Beyond Awkening by Ian McFarlane

Beyond Awakening: The Aboriginal Tribes of North West Tasmania: A History,

by Ian McFarlane;

Fullers Bookshop, Riawunna and University of Tasmania, 2008.

The biggest enemy of truth isn’t the lie, it’s the myth!

—The West Wing

The writing of Tasmania’s history has now deteriorated into a formula not dissimilar to Midsomer Murders. Scholarship has been replaced by scriptwriters locked into the same old cast of characters, the same old set-piece plots, the same old locations and the same old ideology-driven notions of an island steeped in murder, massacres and genocide. Indeed the latest three episodes of Midsomer Murders almost sum up the present academic mindset on Tasmanian history—Episode 57, A Picture of Innocence; Episode 55, The Axeman Cometh; Episode 56, Death and Dust.

The issue is not that terrible conflicts and appalling acts didn’t arise between black and white people in colonial Tasmania (they certainly did); the issue is whether we are being told the truth about those conflicts, whether history is being altered by omission or manipulation and whether the dignity and reputation of both Tasmanian Aborigines and white settlers is being defamed and belittled in the process.

Tasmania is “Exhibit A” in the court of intellectual public opinion, both locally and internationally as far as many historians, authors and journalists are concerned. In the words of the Australian art historian Robert Hughes (author of The Fatal Shore), “Tasmania … was the only true genocide in English colonial history”.

So the stakes are extremely high. Nail Tasmania for genocide and you’ve got the British cornered. Get Tasmania and you have got a “guilty” Australia. Yes, there is fame, promotion and celebrity in kicking Tasmania in the groin.

The simplistic version of Tasmania’s past is that:           

• Tasmania was “invaded” by the British, for mass settlement.

• Aboriginal people were not part of the settlement process.

• The white settlers were racists, and ethnic killers.

• Genocide was committed against the Aboriginal population.

Ian McFarlane’s Beyond Awakening examines the fate of the Aboriginal tribes of North-West Tasmania in eight chapters—the main focus being the period between the discovery of Bass Strait in 1798 and the “round-up” of tribal Aborigines by the bounty hunter George Augustus Robinson, from about 1830 to 1835. Sandwiched between these events are the activities of the Van Diemen’s Land Company, established in London for the purpose of growing fine Saxon wool. The initial promise to the VDL Co by the British government was 250,000 acres in “unsettled areas” of Tasmania.

Chapter One of Beyond Awakening is a brief crisp overview of Tasmanian Aboriginal society in the early part of the nineteenth century. At this time it is thought that there were forty-eight or so Aboriginal family bands that made up the nine tribe/language groups of Tasmania. Each band may have had between thirty and fifty people; perhaps half the number were adult and half were children. (Various speculative guesses suggest a total population of between 2000 and 4000.)

We are told by McFarlane that the Aboriginal people of Tasmania built substantial huts, travelled from area to area, exploited the shoreline seafood and hunted sections of regularly burnt grasslands for kangaroo and emu. In this chapter he dispels myths of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people being unable to make fire (they constantly carried firesticks), by showing examples of their “fire drills and socket sticks”, and he questions the notion that they stopped eating scaled fish 6000 years ago.

McFarlane states that Tasmanian Aboriginal people “didn’t have the same religious connections to the land” as their mainland counterparts (which is rather surprising) but goes on to say that they had “an unswerving attachment and loyalty to their land”. McFarlane tells us that the pre-colonial Tasmanians didn’t practise circumcision, they cremated their dead and were strictly monogamous.

Against the charge that the men traded their women to white sealers (for dogs, flour or sugar) he strangely quotes the explorer Jorgensen’s account of an Aboriginal couple found guilty of adultery. They were sentenced to death by the chief, who ordered “the adulterer [the man], to be speared by the tribe … [then] the husband [of the adulteress] was ordered to beat her brains out with waddies, which was punctually executed”.

It is only when you move on to Chapter Two (“First Contact”) of Beyond Awakening that the style begins to change from a robust historical account to the familiar tone of the PAM (Present Academic Mindset). The first “article of faith” for PAM is to present the British in the worst possible light, and Ian McFarlane does this well.

In 1802 the Governor of New South Wales, Captain Philip King, became aware of three French ships snooping about Bass Strait and Tasmania under the command of the French explorer Nicolas Baudin. He feared the French would seize Van Diemen’s Land for France.

McFarlane would have us believe that the British concern about the French presence was “paranoia”, and in McFarlane’s words, “Baudin’s [expedition] was one of pure scientific enquiry, neither an instrument of French colonial ambitions, nor any element of any of the Napoleonic intrigues suspected by Governor King”. Enter the second PAM “article of faith”—don’t include any facts that might blur the issue. It is worth lingering here a little to consider French ambitions, and their conduct, at this time.

Baudin’s expedition came within eleven years of the terror of the French Revolution when nearly 500,000 French citizens died at the hands of the Jacobins and the military. Baudin’s expedition was within three years of Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt—an invasion dressed up as a “scientific expedition” whereby 40,000 French troops, “supported” by 167 French scientists, conquered Egypt. (They invaded Malta and ransacked Valletta en route, installing a French administration and looting the island’s treasury and food supply.)

Thousands died as the result of Bonaparte’s activities in Egypt. On his march from Alexandria to Cairo, in just one village alone 900 men were slaughtered “to teach the indigenous population a lesson”. The French managed to kill 6000 Muslims at the Battle of the Pyramids and desecrate and sack Cairo’s great mosque. Two hundred Egyptian men were executed, and their village burnt to the ground, for killing one French soldier. For a period, Bonaparte ordered five or six Egyptians beheaded daily in the streets of Cairo to “maintain order”.

Following a rebellion by Muslim elders, Bonaparte had these men, singly, taken into a courtyard in The Citadel. The executioner approached each prisoner and threw sand into his eyes. As the prisoner raised his hands and lower his head to clear the sand, a sword swiftly beheaded the victim. About 300 were executed this way, their bodies then tossed into the Nile.

His work done in Egypt, Bonaparte moved on to Palestine and Syria. Jaffa fell in three hours. French troops were then allowed to undertake a “Napoleonic massacre” which lasted between two and four days. One French observer described the massacre as “ecstasy of blood, the frenzy of rape and the fever of loot”. About 2000 people, mostly civilians, were slaughtered. Bonaparte then ordered the Jaffa garrison, which had been offered prisoner-of-war status (about 3000 men), executed on the beach south of Jaffa by two battalions of French soldiers using mainly bayonets (to conserve ammunition).

In Beyond Awakening, Ian McFarlane endeavours to compare the “compassionate” French with “Perfidious Albion”. He tells us that Baudin sent a letter to Governor King in Sydney stating:

“To my way of thinking I have never been able to conceive that there was any justice or equity on the part of Europeans, in seizing in the name of their governments, a land for the first time, when it is inhabited by men who have not always deserved the title of savages.”

King would have been more concerned about French intentions than platitudes. Baudin had renamed southern Australia “Terre Napoleon”, Baudin’s expedition had been commissioned by Bonaparte himself, and Baudin had challenged British sovereignty over “New Holland”.

Compared to the French conquest of Egypt, the British arrival in Tasmania, four years later, was a timid affair. Instead of over 40,000 French troops and 300 ships (which included thirteen battleships, forty-two frigates and 130 naval transports), Governor King’s “invasion”, sent south from Sydney in August 1803, comprised two small vessels under the command of Lieutenant Bowen to establish an outpost at Risdon Cove, near the future site of Hobart. The party consisted of forty-nine people.

Five months later, in February 1804, Lieutenant-Colonel David Collins arrived at Risdon Cove with quite a few less than the 400 convicts and soldiers he had set out from England with in the Calcutta the year before. He had been ordered to start an outpost in Port Phillip Bay. It proved such a disaster, with so many dying, that he moved south to Van Diemen’s Land and joined Bowen. Towards the end of 1804 Governor King sent Lieutenant Paterson to the Tamar River, in northern Tasmania, with 181 people, seventy-four of whom were convicts. In reality, Tasmania was originally occupied as a foil to French territorial ambitions, then as a convict outpost, to replace the notorious prison on Norfolk Island.

Any notion that Governor King (or indeed the British government) intended to “settle” Tasmania and convert it into a vast agricultural colony, at this stage, is complete nonsense. No one had any concept of the island’s fertile interior or knew anything about the island except for its potential timber and the rich seal herds on the coastal islands. The interior was a total mystery. What was to happen over the next thirty years was a “cascade of events” rather than any concerted plot to wipe out the Tasmanian Aboriginal population and replace them with British settlers.

Chapter Four of Beyond Awakening is entitled “Van Diemen’s Land Company Genocide”. The impression created in the book is that the period from 1827 to 1842 saw the organised extermination of the northern Peerappeer and Tommeginne tribes. In McFarlane’s sights is Edward Curr, the local manager of the Van Diemen’s Land Co. But McFarlane fails to make his case.

You cannot turn crass nineteenth-century frontier violence into “genocide”, a crime invented in 1941, and adopted by the UN in 1948 as a result of the Nazi Holocaust. To do so degrades the Tasmanian Aborigines into helpless victims, which they weren’t, and diminishes the enormity of Hitler’s Final Solution.

It is at this juncture that things become slightly fog-bound, although documentary evidence paints a general picture of the situation in Tasmania between 1824 and 1830. From the Aboriginal side, during this period, they undertook 729 attacks on whites or their property. During these incidents 187 whites were killed and 211 were wounded. Over 320 dwellings were plundered, thirty-two set on fire.

In defence or in retaliation (following attacks), the most credible research suggests 118 Aboriginals were killed by whites and an unknown number wounded. A small number of these killings were unprovoked and can be classed as murder. Of this total of 118 about fourteen occurred in the region of the VDL Co between 1829 and 1839, although present-day historians like to claim evidence of over fifty deaths. This centres on the highly disputed “Cape Grim massacre” and the word of a fairly unsavoury character.

Much of McFarlane’s evidence comes from the diaries of George Augustus Robinson, who, for considerable fees and promises of grants of land for himself, deceived the northern tribes, and others, into moving to Flinders Island. This proved to be a catastrophic enterprise.

In Chapter Eight Beyond Awakening recovers some ground in telling the tragic story of Pervay and Timme, two northern Tasmanian Aborigines, taken by Robinson to Port Phillip (Melbourne) in 1839. (His work done in Tasmania, Robinson had secured a contract to become Chief Protector of Aborigines in Port Phillip, for the handsome salary of 500 pounds a year.)

Robinson’s base was the present site of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens where he employed four white Assistant Protectors and his Van Diemen’s Land Aboriginal “comrades”. These were Pervay, his wife Fanny, Timme and the famous Truganini, who all worked with Robinson as interpreters and negotiators until 1841 when the funding for the Aborigines’ expenses ran out.

Robinson, not prepared to use any of his own money, advised Superintendent (later Governor) La Trobe that “he wanted to get rid of them”. Sensing they were about to be dumped, Pervay gathered his group, including an Oyster Bay woman called Matilda, and “went bush”. They became outlaws, robbing settlers’ houses and causing general mayhem in the Port Phillip region.

In October 1841 they were captured by a police party and confessed to shooting four men and committing nine robberies. In their possession were five single-barrelled and three double-barrelled guns, four pistols and a spring-loaded bayonet. At their trial they were defended by the Irish lawyer Redmond Barry, who was later to be the judge at the Eureka Stockade treason trials in 1855, and the trial of Ned Kelly in 1880.

Pervay (also known as Napoleon) and Timme were found guilty and sentenced to death. The women were set free. According to Ian McFarlane, “Pervay, who slept soundly, ate a hearty breakfast of 3 pounds of bread, three panikins of tea, lit his pipe then laughed, snapped his fingers and shouted that he ‘didn’t give a fig for anything’.” Timme was inundated by ministers of religion who wished to save his soul.

About 5000 people came to see Melbourne’s first execution. The two prisoners, dressed entirely in white, arrived by cart, attended by a company of soldiers with fixed bayonets. A newly constructed gallows stood outside the Melbourne jail.

Beyond Awakening’s weakness seems to stem from its beginnings as a university thesis—with all the political correctness and Present Academic Mindset that that entails. Ian McFarlane’s first and last chapters justify the purchase of this book for all who are interested in Tasmanian history—and can sort out political spin.

But a comprehensive history of the Aboriginal tribes of Tasmania has yet to fully unfold. Their part in the colonial experience deserves more than being presented as mere victims. Timme, Truganini, Pervay, William Lanney, Dolly Dalrymple, Fanny Cochrane-Smith and the hundreds of other Tasmanian Aborigines who lived in these times were no sissies. They knew who and what they were—and what was going on.

And the 13,000 to 16,000 Tasmanian people who today proclaim Aboriginality cannot disclaim their European heritage either, as it is part of their being. They have been ill-served by academics and writers who promote resentment and malice, which, now so firmly instilled, will most likely ferment for generations.