November 28.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Contrasts – peace and slaughter
Two pictures of differing relations
...conflict with the Aboriginal people was well underway. Indeed, just seven days after [Colonel William] Paterson's initial arrival, an estimated 80 Aborigines – almost certainly the entire local band – descended on the British camp at outer Cove. One prominent individual, assumed to be the chief, was presented with a looking-glass, a hatchet and two handkerchiefs. But access rights to customary territory required much more than this and the Aborigines attempted to remove everything from the first tent they came across. When a sergeant of the guard intervened, he was seized by some Aboriginal men and would have been hurled over a rock into the sea had not two privates opened fire. One Aboriginal man fell dead and a second was wounded, the Aborigines responding by hurling a few spears and stones without effect, obviously shaken by this sudden turn of events. [1]
Paterson did make at least one attempt to restore amicable relations. While exploring the Tamar River later the same month his party came across 'about forty natives, including men, women and children'. Paterson sent a soldier forward with a handkerchief held out as a gift, only to be repulsed by stones. The emissary withdrew after placing the material on the ground with a hatchet, and with distance between them the Aborigines recovered the items and evinced their delight. Paterson remained wary, positioning a guard to cover the party's withdrawal. At that point an Aboriginal man came forward and presented one of the solders with a necklace that included a white metal button among the strung shells. [2]
Lieutenant-Governor Paterson to Governor King, Camp at Outer Cove, Port Dalrymple, 26 November 1804, HRNSW, Vol. 5, p. 484.
‘Exploration of Port Dalrymple and the Tamar', Journal of Lieutenant-Governor Paterson, 28 November 1804, p. 499.
Acknowledgment: Murray Johnson & Ian McFarlane, Van Diemen's Land – An Aboriginal History, pp. 82-3, 397, n.68, n.69.
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“Why are there no natives seen in the town?”
When the missionary Rowland Hassall visited Hobart in March 1819 and inquired: 'Why are there no natives seen in the town?' the answer given was: 'We shoot them whenever we find them.' [1] Yet a year earlier the Hobart Town Gazette had raised pertinent questions about the colonial government's responsibility for the Aborigines:
Are not the Aborigines of this Colony the children of our Government? Are we not all happy but they? And are they not miserable? Can they raise themselves from this sad condition? Or do they not claim our assistance? And shall that assistance be denied? Those who fancy that 'God did not make of one blood all the natives of the earth', must be convinced that the Natives of whatever matter formed, can be civilized, nay be Christianized. The moral Governor of the world will hold us accountable. The Aborigines demand our protection. [1]
Here, it seems that the newspaper's editor, Andrew Bent, was referring to the changing conditions of the frontier. In November, 1818, following the killing of a sealer at Great Swanport by a large group of Oyster Bay in reprisal for his slaughter of hundreds of swans, a detachment of the 48th Regiment was despatched to the area, where they killed twenty-two of the Oyster Bay people. [2] Four months later, in another affray with sealers, an Oyster Bay man was shot and his children abducted. In the same month, at William Stocker's cattle run at Tea Tree Brush at the Macquarie River in the eastern Midlands, stock-keepers killed an Oyster Bay clan chief. At the same time, at Russell Falls near New Norfolk, stock-keepers killed a group of Big River people, and two or three of the children orphaned in the affray were taken to Hobart. [3]
Hobart Town Gazette, 25 April 1818.
ibid., 28 November 1818; British Parliamentary Papers, 'Van Diemen's Land', 50.
Hobart Town Gazette, 10, 17, 24 April 1819; see Thomas Scott's drawing of the hut in 'Drawing and sketches of Van Diemen's Land 1820', SLNSW ML A1055/3, no. 39; Plomley, Jorgen Jorgenson, 93-4.
Acknowledgment: Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, pp. 67-68, 367 n.28, n.29, n.30.