December 24.
“A Portrait of Australia With Important Bits Missing” by Glenn Loughrey
‘treated...like other prisoners of war’
'Expulsion of the Aborigines from the settled Districts'
Sporadic violence had been endemic in Van Diemen's land for two decades, but in early 1828 it escalated to war. Though [Lieutenant Governor] 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.
As a legal instrument the Proclamation applied a logistical structure for fighting the war. It proposed that 'a line of Military Posts will be forthwith stationed and established along the confines of the settled districts' through which Aboriginal people could not pass without the personal approval of the Lieutenant Governor. Magistrates were ordered to effect the 'expulsion of the Aborigines from the settled Districts', although they were to be treated well if captured, like other prisoners of war...
The British Empire had been preparing for war in Van Diemen's Land for several years. The initial invasion was part of a global strategy of empire-building, and resistance was to be expected. Led by military officers, effected by soldiers and supported by convict labour, the establishment of a penal colony was intended to prevent rival claims in the region...
Much like the new colonial outpost of Singapore, which supported a British push into southeast Asia through the Malayan Peninsula, the broad processes of Australasian British settlement were guided for wider imperial objectives, orchestrated under the careful supervision of the British Secretary of State for War and the Colonies. By the late 1820s, the continent was ringed with frontier bases, projecting British power into their subregions, controlling key sea routes and approaches, and supporting continued advances into the interior. Hobart and Launceston were parts of this big picture.
Acknowledgment: Nick Brodie, The Vandemonian War, pp. 10-11.
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A note about ‘slaughter’
In a diary kept by one pioneer grazier, there is a note saying ‘Inspector [John] Carroll’s Native Police’ from Aramac [in Queensland] ‘slaughtered all the males they came across’ at Elderslie station on the Western River. [1]
Diary of R.M. Watson, 1-2, Noel Butlin Archives Centre, Australian National University, Manuscript N31/1 (i).
Acknowledgment: Jonathan Richards, The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2017 pp. 105, 279 n.44.