Some Account of the Wars, Extirpation, Habits, &c., of the Native Tribes of Tasmania/Narrative of a Trip to Oyster Cove in 1855
NARRATIVE of a TRIP to OYSTER COVE in 1855.
The following narrative of a journey I made in April, 1855, from Hobart Town to Oyster Cove, and published at the time in a local newspaper, long since defunct, embodies much information of the condition of these people as I then saw them; and if I have slightly altered it from the form in which it originally appeared, it has been to incorporate it with this account of our native tribes:—
Circumstances, the relation of which would in no way interest the reader, required me to make the journey from Kingston (10 miles south of Hobart Town) to the neighbourhood of Oyster Cove, the dwelling place of the few remaining aboriginal people of Tasmania, which is distant, overland from Hobart Town, about 23 miles. Desirous of preserving some memorial of this excursion, I made a few notes as I went along, from which, in an after leisure hour, I have compiled the following narrative for the perusal of such as may take an interest in the subjects it treats of.
The village of Kingston is an irregular straggling country township, a mere assemblage of scattered cottages, situate near to a small stream called Brown's River—a small rill. Several of these buildings are mere huts, but others are good brick residences; the entire number being about a dozen.
The morning of my departure was one of sunshine; and I started with a young companion, who travelled, like myself, a-foot, fresh for the journey, and in such spirits for a walk as fine weather usually produces. We took the principal highway, of course, but from which only a very imperfect knowledge of the district it traverses is to be acquired, as it is generally directed across a barren waste; and the traveller judging of the country from road-side experiences only would form a very erroneous opinion of the District. With the exception of that part where it crosses the fine estate belonging to Mr. Baynton, he sees little but barren sands, stunted trees, and a herbage indicative of sterility and worthlessness. But this would be an unfair description of this district, which is called Kingborough, where some excellent farms are to be found, the best soils of which are very little inferior to those of Pittwater. Mr. Baynton's farm is very prolific, and his house and homestead are excellent though, in strict accordance with the prevailing tastes of Tasmanian farmers, every tree that once stood near it has been carefully rooted out, thus imparting an air of nakedness to the place which is most displeasing. Farmers, like others, must consult their own tastes and not those of passers-by, but it has often surprised me to see the indifference with which they throw down all the indigenous forest trees in the neighbourhood of their dwellings, many of which are often exquisitely handsome, and after destroying in a few weeks what a century could not replace, they then often commence planting. But it is not the reproach of Mr. Baynton to have done anything to give shelter to his substantial farm-house, or to beautify its neighbourhood.
A short walk from hence and we reach the shores of North West Bay, along which the road leads for a little distance. This is a large arm of the sea, but, being shit in on all sides by unpicturesque hills, it is not a pleasing place. Approaching North West Bay River, the soil sensibly improves in character, and the coarse grey sands we have passed over are succeeded by a rich red soil of great fertility. The farms hereabouts are small and strictly agricultural, the breeding of stock not being attended to. At this place the stream flows through a rich alluvium, second to nothing in Tasmania.
The floods of lust year (1854), having demolished the bridge that used to span this stream (a Government structure and therenot meant to last), we floundered through it with luckily no more damage than a few contusions, the usual penalty of fording a Tasmanian river, and halted at a road-side inn called the "Half-way House," (half-way to where I was not so fortunate as to discover, as all beyond it is a wilderness of forests). It is kept by a person named Groombridge, whose studious civilities made some slight amends for his rough exterior; and, that our brief stay at his house might be as pleasant as possible, he obliged us with his company at breakfast, and gratified us with the details of many local and domestic matters that no one cared anything about but himself. Still had it not been for rather an unpleasant practice he had of now and then blowing his nose in the corner of the tablecloth, he would have passed for a very nice fellow. Near the Half-way House are several cottages, possibly the nucleus of a future town. Two or three of these already assume the name, if not the reality, of "general stores," but judging from the wares exhibited in the windows, which are limited to a few boxes of lucifers, pipes, and a very small unostentatious display of lollipops, it struck even such unobserving travellers as ourselves that the designation, like the name of the hamlet itself, Margate, had been prematurely assumed.
We resumed our walk. For several miles the road passes a very uninteresting tract of country. The soil is a miserable white loam, producing only stringy-bark trees, derisively called "bull's wool" by bushmen, from the peculiar texture of the bark. They were much scorched by bush fires. At two miles from Margate we crossed a small stream called the Snug River, which discharges its waters into a little inlet, that is so secluded as to have acquired this name. At a short distance from hence are the remains of a once excellent edifice, built originally by the district magistrate, which the destructive bush fires of January, 1854, destroyed, the brick walls excepted. It was then an inn; and at an outhouse, which has since been made habitable, the business has been re-commenced. The landlord, Mr. Haines, had a lamentable tale of misfortune to tell us; but the burning of his premises and furniture was hardly so distressing as his account of the misconduct of the vagabond sawyers and splitters of the neighbourhood, who, under pretence of giving assistance, robbed him of everything they could rescue from the fire.
The last four or five miles of the journey, to Oyster Cove we found the road passing over a succession of high and pretty steep hills, from some points of which we caught an occasional view of a very beautiful landscape; though, from the frequent intervention of trees, it was not seen to the greatest advantage. Now and then only, where an opening occurred, could we get a fair view of it; but, at th every few points where trees were few, we greatly admired the varied and magnificent picture that lay before us. The dusky eminences of South Bruny, stretched along the horizon, terminating in the south east in the bold and beautiful cliffs of the Fluted Cape. Adventure Bay, on the east of Bruny—the place of anchorage of the famous old navigators Cook, Furneaux, and Bligh, last century—lies fully in view, separated from the nearer waters of D'Entrecasteaux Channel by the long, low, thread-like isthmus that unites the two peninsulas of Bruny Island. This singular strip of sand looks more like an artificial embankment, as seen from a distance, than a natural barrier raised to resist the heavy ocean swell of the Pacific. Within the visible horizon of these open spaces, is contained nearly all of Bruny (32 miles long) with its deep and many inlets, and a vast extent of undulating country in the east and north east, fronting on the most varied coast line in the world, forming altogether a picture which well repays the toil of a long journey to see it.
But let us push forward, and soon a bend in the ever-winding road places the traveller in full view of the establishment at which the few remaining descendants of the first inhabitants of Tasmania are located. At this point, though the road has been gradually falling off for a mile or more, the traveller still finds himself at an elevation much above the level of the glen assigned them for their abiding place for the last few years of their still unexpired existence. Occupying now comparatively low ground, the landscape, though still eminently beautiful, is greatly reduced in extent, and most of the scene faintly described above is now shut out by nearer hills that we before stood above and looked over. But if the view were a hundred times more prepossessing than it is, its attractions would be scarcely observed at an instant that places before us an object, which, though mean and unimposing, is, on account of its inmates, the only thing the stranger traveller can look at.
Standing in view of this dreary edifice, rude though it is, and in vile contrast with the landscape around, both the eye and mind seem actually to refuse to rest on any other object. How, indeed, should it be otherwise, when we know that within the walls of that desolate-looking shealing are all who now remain of a once formidable people, whom a "thirty years war" with our own countrymen have swept into captivity, and their relatives to the grave; a war which, notwithstanding our ultimate success, we derived little credit from.
The glen in which they vegetate, rather than live, derives its name from the little inlet in front of it. Oyster Cove, a small arm of D'Entrecasteaux Channel, so abounding in mud-flats that a row-boat cannot reach the shore, except at high-tide. Between the beach and the building they occupy is a small salt marsh, but as the ground rises a little it improves in character, changing into a fertile alluvium, but of very limited extent, five or six acres only, all behind it being more barren, if possible, than the sand of the sea shore, producing nothing but useless herbage and forest trees dwarfed into mere bushes by the exceeding infertility of the land.
The building they inhabit a part of, is a long low narrow range formed of rough slabs, formerly occupied by a large body of convicts, nominally employed in cultivation, but in reality doing next to nothing, and the results of their labours are, therefore not very perceptible. The barrack is an irregular quadrangle, enclosing a space of about half an acre, the walls of which appear to me not more than seven feet high, pierced with dimunitive windows that afford little light and less ventilation, and you seem to feel their unwholesomeness the moment you enter them, and the less I say about the cleanliness of this neglected asylum the better. In fact, the edifice is as badly adapted for the purpose it is used for—a place of shelter for a people whom the viscissitudes of war have made us the natural guardians of—as could have been found.
In selecting a residence for them, it should have been remembered that they have not been nurtured like ourselves in houses, and the close unwholesome atmosphere of such low-roofed abodes must be peculiarly unsuited to a race of people, who, down to the time of their surrender, lived wholly abroad, breathing only the pure and uninfected air of their own glens.
This establishment is in a place so secluded, so completely away from all the chief thoroughfares of the island, and so rarely visited except by the inhabitants of the by-district it is placed in, chiefly sawyers and splitters, that I doubt if its very existence is known to the great bulk of the community; or that on the shores of an unfrequented bay are still to be found the remnants of those men who for so many years successfully held their ground against their powerful invaders, with a pertinacity that will long be remembered by the colonists; and if it is recorded of them that they committed many acts of aggression on the settlers, it will be at least admitted that it was not by their hands that the first blows were dealt, or the first blood drawn.[1] These circumstances, now that the strife is past, should make them the objects of our peculiar solicitude. Is there, then, nothing that we owe them beyond a naked sustenance and a deserted barrack? Should we be satisfied with voting them a few hundreds annually to prevent them dying of want? or at knowing they are at liberty to wander where they like in the bush, exposed to the demoralisation inseparable from constant contact with the restless community of bush sawyers, &c., whose acquaintance with the simple-minded women of the blacks is notoriously impure? or that we pay a non-resident superintendent to protect them, who might as well be in Spitzbergen as where he ever is, that is, absent from his post enjoying himself at head quarters? True, there are some inferior persons here, but whose care for the natives is confined, I believe, to the mere issue of such supplies as the Legislature allows the blacks and their dogs. But if it ever extends beyond this, all I can say is they are a greatly belied class.
It is a reproach to us that they are under no real supervision, and that nothing is done to raise them above their original condition, or rather that we have allowed them to sink still lower than they were when we first found thorn. Let anyone who doubts this visit the district, and he will hear nothing to controvert it, or to show that either chastity in the women nor temperance in either sex are to be regarded as virtues, or that anything is done to arrest their degradation.
The natives are, at least nominally, Christians, and in the census of the colony are assigned to the Established Church, but it would be interesting to know when they last received instruction of any sort. In this they are wholly neglected. It is idle excusing ourselves from these duties, by saying that they are intractable and incapable of receiving instruction. On the contrary, I know they are naturally acute, cheerful, and no less intelligent than ourselves.
At the time of their surrender they numbered about 250, of whom about fifteen-sixteenths have died in only 20 years, a most fearful mortality. A few births added a trifle to their numbers. There now remain only 16 of pure-blood and one half-caste—a female. Of the former there are four men, two boys, and ten women. The boys are about 15 years of age, and must have been born since the surrender of the race. So there remain, of all that Robinson gathered together, only 14. There are now no births, though some of both sexes have not passed the prime of life.
What a melancholy state of things these facts disclose. But passing these over, it is impossible to help inquiring what causes could have led to the premature decadence of that portion of this people who survived the calamities of war, and what reason can can be assigned for their infertility since falling into our hands.
To the first of these questions I have often thought it might be replied, forcing on them too suddenly our own habits, as if the savage could at once adapt himself to the ways of civilised life; in fact, requiring a people whose whole lives had been passed in the open air, to dwell as we dwell, and live as we live. Into this error Robinson himself fell, for when he first drew the Bruny Islanders together around his dwelling, several died almost directly.[2] He housed, or rather huddled them together in warm rooms, and required them to wear clothing. But doubtless, this partial confinement in an atmosphere too impure for them, and the too sudden restraint of the free use of their limbs, were wholly unsuited to their habits and constitutions, and, of course, when divested of these fatal comforts, colds, and the endless train of disorders that spring from them, sent them rapidly to the grave.
That so few births have happened since their captivity commenced (and even these appear now to have ceased) may perhaps be traced in some measure to the above causes, particularly to the entire change of habits. But if it is true, as I have repeatedly heard, that prostitution is commonly practised by the women, the chief cause of course lies here.
I have dwelt, perhaps, at too great length on the subject under review, but it is difficult to compress the account, of the condition of a people into a paragraph, and few, I hope, will begrudge the time expended on the perusal of this paper, who understand the duties of man to his fellows, and the consequent necessity of atoning for long neglect, even at this late hour, by future attention to their wants; for we cannot by mere maintenance in life repay the debt we owe a race whom we hare forcibly dispossessed of everything but mere existence. Other duties we are bound to take on ourselves, to improve the condition of the remnant whom time, war, and disease have left to our care, and by careful supervision to arrest the evils that are fast working out their extinction.
- ↑ I had not read the Aboriginal Committee's Report when I wrote this.
- ↑ In the original I said six, which number I took from the grave mounds that I saw in 1830. I had not then read Robinson's report, giving the correct number of deaths, namely, 22, so that many bodies must have been disposed of in other ways than by burial.