She was further adorned with a fair moustache, and well developed, curly whiskers, that were just beginning to turn with advancing years. She was in 1829 the wife of the bold Wooreddy, the chief of the Bruni tribe. Her appreciation of English society was a sore trial to her more solemn-looking native companion. As her name so often appears in this work, it is needless to say more of this sylvan goddess of Tasmania. She is the last of the race.
Maryann, the half-caste, was the wife of Walter, King Walter, or George Arthur Walter. She had the appearance of her mixed race. Her delicate hand, her dark eyes, her nose and mouth, declared the native mother; but her broad and lofty forehead indicated the European descent of the father. She was unquestionably a woman of weight in the country, bringing down upon the floor as she walked a pressure of some seventeen or eighteen stone. There was not only vigour of intellect, but a strength and independence of will, stamped upon her expansive features. The base of her brain represented the portentous character of animal appetites, while the loftiness and breadth elsewhere exhibited the force of moral sentiments. She was a woman who, placed in happier circumstances, could have been the Czarina of Russia, and would have emulated the intellectual prowess of a Catharine, though she might have betrayed an equal intensity of passions.
Her mother, Sarah, had been stolen from her forest home by one of the early sealers of the Straits, whose name was Cottrel Cochrane. He had not proved a cruel husband, nor a wholly neglectful father. When, however, Mr. Robinson made his raid upon the Straitsmen, and carried off their dark-skinned partners, Maryann found a new home on Flinders Island. There she was cared for as the daughter of a black woman rather than the child of an Englishman. Her associates were her mother's race, and she felt her degradation in the presence of her whiter female acquaintance. With such extraordinary powers, had she been received into a respectable family, and treated in a proper manner, she might have been a happier and more useful woman. As it was, she became the wife of Walter. She never had a child.
The masculine element of Oyster Cove was not in the ascendant. There was poor Tippoo Saib, no longer a terrible
