The third wave of genocide took place between 1825 and 1831, years known as the ‘Black War’, which killed a further 700 Tasmanians, leaving fewer than 300 alive. The British authorities had now got rid of most of the bushrangers, so the majority of this wave of killings were carried out by farmers and stockmen, often in remote parts of the island, where any edicts coming from Hobart could be safely ignored. The term ‘war’ is something of a misnomer; there were no armies, no generals, the conflict involved hundreds of local incidents all over the island, and it is only thanks to the testimony of many witnesses at the time that we have accounts of the kind of killings and behaviour that took place. One farmer ripped open an Aboriginal’s stomach while seeming to offer bread at the end of a knife; another farmer placed a gin trap in a barrel of flour and then watched with delight as an Aboriginal had his hand snapped off in the trap; another farmer played Russian roulette with an empty gun, before handing a loaded one over to an Aboriginal who then blew his brains out.
We also learn of two British settlers out hunting birds, who come across a group of Aboriginals in the forest. Most of them flee, except for a heavily pregnant woman who, terrified, climbs up a tree to hide. She is shot down by the hunters, immediately miscarries her baby, and then the men look on in amusement as she crawls to a creek to die.fn1 It is worth pausing here to remember that at exactly the same time that such barbarisms are taking place in Tasmania, the spirit of humanism is taking Europe by storm, the Romantic movement is in full bloom, and Beethoven has just written his Ninth Symphony, containing Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ – ‘Alle Menschen werden Brüder … Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt!’ (All people become brothers … This kiss is for all the world!).
Not surprisingly, such brutal abuses fuelled the strongest reaction from the Aboriginals, and 176 British settlers were killed in revenge attacks during this period. This led to public meetings in Hobart where the authorities debated the possible responses with the settlers. The majority of the colonists favoured a policy of complete elimination of the Aboriginals now – at one of these meetings a Dr Turnbull made comparisons with neighbouring Australia, ‘extermination has been adopted in New South Wales with the greatest success’, so why couldn’t this policy be enacted in Tasmania too? The government set up its own Committee for Aboriginal Affairs, who proposed a system of bounty payments for the capture of natives rather than their killing, and the increase in the use of convicts to guard remote farms. But the killings continued, colonists paying for roving groups of militias to patrol in search of Tasmanians – essentially death squads. These militias would attack any Aboriginals they found, even groups peacefully cooking round fires. They would be shot or bayoneted, including young children. ‘Crow-hunting’ became a popular sport, where families would combine country picnics with a spot of killing.
It was a favourite amusement to hunt the Aboriginals; a day would be selected, and the neighbouring settlers invited, with their families, to a picnic … After dinner, all would be gaiety and merriment, whilst the gentlemen of the party would take their guns and dogs, and, accompanied by two or three convict servants, wander through the bush in search of black fellows. Sometimes they would return without sport; at others they would succeed in killing a women, or if lucky, [perhaps] a man or two.fn2
I think of Jan Karski here, watching from that upstairs window as the two Hitler Youth joyfully ‘hunted’ Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. But in Tasmania it’s the British who hunted human beings.
Some settlers even kept ‘trophies’ – body parts cut off from Tasmanians they had killed. ‘One European had a pickle tub in which he put the ears of all the blacks he shot.’ I think here of the fourteen-year-old son of Martin Bormann being shown into Himmler’s attic, and being traumatised for life, seeing chairs made from human legs and a copy of Mein Kampf covered in human skin. But here the farmer with the ear collection was a European man who had grown up in the midst of the Enlightenment and the values of the French Revolution – liberté, egalité, fraternité.
In November 1828, Governor George Arthur declared martial law in an attempt to appease the colonists. He also increased the bounties paid for capture of live Aboriginals – £5 for adults, £2 for children. ‘Black catching’ now became more popular, and lucrative, than ‘crow-hunting’. But the killings continued, especially in the east of the island, where the Big River and Oyster Bay tribes were looking to avenge the murders of 240 of their people during the years of the Black War. They killed twenty European settlers in 1830, and Governor Arthur was under greater pressure than ever to take harsher action. He came up with the idea of a ‘game drive’, based on English hunting principles, in which a vast cordon of 2,000 British soldiers, police, settlers and convicts would sweep from the north of the island to the south-east, forcing all the remaining Tasmanians into the ‘funnel’ of the Tasman Peninsula. The ‘Black Line’ was the largest ever force used against Australian Aboriginals (Cocker notes it was as large a force as the conquistador Hernando Cortés had used to subdue Mexico), and cost around £50,000. Farcically, the entire operation, lasting from 7 October to the end of November, captured not a single Aboriginal, though Arthur argued that at least the eastern part of the island had now been cleared of aggressive Tasmanians.
By 1831 there were probably fewer than 400 Aboriginals left across the whole island, and half of these were women and children being used as domestic slaves by the settlers. What happened to the remaining 200 or so free indigenous Tasmanians in the next twenty years is as appalling as anything that had occurred since 1804 – a phase that could be called ‘killing with Christian kindness’. The central figure in this phase was a forty-two-year-old former builder from London called George Robinson. Like many people whose ‘heart is in the right place’, he ended up doing incalculable damage. He was evangelical in his Christianity, had a family of seven children, and was desperate to spread the ‘Good News of Salvation’. Five years after his arrival in Hobart in 1824, Governor Arthur put him in charge of a group of twenty-five captive Aboriginals who were being held on the island of Bruny, just to the south of the town.
Robinson’s dream was to bring ‘the Word of the Lord’ to this benighted remnant of the Tasmanian people. But to do this, he realised he first needed to learn more about them; he spent months learning their language and their customs. He soon understood that far from their image of ‘demonic’ aggression that most of the settlers saw, the people he got to know were peaceable and highly intelligent. And, given the brutality of their earlier treatment by his compatriots, it is striking, and affecting, to read Robinson’s genuine sympathy for the suffering the Aboriginals had undergone – as he writes in his diary: ‘The cruelties exercised upon them beggars all description … and their sufferings have been far greater than those of the Indians at the hands of the Spaniards.’ But although this impulse to halt the Tasmanians’ sufferings was real, sadly Robinson was also driven by egotism and an inflated sense of his own importance – as he wrote: ‘It is no small honour conferred on me that I should be the individual appointed to ameliorate the conditions of this hapless race and to emancipate them from bondage.’ He began to see himself as the ‘saviour’ of the Tasmanians, and it was this Christian delusion which now contributed so significantly to their final demise.