April 15.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Official whitewashing
“Any pretence of peaceful settlement was officially over.”
From these discreet beginnings, a false narrative bloomed. (Lieutenant Governor) Arthur's pacific approach to the Aboriginal visitors from Bruny Island belongs to a highly specific set of circumstances, but his broader policy reflected an aggressive colonial plan. Just a few weeks earlier, in April 1828, Arthur had responded to reports of increased violence in the interior by issuing a proclamation that the settled districts be cleansed of Aboriginal people. [1] The closing pincers became an armed frontier – the Lieutenant Governor was preparing to divide and conquer.
Sporadic violence had been endemic in Van Diemen's Land for two decades, but in early 1828 it escalated to war. Though Arthur did not issue a document or instruction to Aboriginal tribes informing them that the British empire considered itself at war with them, the April 1828 Partition Proclamation serves as a useful marker of several operational threads coalescing, and can be regarded as the official acknowledgement of major hostilities.
The Proclamation opened by carefully reciting some prior proclamations and orders, thereby establishing the colonisers' patient and beneficent intentions. Frontier violence was acknowledged but attributed to the misbehaviour of 'Shepherds and Stockkeepers' and 'Sealers', thereby implying these to have been the illegal acts of individuals, and therefore classified as criminality. The Proclamation further absolved the government by brushing over the invasiveness of colonisation itself, instead pointing to the intransigence of Aboriginal people who exhibited 'a state of living, alike hostile to the safety of the Settlers,* and to the amelioration of their own habits, character and condition'. There was a state of mutual animosity so intense, the Proclamation avowed, as to require the segregation of the country. The Aboriginal people were to 'be induced by peaceful means to depart, or should otherwise be expelled by force from all the settled Districts'. Any pretence of peaceful settlement was officially over.
Proclamation, 15 April 1828. see Commons Return, pp. 22-24.
Acknowledgment: Nick Brodie, The Vandemonian War pp. 9, 385, n.11
* There was no mention or acknowledgement that the colonisers' taking of land from the Aboriginal people was inimical to the security, well-being and safety of the Aboriginal occupants of the land. – RB.
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“For [Indigenous Tasmanians] who wanted to live, surrender was their only option.”
It must have been difficult for the Tasmanian to imagine what such a solution would look like. There is no reason to think the idea of removing to an island had even occurred to them until [George] Robinson and his envoys proposed it. At the same time, the thought of living amicably alongside the white man was clearly absurd. Why should all those thousands of independently acting white men suddenly cease trying to kill them? To the last of the free Tasmanians, hiding was the only alternative to fighting. It is telling that Robinson's offer of a bloodless escape from nightmarish ordeal was swiftly accepted in just about every instance. For those who wanted to live, surrender was their only option.
Acknowledgment: Nicholas Clements, The Black War, pp. 176-177.