May 3.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
A range of armaments used...at Risdon Creek
On the morning of 3 May 1804, Edward White, an assigned convict servant to settler Richard Clark, was hoeing his master’s garden on the eastern side of Risdon Creek when he suddenly saw about 300 men, women and children appear out of the valley nearby, driving a mob of kangaroos down the hill before them. They were probably the Leenowowwenne and the Pangerninghe clans from the Big River nation on their autumn migration to the east coast. They were astonished to see Risdon occupied by strangers, for, as White later said, ‘they looked at me with all their eyes’. He also noted that they carried no spears, only waddies. Unafraid, he went down to the landing at the creek to report their presence to two soldiers stationed there, and then went back to his work. [1]
Lieutenant William Moore, who was in charge of the settlement at the time, was alarmed by the Aborigines’ sudden appearance. Unlike Edward White, he considered that ‘their numbers were far from friendly’ and that they were a war party and decided to take offensive action to protect the camp. Hostilities began at eleven o’clock, when Moore sent five soldiers to assist his gamekeeper, from whom the Big River people were trying to wrest a large kangaroo. Then he was told that another group of Big River men were ‘beating Mr Birt, the settler at his farm’ on the eastern side of the creek. So he despatched two more soldiers, ‘with orders not to fire if they could avoid it; however they found it necessary, and one was killed on the Spot, and another was found Dead in the Valley’. [2]
Confused and in shock, the Big River people appear to have retrieved the bodies and then retreated to the hill on the other side of Risdon Creek, directly opposite Jacob Mountgarrett’s recently completed stone cottage. At this point Mountgarrett persuaded Moore to make this cottage the centre of military operations. Archaeological evidence suggests that Moore stationed fifteen armed soldiers and about the same number of male convicts together with perhaps two armed settlers around it and then brought up one of the carronades* loaded with grapeshot as further protection. The weapon of mass destruction that Matthew Flinders had sent to Risdon as protection against the French was now put to another use. At two o’clock Mountgarrett fired the carronade* at the Big River people, and the soldiers, settlers and convicts fired their rifles, pistols and muskets in support. Archaeological findings at the cottage include a 12-pound steel cannonball, hand-made lead shot, a hand-moulded ball, lead casting waste, two lead balls for a long-arm rifle, a group of thirteen hand-made lead bullets probably for a small-calibre pistol, a group of thirty-three hand-made lead shot, and thirteen lead-shot. [3]
At this point Mountgarrett yelled at Moore to shoot ‘the black devils down’ and brandishing his sword he led the soldiers and convicts in pursuit of the Big River people ‘some distance up the valley’ near to where Risdon prison now stands. There, according to Edward White, ‘a great many’ of the Big River people ‘were killed and wounded’ and ‘one was seen to be taken away by the blacks’. [4]
...Four days later, in his official report to [Lieutenant Governor David] Collins, Moore said that the Big River people had been the aggressors, that he had not fired at them until they had ‘surrounded’ the ‘Camp’, when two of them had been killed, and that it was not he, the soldier, but Mountgarrett as the magistrate, who had proposed to fire the cannonade and then led the chase up the valley. In presenting his own actions and that of the soldiers as entirely defensive, Moore escaped reprimand. [5]
British Parliamentary Papers, ‘Van Diemen’s Land’, 51-4.
Historical Records of Australia, series III, vol. i, 242-3; Fawkner, Reminiscences, 24.
Tardif, John Bowen’s Hobart, 145; McGowan, Archaeological Investigations, 135.
Fawkner, Reminiscences, 24; BPP, ‘Van Diemen’s Land’, 53; Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians, 35; Angela McGowan, personal communication, 19 Jan. 2010.
HRA, series III, vol. I, 242-3.
Acknowledgment: Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, pp. 49-50, n.17, n.18, n.19, n.20, n.22.
* Carronade – A muzzle-loaded cannon usually used on armed boats.