Some Account of the Wars, Extirpation, Habits, &c., of the Native Tribes of Tasmania/The Early Years of the Last of the Tasmanians
THE EARLY YEARS
OF THE
LAST OF THE TASMANIANS.
"All perished—I alone am left on earth
To whom nor relative nor blood remains,
No—not a kindred drop that runs in human veins."
The following is M'Kay's account of some passages in the life of this woman—the last of her race—as communicated to him by herself:—
"On the 16th or thereabouts, of January, 1830, I first saw Truganini, we took her, also her husband, and two of his boys by a former wife, and two other women, the remains of the tribe of Bruny Island, when I went with Mr. Robinson round the island. I think she was about 18 years of age, her father was chief of Bruny Island, name Mangana. She had an uncle, I don't know his native name, the white people called him Boomer, he was shot by a soldier. I will now give you some of her own account of what she knew:—We were camped close to Partridge Island when I was a little girl, when a vessel came to anchor without our knowledge of it, a boat came on shore, and some of the men attacked our camp. We all ran away, but one of them caught my mother, and stabbed her with a knife, and killed her. My father grieved much about her death, and used to make a fire at night by himself, when my mother would come to him. I had a sister named Moorina; she was taken away by a sealing boat. I used to go to Birch's Bay; there was a party of men cutting timber for the Government there, the overseer was Mr. Munro; while I was there two young men of my tribe came for me, one of them was to have been my husband, his name was Paraweena. Well, two of the sawyers said they would take us in a boat to Bruny Island, which we argeed to. When we got about half-way across the Channel, they murdered the two natives, and threw them overboard, but one of them held me. Their names were Watkin Lowe and Paddy Newell, this was the account she gave me many times."
For the use of those who may not be well acquainted with the places named in the previous note; or whose recollections may not extend back very far, I beg to supply a few particulars:—At the time when M'Kay became acquainted with the woman he writes about, the Bruny Island tribe was reduced to six persons. It was formerly a very numerous one, and only six mouths before was probably eight or ten times as strong as in January of 1830. Disease, which had been thining our natives for years past, was peculiarly fatal at the time M'Kay writes of and afterwards. According to one of Robinson's reports, dated 23rd of September, 1829, no fewer than twenty-two of this tribe had died in the preceding fifteen weeks, or about three a fortnight; but of those who went off between September and January there is no report.
To most readers residing in the South, I presume it will be known that Partridge Island is in D'Entrecasteaux Channel, very close to one of the points of South Bruny, and about forty miles from Hobart Town. It was so named by Admiral Bruny D'Entrecasteaux. When I first knew it, 1830, it was generally called Santo's Island, why, I know not. It has now recovered its proper name. Birch's Bay is also in this Channel, where there was formerly a large Government sawing establishment. The overseer, as Truganini styles Mr. Peter Munro, who was the superintendent of the establishment, a designation, which in the Governmental service meant something very much above an overseer. I knew him well and a most excellent and gentlemanly person he was.
M'Kay, who writes but seldom—like most to whom writing is troublesome—is less communicative with his pen than his tongue. I shall therefore supply anything that he has omitted from his note, from his conversations with me about the savage butchery of these striplings; to which I shall add what I knew of the vagabond Lowe, who I will venture to say, was the originator of these murders.
When these men had conveyed the two youths and the girl about half way across the Channel, which may be a mile and a half wide hereabouts, the horrible tragedy commenced by the two boatmen throwing both the young fellows into the water. Directly they were overboard and the girl secured, they took to to their oars, and using all their strength, they pulled away from them, leaving them either to drown or to regain the land if they could. But the young blacks were both fast swimmers, and overhauled the boat before she had much way on her, and laying hold of the gunwales tried to get in again; but this was most effectually prevented by one of the boatmen seizing a hatchet and chopping off their hands near the wrist, in which disabled state the poor creatures went down, and the murderers got clear off with their prize—the poor girl—who had just witnessed the shocking massacre of her young companions.
But as legal punishment never overtook a white man for the murder of an aboriginal, so these homicides escaped; neglect, or a combination of lucky circumstances, always interposed to prevent enquiry. The girl could not then speak a word of English, and as the murderers kept silence nothing was ever known of this infernal transaction, until she first revealed it to M'Kay, but not until the men had escaped, and could not be brought to trial, if that would have availed anything at the time.
Newell must have been as depraved a felon as Lowe, but as I knew something of the latter, and not of the other, I can only speak decisively of Lowe. He was one of those fellows having no higher aspirations than to be thought a clever scoundrel, and he gloried in the reputation which his evil deeds had acquired for him. He was a perfect master of villany in whatever shape it was to be achieved, and the practice of knavery was the business of his life.
It is now more than forty years since I knew him, loafing about a district with not a dozen persons in it, and where it might have been thought there was little opening for the exercise of such talents as his. But he found a way to employ them, and carried desolation to one hearth. His final act in the colony, after becoming free, was quite of a piece with all his antecedent practices.
At the time I am speaking of, Hobart Town was as much defiled by the presence of a low class of usurers as the holy temple itself eighteen or nineteen centuries before. No risk was too great for these worthies. Money was often obtainable on the most questionable security, but at such an enormous rate of interest as must have contemplated an occasional default.
Lowe, who had been in every gaol and chain gang of the colony, was heartily sick of Tasmania by the time his original and cumulative sentences had expired, and he longed to return home. But as he had not a shilling some device had to be hit on, whereby money enough could be raised to pay his passage, and which a fellow so gifted as he, was not slow to discover.
Clever and keen as money lenders are reputed to be, it struck Lowe that there must be some way of doing them, and a bright idea flashed upon him, "all of a moment," as he afterwards expressed it, that eventually enabled him to pluck one of them quite to his mind.
To this end he either wrote a letter, or got some convict law clerk to do it for him, addressed to himself, purporting to be written by the executors of a lately deceased person. This letter, after acquainting him that a rich uncle of his had given up the ghost, proceeded to congratulate the fortunate Mr. Lowe on his accession to a considerable fortune, and concluded by advising either his immediate return to England with the necessary credentials of identity, or to forward a power of attorney to some friend to act for him, &c., &c. The letter was entrusted to a seaman in the plot who was returning to England, by whom it was posted in London, and in due time it reached the hands of the quondam convict, and incredible as it may appear to us now, he actually found someone to advance a good sum on the faith of this letter of advice, and Lowe having given the necessary acknowledgement of indebtedness, took ship to England, and has never been heard of from that day to this.
Since the foregoing narrative of the early history of the woman Truganini—the very last of the aboriginal people of Tasmania—went to the press, she too has "gone to her long home," having died on Tuesday the 8th of May, 1876, at the age of about sixty-four.
As it will be found in another part of this history of the extermination of the blacks, she was one of those whom Mr Robinson employed to induce them to surrender, and whom he never could have subdued but for her and a few others of her race. To him it undoubtedly is that the merit belongs of devising and executing the plans that led to their removal from the mainland of Tasmania; but to others, and chiefly Truganini, was entrusted the perilous duty of negotiating with the tribes to lay down their arms, and submit themselves to the paternal custody, such as it proved to be, of a Government happily long since extinct.
I hope there are none amongst the readers of this narrative who have not perceived, that in the performance of the task thus assigned her, she was powerless to evade it. Acting under the guidance of a man who, astute as he naturally was, was himself greviously deceived by false representations of the ulterior designs of the Government on the liberties of this people, which were doubtlessly communicated to his employees, she followed his leading almost necessarily. To this it has to be added, that he had acquired an ascendancy so complete over those of these simple minded savages whom he had subdued to his service, as to have left them almost literally without the faculty of volition. Hence he often urged them on enterprises of danger that they would have willingly evaded, had it been permitted them to consult their own inclinations. In several of his official reports, he acknowledges engaging them in embassies so fraught with peril, that death seemed the certain consequence of their obedience. All his interviews with the still unsubdued tribes, were preceded by negotiations first opened by his "friendly natives," as he calls these humble agents, in which Truganini took so prominent a part, that it is said when the deluded blacks found themselves prisoners, they often taunted her with being the author of their downfall. (See Tasmanian Tribune, 9th of May, 1876). But the poor woman could have had no idea of the doom that awaited them.
To other services this community, and prominently Robinson himself, owed this last survivor of a now wholly extinct nation, was his own preservation from death in the midst of his useful career; when she displayed such courage as was creditable to her in a very high degree. The details of this adventure, where these two, after a savage assault on the lives of their party by a horde of infuriated blacks, were separated from the others and driven into the Arthur River, where but for her he must have perished, are given in a former page. In his official reports of this repulse, he does not indicate the woman who preserved him; but in his private conversations he always named her as the one to whom he owed his escape. Of those to whom he related it some are still in life.
The age of Truganini has been recently computed to be seventy-three; but this is a mistake for she was not nearly so old. At the time of her capture, 16th of January, 1830, she was only about eighteen, which fixes he birth, approximately, at 1812. Her age was therefore but little over sixty-four. Her birth, it may be presumed, happened when Colonel Andrew Geils administered the Government of Tasmania.
Throughout this history, wherever her name occurs, I have adopted the orthography of Robinson, namely, Truganini. But I have lately been informed by Mr. J. W. Graves, who has paid particular attention to her own pronunciation of it, that it should be spelled Trucanini, which is the term by which her tribe designated a plant found by the sea side, which we call barilla.