THE ABORIGINES.

LONG before this serious difficulties had arisen with the natives, a party of whom, something like five hundred strong including women and children, were engaged in hunting near Risdon when they were attacked by some white settlers, assisted by soldiers, and a great slaughter of the blacks ensued. One estimate carried the number of the dead as high as fifty. Naturally enough, the feelings of resentment and vindictiveness which this murderous outrage aroused in the minds of the aboriginal inhabitants of the island impelled them to acts of revenge; and these were still further stimulated by the cruel usage the unfortunate natives received at the hands of the convicts, who had been released from prison in order to hunt for kangaroos. Many of these lawless ruffians looked upon their dark-skinned brethren in the light of game, to be shot without compunction. "Black women were lured away," writes the latest historian of Tasmania, "babes were murdered, and maidens violated." Lieutenant-Governor Collins did his best to repress "the murders and abominable cruelties practised upon the natives by the white people;" but the means at his command were inadequate for the purpose, and his successors, Governors Davey, Sorell, and Arthur, issued proclamation after proclamation condemnatory of the atrocities perpetrated upon the blacks but they were impotent to restrain the savage propensities of country settlers, liberated convicts, sealers, and runaway sailors, who were beyond the reach of the law, and deaf to the voice of humanity. These shrank from no crime and recoiled from no cruelty. "The wounded were brained; the infant cast to the flames; the bayonet was driven into the flesh; the social fire round which the natives gathered to slumber, became before morning their funeral pile." If the women were spared, it was only to become the slaves and concubines of their ferocious captors. Goaded to desperation, the blacks retaliated with bloodshed, craft, and pillage; but, entertaining an awful horror of the darkness, they spent their nights around their watch fires, and thus exposed themselves to be surprised and butchered as they slept.

All attempts to put an end to this frightful state of things having proved abortive, martial law was proclaimed upon November 1st, 1828, and the Government offered a reward of five pounds for every adult and two pounds for every child captured without injury. Search parties were organised, one of which was led by John Batman, who afterwards became one of the founders of Melbourne, and a good many captures were effected; but, unfortunately, not without fatal conflicts. Finally, Governor Arthur ordered a military cordon to be drawn across the island from east to west, composed of eight hundred, soldiers, the police, upwards of seven hundred convict servants, and about fifteen civilians, and it was expected that by this means the blacks, retreating before the advance of the whites, would be driven into Tasman’s Peninsula. The undertaking cost upwards of sixty thousand pounds, and it resulted in the accidental capture of a man and a boy.

After the disastrous failure of this large enterprise, a poor bricklayer in Hobart Town, named George Augustus Robinson, animated by a noble enthusiasm for humanity, accepted an offer of one hundred pounds a year from the government to look after the interests of the natives. He went among them unarmed; travelled through the length and breadth of the island; exhibited an almost sublime courage in circumstances of extreme peril; won the confidence and respect of the most warlike of the blacks; and after walking four thousand miles over the wildest parts of the island, without shedding one drop of blood, he brought into an abode of peace and safety the desperate savages who had held the colony in terror. "Upwards of two hundred of the natives were placed under his protection upon Flinders Island where, unhappily, they withered away in spite of the kindly and considerate treatment they received." The settlement had been formed in 1835, and twelve years afterwards the blacks had dwindled down to forty-four persons. These were removed to Oyster Cove, on the mainland. On March 3rd, 1869, William Lanné, the last male survivor of the race, died in Hobart Town, at the early age of thirty-four, and on May 8th, 1876, Truganini, daughter of the chief of the once powerful Bruni Island tribe, was gathered to her fathers, and so passed away the last aboriginal inhabitant of Tasmania, the sole relict of an extinct people.

LIEUTENANT-GOVERNOR COLLINS died in Hobart Town on March 24th, 1810, and his successor, Lieutenant-Governor Davey, did not arrive until 1813. By this time the pursuits of husbandry and the active whale fisheries established in the neighbouring seas had brought a certain amount of prosperity; but the prosecution of agriculture was seriously impeded by a system of organised plunder and rapine carried on by gangs of armed bushrangers, who slaughtered sheep and cattle, and burned down the corn-stacks of the settlers. The governor was not only weak, but dissipated, and under his feeble rule there was a general relaxation of all the restraints of morality. Wives were a marketable commodity, for which sheep and rum were usually taken in exchange; government officials openly consorted with female convicts, and the condition of society was depraved in the extreme.

Lieutenant-Governor Colonel Sorell, who succeeded Davey, was a man of a different stamp, firm, sagacious, and energetic. By the vigour of his administration he all but suppressed bushranging. He encouraged immigration by grants of land and loans of stock and seed to eligible persons; and during his tenure of power three hundred lambs were imported into the island from Captain John Macarthur’s flock of merinos at Camden, New South Wales, and a few years afterwards the exportation of wool commenced. When Governor-General Macquarie visited the island in 1821, he found that it contained a population of seven thousand four hundred, of whom two thousand seven hundred were residents in Hobart Town and its immediate vicinity. There were fifteen thousand acres of land under cultivation, and the live stock comprised thirty-five thousand head of horned cattle, and one hundred and seventy thousand sheep. Religion and education were not uncared for; a newspaper had been started, and there was a fortnightly mail between Hobart Town and Launceston, which only occupied a week in the transit. A local court, with limited jurisdiction, had been established in 1816, in which laymen were allowed to plead; and it is interesting to find the name of John Pascoe Fawkner, one of the future pioneers of Port Phillip and founders of Melbourne, among those who were thus privileged to plead in the court at Launceston.

Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur was appointed lieutenant-governor of the colony, in succession to Colonel Sorell, in 1824, and appears to have rendered himself unpopular by the adoption of an arbitrary policy, unsuitable to a community which contained a considerable number of free settlers. About eighteen months after his arrival in Van Diemen’s Land it was proclaimed an independent colony, and the Imperial Government instituted Executive and Legislative Councils, with advisory and legislative functions. By dismissing a popular Attorney- General, and by straining every nerve to destroy the liberty of the press, Governor Arthur intensified his unpopularity; and as his power was almost absolute he was both hated and feared by a large section of the population. On the other hand he strove to the best of his ability to promote the cause of religion and education, and many churches and schools were established while he was at the head of affairs. The public finances were brought into a satisfactory condition, and after providing for an expenditure of something like fifty thousand pounds per annum, he was enabled to carry forward a surplus. For the better administration of justice he divided the island into police districts, with a stipendiary magistrate for each; but he caused the laws to be executed with a Draconic severity, which transformed wretched convicts —many of whom had been transported for trivial offences —into sullen madmen, or ferocious and revengeful devils. Men fled from the horrors of the penal settlement into the solitude of the bush, preferring to face a lingering death by starvation rather than undergo the tortures of the often repeated lash at the convict station. There is one well authenticated instance on record in which eight fugitives perished, with one exception, but not before some of them had murdered their companions in order to satisfy their own wolfish appetites. When the surviving member of the party surrendered himself, there was found upon him the flesh of his last companion, whom he had killed while asleep. In the year 1825, as many as one hundred escaped convicts with arms in their hands had re-established a reign of terror in the country districts, such as had prevailed in the time of Lieutenant-Governor Davey. Every lonely house was barricaded at night, and behind muskets, the muzzles of which glittered from small port holes, stood one or two of the inmates detailed to watch over the safety of the sleeping household. One desperado, Brady by name, at the head of a mounted gang captured the town of Sorell, seized the gaol, locked up the soldiers in one of the cells, and liberated the whole of the prisoners. At length it became a question whether law or lawlessness should triumph. Governor Arthur placed himself at the head of strong body of soldiers and civilians, and hunted the daring outlaws down. As many as one hundred and three persons underwent capital punishment in the years 1825 and 1826, and once more the plague of brigandage was stamped out.

It was about this time that the Van Diemen’s Land Company obtained its charter of incorporation from the Imperial Parliament, and received a grant of land comprising upwards of four hundred thousand acres in the north-western portion of the island, for which it was to pay an annual quit-rent of four hundred and sixty-eight pounds sixteen shillings, with the option of redeeming it at twenty years’ purchase. Banks were established in Hobart Town and Launceston, and the first land sales took place in the year 1828; but at so inconsiderable a price that seventy thousand acres alienated during the next two years, only yielded twenty thousand pounds to the Treasury. The system of issuing free grants came to an end in January, 1831.

The foundation of a settlement in Port Phillip by a number of the more energetic inhabitants of Launceston, as already described, re-acted most beneficially upon the prosperity of the northern portion of Van Diemen’s Land; and at the same time the development of its internal commerce and industry was materially promoted by the construction of roads, wharfs, bridges, and other public works, by convict labour. In place of a fortnightly mail between Hobart Town and Launceston, there was already a postal delivery in the two places twice a week in 1835, and the journey had been reduced from seven days to nineteen hours. The penal settlement at Macquarie Harbour had been relinquished, and the convicts were deported to Tasman’s Peninsula, with some important modifications of the brutal system of treatment to which they had previously been subjected.

The government of the island remained in the hands of Colonel Arthur for twelve years; and the Crown acknowledged the value of his services by creating him a baronet on his return to England, and by conferring on him the Governorship of Canada. Captain Sir John Franklin, who had served as signal- midshipman on board the "Bellerophon," in the ever-famous battle of Trafalgar, and had distinguished himself by his explorations in the Arctic Circle, was the next Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, where he arrived in January, 1837. The name of Sir John Franklin was already associated with some of the stirring episodes of modern English history, and the appointment of such a man was felt to be an honour to the colony. He had seen service at the battle of New Orleans in 1814, as well as at Trafalgar under Nelson; and in 1819 and 1824 he headed a hazardous exploratory expedition in the British territory, in North America. But these services were afterwards to be eclipsed by his expedition in the "Erebus " and "Terror" to the Arctic regions; and the story of his loss there is one of the most sensational tales of modern maritime adventure. He was Governor of Tasmania until 1843. One of his first acts was to give publicity to the proceedings of the Legislative Council; and the next was to endeavour to heal the discord of parties, by personal influence, tact, geniality, and conciliatory manners. In every effort that he made to promote the welfare of the dependency committed to his charge, Governor Franklin enjoyed the active sympathy and cordial co-operation of his admirable wife, whose interest in the material and intellectual progress of the colony was as ardent as his own. To numbers of even well informed persons in the old world the very name of this remote island was unfamiliar until it became associated with that of the illustrious navigator; and men of high scientific attainments began, from that, time, to exhibit a lively interest in a part of the world of which so little was actually known. Hither came John Gould, the ornithologist, whose great work on the "Birds of Australia" is monumental in its character. The French ships "Zele" and "Astrolabe" anchored in the Derwent, after exploring the Antarctic regions, and the officers and scientific leaders of the expedition were received with open arms by Sir John and Lady Franklin; who had also the gratification of welcoming Captains Ross and Crosier, and Dr. Hooker, the great botanist, when the "Erebus" and "Terror" put into Hobart Town, in November, 1840, after their Antarctic voyage. Hither also came that undaunted explorer, Count Strzlecki, a Polish nobleman, who was one of the earliest to discover and describe some of the more remarkable of the geographical and geological features of the interior of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. And lastly must be noted the arrival in the Derwent, on February, 6th, 1836, of a vessel engaged in making a scientific voyage round the world, one of its staff of observers being a young man named Charles Darwin, whose researches and conclusions were destined to revolutionise the science of biology.

Sir John Franklin was replaced in the government of the colony by Sir John Eardley Wilmot, on August 21st, 1841. He assumed his responsible position under circumstances calculated to test the wisdom and try the temper of an administrator of great experience; while he had none, except what had been acquired in connection with legislative business and with county affairs in the mother country. Shortly after his appointment to the Governorship of Van Diemen’s Land, the penal settlement in Norfolk Island had been constituted a dependency of the former; and the most depraved, desperate, and irreclaimable of the convicts had been herded together on that beautiful spot. It would be difficult to exaggerate the horrors perpetrated by such a "pestilent congregation" of criminals of the deepest dye. To attempt to describe them would require the pen of the austere Florentine, who saw in imagination the appalling spectacle of the Malebolge. There were two thousand prisoners concentrated in Norfolk Island in the year 1845, under the nominal rule of a superintendent who is alleged to have been stern, merciless, and cruel in the exercise of the authority entrusted to him. He had men to deal with in whom the passions of the wild beast were intermingled with the vicious instincts and brutal propensities of human nature when it has cast off all restraints of morality and conscience, and is in open revolt against all laws of God and man; no man could be less fitted for the task, and he used the lash and various forms of torture with a frequency and severity which failed to break the spirit of the criminals he endeavoured to tame, while it aggravated the ferocity of their natures, made them more desperate and defiant, and caused them to redouble their iniquitous practices, by way of scornful protest against the maltreatment they received. The result was the prevalence of a state of things upon the island, which in its unexampled misery and horror it would be impossible to find adequate words to describe. The Imperial Government happening to learn what a pandemonium Norfolk Island had become, determined upon putting an end to it, and Governor Wilmot received instructions for the immediate transfer of the establishment to Port Arthur. This was eventually effected, the former superintendent being most unwisely appointed commandant; and he, himself, it may be mentioned, was afterwards murdered by some infuriated convicts at Williamstown in Victoria.

A turning point had now arrived in the history of Van Diemen’s Land; and its free population found itself confronted by two alternatives. Either it must consent to succumb to, and to be overwhelmed by the criminal and servile element —for there were upwards of twenty gangs of "probationers," numbering from one hundred to five hundred each, working in different parts of the colony —or it must resolve, as it soon afterwards did, that transportation should cease. Up to this time the Imperial Government had been expending the sum of three hundred thousand pounds per annum on the maintenance of its penal establishments; but the Secretary of State for the Colonies was bent upon cutting this item down and upon rendering those establishments self-supporting, at any rate to some extent. Instead of making roads and executing public works, as heretofore, the convicts were employed in clearing and cultivating land; and the crops thus raised were consumed as food by themselves, and the surplus sold to the detriment of the farmers, who were not only deprived of the market they formerly enjoyed, but were subject to a disastrous competition. Agricultural industry received a severe check; the revenue from the sale of Crown Lands dwindled down to almost nothing; the country was in debt; and fresh sources of taxation had to be sought for. The Legislative Council was composed in part of nominee and in part of representative members; and six of them resigned their seats rather than acquiesce in the imposition of fresh burdens upon the people under an irresponsible system of government, and as an emphatic protest against the unconstitutional conduct of the Governor in borrowing money from the banks, and spending it without the consent of the legislative body. In the following year (1846) Sir Eardley Wilmot was recalled by Mr. Gladstone, who explained that he had adopted this course, "not on account of any errors committed by the Governor in his official capacity, but because rumours reflecting upon his moral character had reached the Colonial Office." Mr. Gladstone refused to give the names of his informants, but judging from the concurrent testimony of the Bishop, the Chief Justice, and those who enjoyed the best opportunity of studying the character and conduct of Sir Eardley Wilmot, he had been grossly calumniated by his anonymous traducers. He died eight days after the landing of Governor Denison, and his funeral called forth a striking demonstration of the esteem and respect in which he was personally held by many of those whom he had ceased to rule.

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