The Last Man by Tom Lawson

Author:Tom Lawson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Tasmania, Aboriginals, Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, British Colonialism, Australasian History
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-03-27T16:00:00+00:00

Reporting Genocide

I will begin by going back to the beginning of this book and considering how the ‘Black War’ was reported in Britain. First, it is worth noting that the ongoing conflict in Van Diemen’s Land was recounted publicly as well as in private letters. A picture of desperate colonists under siege was developed throughout the 1820s, with settlers portrayed as victims of attack from the ‘pitiless savages’.5 Often, particularly fearful descriptions of settler–indigenous relations were provided in an effort to counter the emigration propaganda that constructed Van Diemen’s Land as an English Elysium. ‘The truth is,’ wrote a correspondent in The Examiner in October 1824, ‘the natives of Van Diemen’s Land are generally hostile towards the settlers […] they show foreigners no mercy when they catch them alone and unarmed.’6 Not that such reporting disrupted a continuous picture of Van Diemen’s Land as a potential idyll, the ‘most fruitful and healthy spot on the face of the earth’.7 However, across the decade, as the violence in Van Diemen’s Land intensified, its reporting came to dominate the way in which the colony was represented in Britain.8

Settler violence was part of this story, but was invariably represented purely as an effort to quell the ‘restless’, ‘annoying’ or ‘troublesome’ ‘black natives’.9 The offer of friendship, readers were informed, had been met only with violent and, by implication, irrational and unjustified violence – an idea that assumed the worth of colonisation. Yet in the face of such provocation the settler population remained apparently resolute, building an inheritance for their ‘children and grandchildren’.10 But, as the rhetoric surrounding the indigenous population reached a crescendo towards the end of the 1820s, the settlers themselves were portrayed as increasingly (but necessarily) violent. In April 1829 several newspapers reported that the ‘natives’ had, ‘like the snakes’, resumed a campaign of violence ‘as the warm weather returned’.11 And as such it was going to be necessary for the settlers to take ‘vigorous and efficient measures’ in response.12 By this stage it was predicted that a ‘war of extermination’ would be the inevitable result of this enduring hostility. ‘The Line’ was similarly reported as a popular uprising against the island’s original inhabitants: ‘it would appear that the whole of the population of Hobart Town were up in arms to oppose the Aborigines,’ readers were told in May 1831.13 By 1832 newspapers were predicting openly that the settlers’ response to further violence would be to ‘hunt them down like wild beasts’.14

It is of course impossible for us to understand the impact of this colonial discourse. We might speculate that anyone leaving Britain after 1824 would have known, if they had thought about Van Diemen’s Land at all, that one of the things that awaited them was a population that wished to disrupt settlement and development. We might even go further, and point out that some of the writing about Van Diemen’s Land in the 1820s suggested that any future colonists would have to do battle for their land. Certainly it

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