I whakaputahia tuatahia tēnei atikara e NITV i Ahitereiria
Warning: this article describes historical atrocities and may be distressing to some readers.
It remains to this day the largest domestic military offensive in Australia’s history.
The scale of the gathering was unprecedented: Some 540 military personnel of all ranks - a little over half of the entire military garrison in Van Diemen’s Land - around 700 convicts and almost 1000 free settlers, police and civilians.
In total, some 2,200 men under military command, about 10 per cent of the entire population of Van Dieman’s Land. Between them they carried 1000 ‘stand of arms’, 30,000 rounds of ammunition and 300 pairs of handcuffs.
The purpose of this ‘force’ was to drive four of the nine Tasmanian Aboriginal nations from their homelands – forcing them to another part of the island - and bring an end to ‘The Black War’ which raged across Lutruwita (Tasmania) from the mid-1820s to 1832.
‘The Black War’ had been a sustained guerrilla campaign since the mid-1820s by the Palawa clans within the Oyster Bay, Big River, North Midlands and Mt Ben Lomond regions against the rapidly increasing number of European settlers in the colony’s central and eastern Midlands.
As the European population grew, land grants for farming expanded along the colony’s major rivers, the Derwent, Clyde, Jordan, Coal and Ouse. These areas became known as the ‘settled districts’.
Conflict intensified over the seizure of Country, the loss of hunting grounds, and the kidnapping and abuse of women and children and the killing of palawa (Aboriginal) men.
Outnumbered and outgunned, the palawa fought back hard.
Under leaders and warriors like Montpeliater (of the Big River people), Tukalunginta (also known as Tongerlongeter of the Oyster Bay region) and Mannalargenna, Umarrah, and Kickerterpoller, Kallerromter, Maccamee, Wareternatterlargener (the North Midlands and Ben Lomond/Oyster Bay regions), they fiercely defended the invasion of their Country.
It was this resistance – this defence against invasion - that is known as ‘The Black War.’ (The term ‘black war’ and ‘black line’ were coined by journalist and historian Henry Melville in 1835.)
Historian Dr Nicholas Clements from the University of Tasmania describes Tasmania’s Black War as the most intense frontier conflict and one of the bloodiest chapters in Australian history.
“As more and more colonists flooded in, palawa attacks soared from 20 in 1824 to 259 in 1830,” he said.
“War parties torched dozens of properties, plundered hundreds of homes and speared thousands of sheep and cattle; even more devastating was the human toll: 223 colonists killed and 226 wounded.”
Setting an example with ‘British justice’
Seven years earlier, in November 1823, George Arthur (the Lieutenant-Governor of Van Dieman’s Land) had deployed different strategies to force the palawa nations to surrender and vacate their homelands in these ‘settled districts.’
Initially, Arthur had treated them as common criminals by sending out police patrols to track down and arrest individual Palawa accused of killing settlers.
As a deterrent to the others, he brought four Aboriginal men before the courts in 1825 and 1826 and upon their conviction, publicly hanged them.
On 25 February 1825 in the Hobart Town Gaol, two men - known only by the nicknames Musquito and Black Jack - were hanged, alongside six white bushrangers.
Black Jack was from the Oyster Bay tribe, while Musquito (c.1780–1825) was born in the Sydney basin and would later join local palawa groups - including the Oyster Bay tribe - and led strategic, armed guerrilla resistance against abusive stock-keepers and expanding colonial outposts.
In September 1826, two more Oyster Bay men, ‘Jack’ and ‘Dick’, were convicted of murder and hanged.
Lieutenant-Governor Arthur declared these hangings were intended to set an example.
However, these measures failed to quell the attacks, and after the executions, palawa attacks on settlers escalated, and the four hangings became a turning point in the Black War.
In November 1826, Arthur declared all palawa resistance fighters to be ‘insurgents’ and authorised the police magistrates to respond to their attacks by sending out armed parties of soldiers and police to ambush them at their camps at night or early morning and force their surrender.
“Many were shot on sight, including women and children.”
He issued a government notice authorising settlers, pastoralists, and convicts to kill Aboriginal people if and when they threatened or attacked their cattle and properties.
Undaunted, bands of Palawa warriors continued to attack settler properties.
During the summer of 1826-27, clans of the Oyster Bay region joined those in the Big River and North Midlands districts, and more than twenty raids were carried out in October 1828 alone.
By November 1828, the fighting had become so ferocious that Arthur was forced to declare martial law in the settled districts. He termed martial law “carrying on military operations against the Natives”, and it was to remain in effect “until the cessation of hostilities”.
This meant that soldiers and police could raid palawa camps without provocation to arrest and detain any people they found. Many were shot on sight, including women and children, leading to further escalations in retaliatory violence.
By the winter of 1829, the region had become a ‘war’ zone.
According to the late historian Lyndall Ryan, over the next two years ‘more than 400 Aborigines were killed by these measures.’
Now the Palawa were defined as ‘‘open enemies’’ of the British state and could be tracked down by specially formed pursuing parties and killed with impunity. (No colonist was ever tried or executed for killing an Aboriginal person in Tasmania.)
However, as an encouragement to capture rather than kill, a reward was instituted - £5 for every adult Aboriginal and £2 for every child.
By August 1830, the palawa were recorded as having killed more than 114 settlers and servants, and wounded more than 500 colonists.
As a result of the ongoing and escalating palawa resistance, the colony of Van Diemen’s Land was in crisis.
Military operations
By September 1830, Governor Arthur was under pressure from settlers and private citizens who threatened to take matters even further into their own hands.
Arthur took the dramatic step of a call-to-arms of all settlers in order to raise a volunteer army for a military campaign to expel the palawa from the settled districts - in particular the Mairremmener people of the Oyster Bay and Big Region region.
“The community being called upon to act en masse on the 7th October next, for the purpose of capturing those hostile tribes of the natives which are daily committing renewed atrocities upon the settlers … Active operations will at first be chiefly directed against the tribes which occupy the country south of a line drawn from Waterloo Point east, to Lake Echo west …”
Governor Arthur instructed colonists to form a line stretching across the settled districts and move south, pushing Aboriginal men, women and children of those nations south and onto the Tasman Peninsula where they could be rounded up. From there they would be relocated to Tasmania’s offshore islands, putting an end to their resistance.
On 1 October 1830, Arthur by proclamation continued and extended martial law over the whole of the colony.
On 7 October 1830, more than 2,200 settlers, military, police and convicts reported to seven prearranged locations across the settled districts - forming a human chain that commenced its advance on a 190-kilometre front. The costs associated with this operation were enormous, amounting to more than £30,000, about half of the revenue collected in the colony that year.
Over many weeks, this line - and two additional lines - moved slowly south in an attempt to intimidate, capture, displace and relocate the remaining palawa. At one point, the line remained stationary for over 2 weeks.
While there were sightings of palawa, the line did not have much success in forcing them to the south, with most slipping back into their traditional lands.
Members of the Oyster Bay and Big River clans slipped through the lines, with Governor Arthur later admitting that ‘no single party discovered any traces of the Natives’ other than ‘an assemblage of their huts’.
After six weeks of marching, the force had captured one boy and one elderly man; two palawa were reported killed in the operation.
The campaign was abandoned on 24 November 1830.
While the Black Line was considered a logistical failure, in the long term it did have the effect desired. Desperate to avoid the guns, the declining numbers of the Oyster Bay and Big River nations headed into the high country.
On January 7, 1832, the last dozen or so warriors from the Oyster Bay-Big River resistance walked down Elizabeth Street in Hobart, spears in hand.
Led by Tongerlongeter - a Poredareme warrior of the Oyster Bay nation - they met with Governor Arthur at Government House to finalise an ‘armistice’, negotiated by George Augustus Robinson, who had been tasked with “conciliating the hostile tribes”.
The ‘terms’ were that the Oyster Bay-Big River mobs would lay down their arms and they could, once order was restored, remain on their land with a government emissary for protection.
Ten days later, the whole party set sail for Luparretta (Flinders Island), thus bringing an end to the largest domestic military offensive in Australian history.
‘A great hunting-match’
When English naturalist Charles Darwin visited Hobart in February 1836, he compared the Black Line to one of the notorious ‘‘great hunting-matches" in India.
“All the aborigines have been removed to an island in Bass’s Straits, so that Van Diemen’s Land enjoys the great advantage of being free from a native population. This most cruel step seems to have been quite unavoidable, as the only means of stopping a fearful succession of robberies, burnings, and murders, committed by the blacks; and which sooner or later would have ended in their utter destruction,” he wrote at the time.
“I fear there is no doubt that this train of evil and its consequences originated in the infamous conduct of some of our countrymen.
“The plan adopted was nearly similar to that of the great hunting-matches in India,” Darwin concluded.
The Black Line is not simply a story of a failed colonial campaign.
It is a powerful reminder that Aboriginal people resisted the invasion of their lands, and that understanding this history is essential to understanding the nation we are today.
Nā John Paul Janke nō NITV
