March 9.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Ruthless measures should be used
A range of proposals to attack and hunt Aborigines.
John Sherwin, George Espie and John Brodie, whose properties had recently been burnt down by warriors from the Big River nation, made the long journey to Hobart to appear before the committee on 23 February [1830]...All three men advocated that ruthless measures should be used to capture the Aborigines. Sherwin urged that 'Sydney natives' and 'blood hounds' should be hired and that 'decoy huts, containing flour and sugar, strongly impregnated with poison', should also be used. Espie suggested that 150 prisoners should be 'sent after the Natives, who should be rewarded by a conditional pardon for every two or three they captured'. But Brodie believed that the assigned servants had 'become very much afraid of the Natives', that they would shoot more than they would capture and that the Aborigines were beyond conciliation. [1]
Another settler urged that a Maori chieftain and 150 of his followers should be employed to capture the Aborigines and remove them to New Zealand as his slaves. Still another pressed for a full-scale military campaign with high bounties for the captured, while others put their faith in the erection of huts with secret rooms, trapdoors and spring-locks which would capture Aborigines in search of plunder. One wanted Umarrah [2] sent back into the bush with a couple of 'lifers' who would then betray the 'lurking places of the tribes'. Others wanted 'dogs to hunt the Aborigines as was done in Cuba and Jamaica with the negroes'. This started a lively discussion about whether the dogs should be 'Spanish bloodhounds from Manila' or "pointers which should be set upon the natives as if they were quail'. [3] In every case it seems the settlers were anxious to absolve themselves of responsibility for the war.
BPP, 'Van Diemen's Land', 47.
On Umarrah as a leader note pp. 90, 106-107, 133, 190-193
TAHO CSO 1.332, 3, 9 March 1830.
Acknowledgment: Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines – A history since 1803, pp.122-123, 371 n. 2 and 3.
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1986
he pays no heed to the thunder god
yet he is wary and tired
'cause you see funny things out here
as the heat gets you,
twigs snapping behind him
when suddenly in some places the breeze just stops!
all his hair stands to attention
this black man from a northern people
whose world has nothing to do
with the road ripping throughout the wetland
but he is sensitive
is conscious
with dealings and bills
and mouths to feed,
a witness to the machines eating the tea-tree
clawing the soil
burning the patch of bush
for someone else's lust of bitumen and noise
well, he has just to keep moving
despite the dark shadows of ochre and skin
that tempts the mind's eye to ponder what was
and never may be
again.
Acknowledgment: Samuel Wagan Watson, Of Muse, Meandering And Midnight University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2000, p.29.