October 31.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
The traumatising of children
...the surviving Tasmanians’ traditional way of life was thrown into turmoil.[George Augustus] Robinson [expressed some understanding of its consequences.
The children have witnessed the massacre of their parents and their relations carried away into captivity by these merciless invaders, their country has been taken from them and the kangaroo, their chief subsistence, have been slaughtered wholesale...Can we wonder then at the hatred they bear to the white inhabitants? [1]
...The few children who were still alive in 1828 had experienced unimaginable trauma. [2] They had seen most of their siblings and playmates killed or abducted. Their parents too were likely dead. In the north-west, Robinson noted the ‘terror’ experienced by children: ‘I observed that the natives, when they wanted to quiet their children, told them that the NUM LAGGER, i.e. the white man come, which always was sufficient to quiet the children’. [3]
Plomley, Friendly Mission, [Robinson’s] journal, 20 August 1830.
The scarcity of Aboriginal children travelling with bands in the latter part of the war is well documented (for example, Roth, Aborigines of Tasmania, p.22; Robinson to Burnett, 5 January 1832, TAHO, CSO1/318, p. 131.
Plomley, Friendly Mission, [Robinson’s] journal, 16 July 1832.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds and Nicholas Clements, Tongerlongeter, pp. 99, 134, 241, n.65 248 n.43, n.44.
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The Remnant
Forty or fifty people – predominately men- were now all that remained of the Oyster Bay and Big River nations [by 1831] whose combined pre-invasion population was surely well in excess of 1000 and maybe as high as 2000. [1]
This exhausted remnant was composed of individuals from numerous bands. Some were literally the last of their bands, [2] and several were hangers-on from decimated foreign nations.
...The white invasion had...broken the economic and cultural spine of the eastern nations. This was most apparent in the north-east, which had been almost completely stripped of women and girls by the rapacious sealers. In November 1830, Robinson interviewed the survivors from that region and took a census that ‘included all the Aborigines in a line from the Tamar [River] tp the Derwent [River]...parts of different nations, some of Prossers Plains, Ben Lomond, Oyster Bay, Piper[s] River, Cape Portland &c’. The list he recorded, while omitting a number of the women with Tongerlongeter, provides a chilling snapshot of the devastation brought by the invasion: ‘out of 74 persons there are only 3 females’. [3]
Without women and the crucial economic roles they played, the remnant north-eastern bands could not function. More poignantly, they could not see a future. Some of their wives and daughters were still alive, enslaved on the islands of Bass Strait, but they were powerless to liberate them.
…...there is an even more tragic image. In Robinson’s November 1830 census of Aborigines ‘at large’ in eastern Tasmania, not a single child appears. [4] and when his mission encountered these peoples, they were almost invariably childless.
Plomley & QVMAG, The Tasmanian Tribes and Cicatrices, p. 12; R Cosgrove, quoted in P Sanders, ‘Beliefs on Aborigines’, Launceston Examiner, 28 April 2014; Jones, ‘Tasmanian tribes’, pp. 319-54; B Brimfield, ‘Tasmania’s Palaeo-Aboriginal Population prior to 1772CE’, 2014, NLA ID 6929878.
By this time, most bands had been reduced to just a handful of individuals and existed now only in composite with other remnants (for example the Poredareme). Others had been destroyed altogether. See Calder, ‘Levee, line and martial law’, appendix 2; Plomley, Friendly Mission, journal, 3 November 1830, 20 November 1831.
Robinson to Arthur, 20 November 1830, TAHO, CSO1/317, pp. 216-33; Plomley, FM, journal 2, 3 and 15 November 1830.
Robinson to Arthur, 20 November 1830, TAHO CSO1/317, pp. 216-33; Plomley, FM, journal 2, 3 and 15 November 1830.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds and Nicholas Clements, Tongerlongeter – First Nations Leader and Tasmanian War Hero, NewSouth, Sydney, 2021, pp, 144-145, 149, 151, 250 n. 19, n.20, 251 n.39, 252 n.54.