhood that could have been selected in all Tasmania. ”

“ Duncan's woman soon got traces of the tribe they were in pursuit of, and came on their huts it is believed in the afternoon, or even earlier. The Cape Portland natives hated the sealers, and none more so than Duncan himself, whom they recognised immediately. Snatching down their spears from the trees in which they customarily stuck them when in repose, they only waited till he was within range; then, with the fatal aim for which they were so famous, he was struck in nearly all parts of his body at once. He fell of course, death ensuing instantaneously. ”

“ THEIR RELUCTANCE TO KILL A WHITE WOMAN.
Mr. McKay, who knew this people so intimately, relates a circumstance in connection with their manifold aggressions on our people, that has not been published before. Indeed it could hardly be known to any except to one who like him, had lived very much amongst them. But it is so creditable to the great mass of them, that justice to the memory of this people requires that it should not go unrecorded. ”

“ Next morning four of Thomas' assigned servants, as convicts in private employ were called, started on their mission; but not so the natives, the females of whom were still as sulky as black cockatoos are sometimes said to be, and would not return to their tribe; and as the men would not go without them, about a third of their number were billited at Northdown for two or three days, poor Mrs. Parker entertaining, but most unconsciously, the very individuals who had made her a widow. ”

“ At a distance of little more than a dozen miles from Hobart Town is a huge island called Bruny, containing much about one hundred thousand acres, which was formerly inhabited by a considerable tribe of natives. In past years, these people had often committed the usual outrages of the Tasmanian savage on his white neighbour. But this ill-feeling had partly died out through the intercourse they had had with large parties of whalers, stationed for long periods of every year in some of the bays of the island, where they prosecuted, what was then termed the Bay Fishery. ”

“ Our natives managed their attacking movements with uncommon skill, and hundreds are the instances of their sorrounding dwellings in perfect swarms without their exciting the smallest suspicion of their being at hand. No more subtle a race could be than the Tasmanian savages.
Tucker was not an easily alarmed man at any time, and was not much intimidated even now. His double gun, which was loaded and ready for instant work, lay near at hand, and as his mates had their sealing rifles, they were net to be trifled with when they were on the look-out. ”

“ The well-known doctrine of Strezelecki that the savage woman, after contamination by the white, is invariably and for ever infertile, is only an amusing fiction, instances of the contrary having occurred, both in New South Wales and Tasmania, in cases where I presume the cohabitation was not a very protracted one. ”

“ The hatred of the women for their half-caste offspring has been named before, and I have been told that the New Holland woman has the same aversion. My informant was a gentleman who had resided long in the wilds of Australia, and said that though children of mixed blood were to be met at the encampments of the blacks, he never saw an adult half caste amongst them, and he believed they destroyed them. There are about a hundred of them now living in the Straits, the results of union between the sealer and the savage, many of whom have not only reached adultness but old age. ”

“ The little game there was left on the island, after the incursions of the sealers were prohibited, was speedily demolished by the natives. Of shell-fish, there were few or none hereabouts, and no other fish would any native of Tasmania ever touch; whether it was natural aversion or superstition is not known, but scale-fish of any kind was as much an abomination to the entire race as swine's flesh to the Jew or Mussulman; and they would literally rather starve than eat it. In this respect they quite differed from the New Holland savages, by whom it is greatly relished. ”

“ But he was not quite correct, for about nine or ten years afterwards four more were taken, who, there can be no doubt, were the last of them, for the smoke of the savage has been no more seen in Tasmania since.
Whatever the future historian of Tasmania may have to say of this ancient people, he will do them an injustice if he fails to record that, as a body, they held their ground bravely for 30 years against the invaders of their beautiful domains.
Robinson was never the popular man he might have been had he been a little more sociable than he was. ”

“ But if the view were a hundred times more prepossessing than it is, its attractions would be scarcely observed at an instant that places before us an object, which, though mean and unimposing, is, on account of its inmates, the only thing the stranger traveller can look at.
Standing in view of this dreary edifice, rude though it is, and in vile contrast with the landscape around, both the eye and mind seem actually to refuse to rest on any other object. ”

“ The savages of this quarter were a very pugnacious set of fellows, and had long been the objects of the miscreancy of the sealers, and hated the white race accordingly, and they gave the conciliator of their people more trouble than any others, and never was he and his party in such danger of their lives as now, for which M'Kay gets the entire credit. ”

“ Tranquillity is, therefore, through the blessing of the Almighty, restored to the colony, and the people are treated as human beings ought to be treated. No restraint in any way has been placed upon them." But this tranquillity was not yet restored, for many tribes remained to be brought in, which he afterwards secured, who, by living more remotely from the settled districts than those just ensnared, had less opportunities of doing mischief than them, but still never neglected to do it whenever they got the chance. ”

“ But the protector shirks the question of this traffic in women, which the others, who hated these men quite as much as him, impute chiefly to the native men, who first bartered their women for the carcass of the seal or for hunting dogs. These unfortunate women became so useful to their masters, that when they could not get enough of them by purchase they kidnapped them, but made no active war on the blacks until the latter rose against them in a body and killed four of them, "since which time," says Robinson, "the sealers have shot the natives whenever they have met with them." ”

“ But when once taught, there never was a people, according to Robinson, who more readily received instruction, or were more eager for it than the savages of Tasmania. School learning was acquired rapidly by them, even the adults. Scriptural truth was taught them both by their protector and a catechist specially appointed to instruct them, and they seem to have understood it, and for a short time it may be said of them, in the language of a sacred writer that they "saw it and considered it well, they looked upon it and received instruction." ”

“ Of this man Tucker, however it may have happened that he now followed the half savage life of a sealer in Bass' Straits, (a quarter then too often the refugium of men of bad character and practises,) was a gentleman by birth, education, &c., and had once held a commission in the Royal Navy; and in writing of times when Tasmania was a convict colony, it may be as well to say, that he was always a free person. A love of perilous enterprise and wild adventure, I presume it was, that threw him amongst the sealers of Bass' Straits. ”