Governor Arthur now appoints Robinson to be the ‘Conciliator’ to the Aboriginals, and just as Arthur’s ‘Black Line’ is reaching the Tasman Peninsula in October 1830, Robinson is completing his first journey across the island, to search for the last remaining free Tasmanians. He travels with a group of twelve of the Bruny Aboriginals, whose job it is to persuade these free men, women and children to give themselves up, and convert to Christianity. Robinson and his band go through the wildest parts of the Tasmanian bush, through forests and brambles, across mountains and around the rocky coastal regions. His principal ‘weapons’ of persuasion are a flute, which he plays ‘to soothe their troubled minds’, and the Bible. Their first trip, lasting ten months, is fruitless, but his following trips are more successful. By 1831 he has persuaded fifty-four Tasmanians to give themselves up, and in the following four years he brings back another 140 Aboriginals to Hobart and the ‘protection’ of the British authorities. With the exception of the 230 women and children used as domestic servants, not a single indigenous Tasmanian remains free on the island by 1835. Robinson has completed, with his missionary zeal, the process begun with rifles at Risdon on 3 May 1804. As many dispossessed peoples have reflected – ‘You taught us to pray, and while we looked up to heaven you stole our land.’
The years that follow are disturbing to describe. It is decided that a reserve should be created for Robinson’s last Tasmanians, and this should be on Flinders Island, off the north-eastern coast of Tasmania. Here the Aboriginals are baptised and christened with European names, given lessons in scripture, arithmetic and needlework, like schoolchildren, and housed in dormitories. Robinson now terms himself ‘the Commandant’ and there are regular clothing and bedding inspections, as if Flinders Island was a minor English public school. But the water supplies are inadequate, the sanitation poor, and soon disease is rife and many are dying. Governor Arthur’s response is a remarkably cynical example of the British colonial art of ‘turning a blind eye’ to evil: ‘Even if the Aboriginals pine away, it is better that they meet with their deaths in that way, whilst every kindness is manifested towards them, than that they should fall a sacrifice to the inevitable consequences of their continued acts of outrage upon the white inhabitants.’
By 1839, only sixty Aboriginals remain alive. By 1847, when finally the British authorities agree to move them back to the main island at Oyster Cove, thirty miles south of Hobart, only forty-seven are now left. Four years later, this is down to just thirty, and by 1856, when Van Diemen’s Land is officially renamed ‘Tasmania’, a government report about Oyster Cove states:
There are five old men and nine old women living at the Oyster Cove station – uncleanly, unsober, unvirtuous, unenergetic and irreligious, with a past character for treachery, and no record of one noble action, the race is fast falling away and its utter extinction will be hardly regretted.
These official sentiments were echoed some years later, when the novelist Anthony Trollope made a Pacific Tour of Australia and New Zealand,fn3 and remarked on the widespread killings of Aboriginals that were going on then: ‘Their doom is to be exterminated; and the sooner that their doom be accomplished – so that there be no cruelty – the better it will be for civilisation.’
The face of Truganini, the woman often referred to as ‘the Last Tasmanian.’fn4 What do we know of her life? Or what those eyes had seen? Growing up on Bruny Island, the first contact with settlers, the ‘Black War’ – by the age of seventeen she had experienced her mother’s murder by sailors, her uncle shot by a soldier, her sister abducted by sealers and her fiancé murdered by foresters, who then raped her. Having witnessed the violence against her own people, she subsequently agreed to help Robinson and joined him on his trips across the island to persuade her fellow Aboriginals to give themselves up. Later she was one of the first to live on the Flinders Island colony, then following the years of desperate decline at Oyster Cove, with her last relatives dying in 1871, she was, finally, alone.
All that has been read into this woman’s face. Some have seen ‘a fierce personal resistance to the fate of her people’, others have spoken of ‘her natural dignity’; I see rage in those eyes, and also incomprehension in the face of suffering. But her own words and thoughts are elusive. Some survive – for instance, on the choice she made to join Robinson’s expedition across Tasmania, and act as a kind of go-between with the last Aboriginals, she reflected that: ‘It was the best thing to do. I hoped we would save all my people who were left. Mr Robinson was a good man and could speak our language. And I said I would go with him and help him.’ She also said that she did not want her corpse to be mutilated after her death, that she did not want her skull and skeleton to be displayed in a museum as others had been earlier – she wanted to be bured ‘behind the mountains’. Despite the British authorities’ assurance, even this last request of hers was not honoured.
She died on 8 May 1876, aged around sixty-five. Within two years of her funeral and burial, her body was exhumed and the Royal Society of Tasmania subsequently put her skeleton on public display at Hobart Museum, where it remained until 1947. For the next twenty-nine years she was stored in the museum archives, and on 30 April 1976, just before the centenary of her death, her remains were finally passed to Aboriginal representatives; she was cremated, and had her ashes scattered in the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, which runs between her homeland of Bruny Island and the Tasmanian coast. In 2002, the Royal College of Surgeons returned to Tasmania the samples of Truganini’s hair and skin which had found their way to England, in the colonial desire to analyse, categorise and systematise human beings who were considered to be ‘primitive’. The last traces of this exceptional woman were finally laid to rest, 126 years after her death.
9
The British Famine: ‘Slaughters Done in Ireland by Mere Official Red Tape’
In 1847, at the same time that the British authorities in Hobart were deciding what should be done with the last remnants of the indigenous Tasmanians on Flinders Island, the British government in London was facing an impending disaster in a colony much closer to home. For two successive years – 1845 and 1846 – the potato harvests in Ireland had been devastated by the plant disease Phytophthora infestans, better known as ‘potato blight’. In 1845 between a third and a half of the crop was destroyed; the following year, the outbreak was even more disastrous: ‘in a matter of 72 to 96 hours,2 the better part of the 1846 crop was obliterated … so swift and comprehensive was the destruction that a kind of mass disorientation seized Ireland’. An estimated three-quarters of the entire crop across the country had rotted away in a few days. In a country where the potato was the principal food for many people, this was a catastrophic situation. The first confirmed accounts of starvation in rural Ireland came in autumn 1846, and, with winter on its way, it was clear that only urgent action could avert a humanitarian disaster.
What happened next – the Famine (and the reasons for it) – has been argued about ceaselessly ever since, but one fact is not in doubt: a million men, women and children died, and an estimated 1.3 million others were forced to emigrate between 1845 and 1851 (a globally unprecedented level of migrationfn1 at that time), reducing the population of Ireland from more than 8 million in 1841 to 6.5 million in 1851. Today there is at least a widespread consensus on these figures, which originate from the detailed Irish census of 1841, recording a population of 8,175,124, and the subsequent census a decade later in 1851, in the immediate aftermath of the Famine, showing a population of only 6,552,385 (when, allowing for normal growth, the population figure would have been around 9 million).