Van Diemen’s Land
Van Diemen’s Land is a fresh and sparkling account of
the first generation of British settlement in Tasmania that also
makes an important contribution to Australian colonial
historiography. The product of seven years’ research and writing,
and a longer time talking about and walking across the island, it
focuses attention and admiration on the convicts and their children
- Tasmania’s founding mothers and fathers.
The book bears some of the characteristic signs of an adapted
doctoral thesis. Attached to the main body is a 56-page section on
the Aborigines, anomalously called an appendix, which many readers
will find the most important part of the book.
The material was added to the original thesis both because of
current interest in the subject and James Boyce’s important
contribution to the debate that followed the publication of Keith
Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History in 2002
and the answering Whitewash edited by Robert Manne the following
year.
Boyce follows the well-travelled interpretive track cut in the
19th century by historians John West, James Bonwick and James
Erskine Calder that Windschuttle quixotically assailed.
With such depth of research behind him, Boyce bolsters that
tradition while adding colour and nuance and along the way posing
questions that we still find troubling. He has no doubts about the
violence that accompanied the Black War in Tasmania and if anything
believes that traditional accounts “probably underestimate
fatalities”.
He extends the duration of the “Killing Times” to take in the
early 1820s and importantly amends the accepted view that the
settlers were no match for the Aborigines in the bush.
He argues, I think convincingly, that the frontier stockmen,
shepherds and hunters had, over the first 20 years of settlement,
acquired the bushcraft to seriously threaten the Aboriginal bands.
By the 1820s these men “knew the Aboriginal seasonal gathering
places, camping sites and movements and paths that ran between
them. Aboriginal communities that still included small children,
pregnant women and the elderly were highly vulnerable to armed
parties guided by such men”.
Boyce discounts the impact of disease in the destruction of
Aboriginal society before the 1830s, observing that there are
literally no accounts of sickness in the records of the
colonists.
The policies of the administration of Governor Arthur are also
examined anew, Boyce reminding us that at one time, serious
consideration was given to partitioning the island, giving over a
“remote quarter of the island” to the Aborigines, a proposal that
had the potential to provide “an alternative model of Australian
land settlement”.
But intensifying conflict overtook the policy and eventually the
momentous decision was taken to exile the surviving Aborigines to
Flinders Island. Boyce argues that the remaining bands in the
eastern half of the island had entered into negotiation with G. A.
Robinson and Governor Arthur and had been assured that their
sojourn in Bass Strait would be a short prelude to their return to
their homelands.
“As the Aborigines sailed from Hobart Town in early 1832, they
undoubtedly believed that their time on Flinders Island would be
short.”
Arthur’s desire to remove the hostile bands was, at least,
understandable but Boyce turns his attention to the much more
questionable policy towards the tribes on the West Coast who were
still largely undisturbed and whose country was largely unknown to
and of little interest to the settlers. This was an entirely
different matter - much harder to justify either morally or
legally.
“There was no economic justification for the forced removal that
made it unique among the tragedies experienced by indigenous people
during the 19th century,” he writes.
Boyce considers the question of why there was such a strong
desire for the settlers to have an island free of Aborigines . . .
to ethnically cleanse the whole colony. It was an objective admired
by the young Charles Darwin who, when visiting the island in 1836,
observed that the colonists enjoyed the great advantage of being
“free from a native population”.
In asking these questions Boyce brings us to the heart of the
desire expressed all over Australia to be rid of the Aboriginal
presence - overtaken in the late 19th century by the certainty that
nature herself was sweeping them away following the iron laws of
evolution. All too often settlers expressed the view that only with
the “passing” of the Aborigines would the process of colonisation
be complete.
While Boyce has important things to say about the tragic fate of
Tasmania’s Aboriginal tribes, the central focus of the book is on
the first generation of the overwhelmingly convict settlers and
their adaption to the island environment that, with its mild
climate and abundant resources, was “a veritable Eden” - far more
welcoming and amenable than the land around Sydney.
He argues cogently that there needs to be two quite different
narratives about the original colonisation of Eastern Australia,
explaining that “how the early British settlers of Van Diemen’s
Land experienced the Australian continent is thus greatly at
variance with the standard opening of the national story”. The Van
Diemonian convict settlers were, indeed, Australia’s first
successful hunters, pastoralists and colonisers of the bush, which,
with its abundant wildlife and fresh water, provided the convicts
with a vast common where they could escape the constraints of life
under the surveillance of police and soldiers a generation before
Russel Ward’s nomad tribe traversed the outback of New South
Wales.
The hills, mountains and sea-shore “ensured a sanctuary for the
poor where a degree of independence and freedom could long be
maintained”. That freedom, once gained, could never be totally
rescinded by the free settlers or the governments they dominated.
The old spirit of Van Diemen’s Land lived on.
Boyce is unashamedly an island patriot who celebrates those
aspects of the past that were long shunned as being part of the
hated stain of convictism. The convict pioneers were the first to
illustrate the fact that, as Boyce recently told The Mercury
newspaper in Hobart, “there is something distinctive about this
land that people connect and belong to”.
Henry Reynolds holds a Personal Chair in History and
Aboriginal Studies at the University of Tasmania. He is co-author
with Marilyn Lake of Drawing the Global Colour Line, to be
published next month by Melbourne University Press.
