January 30.
“Australia Day” by Glenn Loughrey
Desperate Resistance
Scope of sources on Tasmanian history.
We may never know enough to accurately chart the regional variations of frontier conflict and Aboriginal resistance in every area of Australia. But in a few places the documentary evidence is plentiful. This is true of Tasmania where voluminous official reports, newspapers and other records can be balanced up with the detailed diaries of G.A. Robinson written while travelling extensively in what was still Aboriginal Tasmania. Robinson understood the Tasmanian dialects and spent many hours talking with the blacks at a time when conflict with the whites had reached a bitter crescendo. He provided by far the most important European account of Aboriginal motivation and the cumulative effect of settler brutality. Robinson realized that the Tasmanians had experienced 'a multitude of wrongs from a variety of sources'. [1] The accumulation of private injury and personal tragedy fused to produce the bitter racial hatred and desperate resistance of the Black War of 1827-1830. 'They have' wrote Robinson:
a tradition amongst them that white men have usurped their territory, have driven them into the forests, have killed their game...have ravished their wives and daughters, have murdered and butchered their fellow countrymen; and are wont whilst brooding over these complicated ills in the dense part of the forest, to goad each other on to acts of bloodshed and revenge for the injuries done to their ancestors and the persecutions offered to themselves through their white enemies. [2]
The more observant settlers noted the change in Aboriginal attitudes which took place during the second half of the 1820s. One told an official committee that although he had been aware of black hostility in the past it had previously been 'excited by some temporary aggression of the Whites and remembrance of which gradually gave way to better feelings'. The desire for revenge had not originally extended beyond the 'Tribe, or family, in which it originated'. But the situation had changed and he now detected a 'determined spirit of hostility' among the whole black population. He concluded with the observation:
I think the Blacks look on the whole of the white population as Enemies and are not sensible of any benefit they might derive from living with us on friendly terms. [3]
The escalation of conflict which occurred in Tasmania in the 1820s was mirrored in other parts of the continent. The occupation of the northern pastoral frontier of New South Wales and Queensland witnessed a similar burgeoning of racial violence as the pastoralists moved deeper into Aboriginal territory. Bloodshed in one district built up expectations about its probability in the next.
G.A. Robinson to Colonial Secretary, 30 January 1832, Tas. Col. Sec., CSO/1/318.
N.J.B. Plomley, A Word List of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Languages, Hobart, 1976, p.88
R. Dry, Answers Given by Settlers...to Certain Questions etc, Tas. Col. Sec., CSO/1/323, pp. 289, 291.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier – An interpretation of the Aboriginal response to the invasion and settlement of Australia, James Cook University, Townsville, 1981, pp.68-69, 176 n.54, n.55, n.56.