Black War

The Black War was a period of violent conflict between British colonists and Aboriginal Tasmanians in Tasmania from the mid-1820s to 1832 which precipitated the near-extermination of the Indigenous population. The conflict was fought largely as a guerrilla war by both sides; some 600 to 900 Aboriginal people and more than 200 British colonists died.

When a British penal settlement was established in Tasmania (then called Van Diemen's Land) in 1803, the Aboriginal population was 3,000 to 7,000 people. Until the 1820s, the British and Aboriginal people coexisted with only sporadic violence, often caused by settlers kidnapping Aboriginal women and children. Conflict intensified from 1824, as Aboriginal warriors resisted the rapid expansion of British settlement over their land. In 1828, the British declared martial law and in 1830 they unsuccessfully attempted to force hostile Aboriginal nations from the settled districts in a military operation called "the Black Line". In a series of "Friendly Missions" in 1830 and 1831, George Augustus Robinson and his Aboriginal negotiators - including Truganini - secured the surrender of the Aboriginal belligerents. Martial law was revoked in January 1832.

Almost all of the remaining Aboriginal people were removed from mainland Tasmania from 1832 to 1835, and the 220 survivors were eventually relocated to the Wybalenna Aboriginal Mission on Flinders Island. Infectious diseases and a low birth rate cut the Aboriginal population at Wybalenna to 46 when the mission was closed in 1847.

The frequent mass killings and near-destruction of the Aboriginal Tasmanians are regarded by some contemporary historians as genocide. Others, however, argue that the colonial authorities did not intend to destroy the Aboriginal population.

Etymology

The terms "Black War" and "Black Line" were coined by journalist Henry Melville in 1835. In the early 21st century, historian Lyndall Ryan has argued that the conflict should be known as the "Tasmanian War". She has also called for a public memorial to be commissioned to honour the dead on both sides of the war.

Early conflict

Although commercial sealing on Van Diemen's Land had begun in late 1798, the first significant European presence on the island came in September 1803 with the establishment of a small British military outpost at Risdon Cove on the Derwent River near present-day Hobart.

thumb|right|Natives on the Ouse River, Van Diemen's Land by [[John Glover (artist)|John Glover, 1838]]The British had several hostile encounters with Aboriginal clans over the next five months, with shots fired and an Aboriginal boy abducted. David Collins arrived as the colony's first lieutenant governor in February 1804 with instructions from London that any acts of violence against the Aboriginal people were to be punished. But he failed to publish those instructions, leaving an unclear legal framework for dealing with any violent conflict.

On 3 May 1804, soldiers, settlers and convicts from Risdon Cove fired on a hunting party of 100 to 300 Aboriginal people. The British commanding officer stated that he thought the Aboriginal group was hostile. Witnesses to the massacre stated that between three and 50 Aboriginal men, women and children had died.

By 1806, the British had founded two main penal settlements on the sites of modern Hobart and Launceston. Violence increased during a drought in 1806–7 as tribes in the south of the island killed or wounded several colonists in six incidents mostly sparked by competition for game. There were only three hostile encounters recorded in the northern settlements before 1819, although John Oxley stated in 1810 that convict bushrangers inflicted "many atrocious cruelties" on Aboriginal people which led to Aboriginal attacks on solitary white hunters.

The Tasmanian settlements grew slowly up to 1815, with the population reaching 1,933 people that year. Growth was mainly through the arrival of 600 colonists from Norfolk Island between 1805 and 1813, and 149 male convicts from England in 1812. Former convicts and the Norfolk Islander settlers were given small grants of land. By 1814, of land was under cultivation, with 5,000 cattle and 38,000 sheep. Conflict with Aboriginal people increased, mainly due to sporadic murders and colonists hunting game and kidnapping Aboriginal women and children to enslave for domestic work and sexual abuse.

Between 1815 and 1830, the colony expanded rapidly. The British population grew from 2,000 to 24,000, the number of sheep increased to 680,000 and cattle to 100,000. The settled districtsmainly in the midlands, eastern coast and northwestern region of the islandaccounted for almost 30 per cent of its land area. The expansion of the colony over Aboriginal hunting grounds led to increased conflict which, according to Nicholas Clements, developed into an Aboriginal resistance movement. Aboriginal attacks on colonists averaged 1.7 per year over the 18031823 period, but increased to 18 per year over 18241826. thumb|right|Samuel Calvert's depiction of Aboriginals attacking a shepherds' hut as released in The Illustrated Melbourne PostIn June 1827, at least 80 to 100 members of the Pallittorre clan from the North nation were killed in reprisals for the killing of three stockmen. From December 1826 to July 1827, at least 140 Aboriginal people were killed,

Martial law (November 1828)

right|thumb|upright| Proclamation board labelled "[[Thomas Davey (governor)|Governor Davey's Proclamation" painted in Van Diemen's Land about 1830, in the time of Governor Arthur. Nailed to trees, proclamation boards were designed to show Aboriginal people the benefits of living in peace with colonists under an idealised equal British justice.]]Violence escalated from August to October 1828, with the Oyster Bay, Big River, Ben Lomond and Northern peoples launching raids on stock huts during which 15 colonists were killed in 39 attacks. From early October, Oyster Bay warriors also began killing white women and children. On 1 November, Arthur declared martial law against the Aboriginal people in the settled districts, who were now "open enemies of the King". Arthur's move was effectively a declaration of war. Soldiers were authorised to arrest any Aboriginal person in the settled districts without warrant and to shoot those who resisted. However, the proclamation also stated: Martial law would remain in force for more than three years, the longest period in Australian history.

The predominant mood among colonists on the frontier was fear and panic mixed with anger and a desire for revenge. Although by the end of 1829 the number of Aboriginal people in the war zone had greatly diminished, this was not widely known and the threat that the remaining hostile Aboriginal groups posed to frontier farms was real.

In November 1829, Arthur established an Aborigines Committee to inquire into the causes of the Aboriginal violence and make policy recommendations. The following February, he introduced a bounty of £5 for every captured Aboriginal adult and £2 for each child. He also sought the help of other colonies in increasing the military presence in Van Diemen's Land but without success.

Among submissions it received were suggestions to set up decoy huts containing poisoned flour and sugar, that Aboriginal people be rooted out with bloodhounds and that Māori warriors be brought to Tasmania to capture the Aboriginal people for removal to New Zealand as slaves. Settlers and soldiers gave evidence of killings and atrocities on both sides, but the committee was also told that despite the attacks, some settlers believed very few Aboriginal people now remained in the settled districts.

In its report, published in March 1830, the committee stated that the Aboriginal people had lost their sense of superiority of white men, no longer feared British guns, and were now on a systematic plan of attacking the colonists and their possessions. The committee's report supported the bounty system, recommended more mounted police, and urged settlers to remain well armed and alert.

Arthur forwarded their report to Secretary of State for War and the Colonies Sir George Murray, blaming convicts for mistreating the Aboriginal people but adding, "it is increasingly apparent the Aboriginal natives of this colony are, and have ever been, a most treacherous race; and that the kindness and humanity which they have always experienced from the free settlers has not tended to civilize them to any degree." In response, Arthur extended martial law to the whole of Van Diemen's Land on 1 October. He also ordered every able-bodied male colonist to assemble on 7 October at one of seven designated places to join a massive drive to sweep the hostile Aboriginal people from the settled districts in a military campaign which became known as the Black Line.

On 21 August 1829, four company servants killed an Aboriginal woman at Emu Bay, near present-day Burnie. An investigation was launched but no one was prosecuted. Three company men were fatally speared in July and October 1831 and there were heavy losses inflicted on sheep and oxen. There were 16 recorded acts of violence against Aboriginal people in the conflict, but the number of Aboriginal deaths is unknown. Company employees stated that they believed killing Aboriginal people was justified to protect livestock. Separated into three divisions and aided by Aboriginal guides, they formed a staggered front more than 300 km long that began pushing south and east across the Settled Districts from 7 October. The intention was to form a pincer movement to push members of four of the nine Aboriginal nations across the Forestier Peninsula to East Bay Neck and into the Tasman Peninsula, which Arthur intended to declare an Aboriginal reserve.

The campaign was hampered by severe weather, difficult terrain, inadequate maps and poor supply lines. Although two of the divisions met in mid-October, the difficult terrain soon resulted in the cordon being broken, leaving many wide gaps through which the Aboriginal people were able to easily pass. Many of the colonists, by then barefoot and their clothes tattered, deserted the line and returned home. The campaign's single success was a dawn ambush on 25 October in which two Aboriginal people were captured and two killed. The Black Line was disbanded on 26 November.

When the Black Line commenced, about 300 members of the hostile Big River, Oyster Bay, Ben Lomond and North Midlands nations were still alive and about 100 to 200 of these were within the line's field of operations. They launched at least 50 attacks on colonists—both in front of and behind the line—during the campaign, often plundering huts for food.

Surrender and removal

Surrender in the settled districts

Following the Black Line campaign, there were probably only about 100 hostile Aboriginal people in the settled districts, although the colonists believed the figure was at least 500. Hopes of peace rose over the summer of 1830-31 as Aboriginal attacks fell to a low level. The Colonial Times newspaper speculated that their enemy had either been wiped out or frightened into inaction. However, there was a new wave of attacks in late January and March in which several colonists were killed, and many men on the frontier refused to go out to work.

In February 1831, the Aborigines Committee issued a report recommending that settlers should remain vigilant and that parties of armed men should be stationed in the most remote stock huts. In response, up to 150 stock huts were turned into ambush locations, military posts were established on native migratory routes and new barracks were built at Spring Bay, Richmond and Break O'Day Plains. There was an increased military presence at farms, and military parties of 50 to 90 men sometimes went out in pursuit of hostile Aboriginal groups.

thumb|right|upright|George Augustus Robinson

The committee, however, also endorsed the government's attempts to conciliate the hostile Aboriginal clans. In March 1829, George Augustus Robinson had been appointed the head of the Aboriginal Mission on Bruny Island where about 20 survivors of the southeastern Aboriginal people were accommodated. From January to September 1830, Robinson and 19 Aboriginal negotiators had carried out a "Friendly Mission" to establish contacts with the Aboriginal clans of southwestern, western and northwestern Tasmania. In October that year, he reported to Arthur that his mission had been a partial success and the governor authorised him to seek conciliation with the northeastern clans.

By January 1831, Robinson's party had contacted more than fifty Aboriginal people and had moved them temporarily to Swan Island in Bass Strait. Those moved to the island included the resistance leader Mannalargenna, whose group had killed a number of colonists. In February, Arthur appointed Robinson to head an Aboriginal Establishment on the Furneaux Islands and authorised him to negotiate the surrender of the remaining Big River and Oyster Bay people. In March, the 53 Aboriginal Tasmanians under Robinson's care were transferred to a settlement on Gun Carriage Island (now Vansittart Island).

thumb|left|[[Montpelliatta]]

In June, Robinson and a party of Aboriginal negotiators set off to locate a resistance group led by Umarrah which had conducted a series of raids killing several colonists. The public mood, however, swung further against Arthur's conciliatory approach after an Aboriginal group led by Montpelliatta conducted further raids in the Great Western Tiers culminating in the death of two prominent settlers in August. The Launceston Advertiser declared that only "utter annihilation" could subdue the Aboriginal people.

Robinson's efforts at conciliation were more successful. In September, he and Mannalargenna persuaded Umarrah and his group to suspend hostilities. The following month, Robinson and Mannalargenna met Arthur to discuss the terms of a surrender. Robinson, Mannalargenna and Umarrah then set off for the interior to locate and negotiate with the remaining hostile Big River and Oyster Bay groups. On 31 December, they made contact with a party of 26 Big River and Oyster Bay people led by Montpelliatta and Tongerlongeter. Umarrah's wife, Woolaytopinnyer, persuaded them to surrender.

thumb|[[Tongerlongeter]]

Robinson led the 26 Aboriginal people to Hobart where they surrendered to governor Arthur on 7 January 1832. Ten days later, the groups led by Montpelliatta, Tongerlongeter and Umarrah were sent to Flinders island where the Aboriginal Establishment had been relocated the previous November.

The December surrender effectively ended the Black War, and martial law was revoked in January 1832. There had been 70 Aboriginal attacks on colonists in 1831, in which 33 colonists were killed or wounded. But the number of attacks had been well below the 250 recorded in 1830, and it was now clear that the remnants of the hostile Aboriginal clans had been exhausted, hungry and desperate throughout 1831.

There were no further reports of Aboriginal attacks in the eastern settled districts from December 1831, although isolated acts of violence continued in the north until 1834 and in the northwest until 1842. The death toll from 1832 to 1834 was ten colonists and 40 Aboriginal people.

Removal of western Aboriginal nations

Arthur authorised Robinson to negotiate the surrender of the remaining southwestern and western Aboriginal clans and their removal to Flinders Island, believing that this would be the only way of saving them from extermination at the hands of settlers while providing them with the benefits of British civilisation and Christianity. In February 1832, Robinson and his Aboriginal negotiators embarked on the first of several expeditions to the west and north-west of Tasmania. His party persuaded several small groups to seek refuge on Flinders Island, warning them that they faced violent hostility without protection.

However, after a hostile encounter with a group of 29 Tarkiner people at Arthur River in September, Robinson resolved to use force if necessary to secure the removal of the remaining Aboriginal people. Hunter Island, at Tasmania's northwestern tip, and penal stations in Macquarie Harbour, on the western coast, were used to hold captured Aboriginal people until their transfer to Flinders Island, but many succumbed quickly to disease and the mortality rate reached 75 percent.

Aftermath

thumb|1846 painting of [[Wybalenna Aboriginal Establishment on Flinders Island, where Aboriginal Tasmanians were interned after surrendering.]]

By early 1835 almost 300 people had surrendered to Robinson,

Clements states that the recorded Aboriginal death toll in the conflict was 260. He estimates, however, that only 100 Aboriginal people survived the eastern conflict from a pre-war population of 1,000, and he therefore concludes that 900 died from 1824 to 1831. He surmises that about one-third may have died through internecine conflict, disease and natural deaths, leaving an estimated 600 deaths from frontier violence. However, he states: "The true figure might be as low as 400 or as high as 1,000." Johnson and McFarlane argue that at least 400 Aboriginal deaths in the northwestern conflict should be added to this figure, giving over 1,000 Aboriginal deaths in the conflict across Tasmania.

Ryan states that there were 191 recorded deaths of colonists in the conflict from November 1823 to January 1834, and another 10 deaths after this. His arguments have been challenged by numerous authors including James Boyce, Henry Reynolds, Lyndall Ryan Ryan and Boyce, however, argue that the Aboriginal death rate from disease was low before 1820 and that Aboriginal Tasmanians were more likely to die from disease after they had surrendered to the British.

Academic discussion of genocide

The near-destruction of Tasmania's Aboriginal population has been described as an act of genocide by historians and genocide scholars including Robert Hughes, James Boyce, Lyndall Ryan, Tom Lawson, Mohamed Adhikari, Benjamin Madley, Ashley Riley Sousa, Rebe Taylor, and Tony Barta. The author of the concept of genocide, Raphael Lemkin, considered Tasmania the site of one of the world's clear cases of genocide and Hughes has described the loss of Aboriginal Tasmanians as "the only true genocide in English colonial history". However, other historiansincluding Henry Reynolds, Richard Broome, and Nicholas Clementsdo not agree that the colonial authorities pursued a policy of destroying the Indigenous population, although they do acknowledge that some settlers supported extermination.

Boyce has claimed that the April 1828 "Proclamation Separating the Aborigines from the White Inhabitants" sanctioned force against Aboriginal people "for no other reason than that they were Aboriginal". However, as Reynolds, Broome and Clements point out, there was open warfare at the time. Boyce describes the decision to remove all Aboriginal Tasmanians after 1832—by which time they had given up their fight against white colonists—as an extreme policy position. He concludes: "The colonial government from 1832 to 1838 ethnically cleansed the western half of Van Diemen's Land and then callously left the exiled people to their fate."

As early as 1852 John West's History of Tasmania portrayed the obliteration of Tasmania's Aboriginal people as an example of "systematic massacre" and in the 1979 High Court case of Coe v Commonwealth of Australia, judge Lionel Murphy observed that Aboriginal people did not give up their land peacefully and that they were killed or forcibly removed from their land "in what amounted to attempted (and in Tasmania almost complete) genocide".

Historian Henry Reynolds says that there was a widespread call from settlers during the frontier wars for the "extirpation" or "extermination" of the Aboriginal people. But he has contended that the British government acted as a source of restraint on settlers' actions. Reynolds says there is no evidence the British government deliberately planned the wholesale destruction of indigenous Tasmanians—a November 1830 letter to Arthur by Sir George Murray warned that the extinction of the race would leave "an indelible stain upon the character of the British Government"—and therefore what eventuated does not meet the definition of genocide codified in the 1948 United Nations convention. He says that Arthur was determined to defeat the Aboriginal people and take their land, but believes that there is little evidence that he had aims beyond that objective and wished to destroy the Tasmanian race. In contrast to Reynolds' argument, historian Lyndall Ryan, based on a sample of massacres taking place in the Meander River region in June 1827, concludes that massacres of Aboriginal Tasmanians by white settlers were likely part of an organised process and were sanctioned by government authorities.

Clements accepts Reynolds' argument but also exonerates the colonists themselves of the charge of genocide. He says that, unlike genocidal determinations by Nazis against Jews in World War II, Hutus against Tutsis in Rwanda and Ottomans against Armenians in present-day Turkey which were carried out for ideological reasons, Tasmanian settlers participated in violence largely out of revenge and self-preservation. He adds: "Even those who were motivated by sex or morbid thrillseeking lacked any ideological impetus to exterminate the natives." He also argues that while genocides are inflicted on defeated, captive or otherwise vulnerable minorities, Tasmanian natives appeared as a "capable and terrifying enemy" to colonists and were killed in the context of a war in which both sides killed noncombatants.

Lawson, in a critique of Reynolds' stand, argues that genocide was the inevitable outcome of a set of British policies to colonise Van Diemen's Land. He says that the British government endorsed the use of partitioning and "absolute force" against Tasmanians, approved Robinson's "Friendly Mission" and colluded in transforming that mission into a campaign of ethnic cleansing from 1832. He says that once on Flinders Island, the indigenous peoples were taught to both farm land like Europeans and worship God like Europeans and concludes: "The campaign of transformation enacted on Flinders Island amounted to cultural genocide."

Writing in 2023, historian Rebe Taylor points to the arguments of Windschuttle as being a minority opinion among historians who generally accept the Black War as a case of genocide.

References

Bibliography

External links

Extract from James Bonwick, Black War of Van Diemen’s Land, London, pp. 154–155 <small>Accessed 15 August 2009</small>