The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania by Nicholas Clements

Author:Nicholas Clements
Language: ara
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Published: 2014-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

THE WAR’S END

White

The Black War has ended here after 2 months’ campaign … but I fear we shall not so soon be quit of the blacks.1

Alexander Reid, Bothwell

The failure of the Black Line cast a dark cloud over the frontier community. It had been the biggest effort the colony was capable of mustering, and it had failed. The question now weighing on everyone’s minds was expressed succinctly by William Lawrence in the line’s closing days: ‘If, as is most likely, the present attempt fails, I know not what more can be done, I have not as yet heard of one feasible scheme.’2 Nowhere was this anxiety felt more acutely than ‘in the breasts of lonely settlers’, wrote Lawrence’s fellow linesman, George Lloyd: ‘the untoward result [of the operation] produced a feeling of deep despondence, and shed over their future prospects a gloom from which there seemed to be no possible relief.’3 But, just as despair was setting in, a glimmer of hope appeared.

Colonists knew the natives did not attack as frequently in the summer months, but they seemed quieter than usual. By late January, few serious incidents had been reported, and some colonists began to suspect the line had been effective after all. ‘What has become of all the Aboriginal tribes?’ asked the Colonial Times on 28 January 1831:

Were they all killed or taken prisoners during the late expedition? [These] are now the generally repeated questions. We are exceedingly happy to say that, to all appearances, if they were not taken or destroyed, they appear at all events to have been so much frightened as to prevent, for the present, their repeating their visits to the civilised inhabitants.4

But the newspaper’s optimism was short lived. Even as it was going to print, couriers were bringing the news south of the spearing of a man and a child on the West Tamar.5 Then, on 29 January, only three months after the blacks had killed her husband, Mary McCasker ‘was most barbarously murdered’ at Dairy Plains, and all hopes for peace seemed dashed.6

Experienced frontiersmen were struck by a remarkable fact: the more blacks they killed, the more there seemed to be. Europeans found it extremely hard to identify the individuals or tribes responsible for attacking them, so they were never sure how many they were facing. In hindsight, we know there could scarcely have been 100 natives operating in the settled districts in 1831, but to terrified colonists, this number would have sounded absurdly low. The frequency and geographic distribution of attacks, combined with exaggerated rumours of tribes comprising hundreds of warriors, led colonists to massively overestimate the force arrayed against them. Most assumed there remained at least 500 eastern natives, and some thought the number was in the thousands.7 It seemed only logical that a sizeable population was necessary to generate so much commotion, but the ‘vast savage hordes’ that haunted the colonists’ imaginations bore little resemblance to the desperate remnant they were actually facing. It was to be the final year of the war, but no one knew that then, nor did anyone suspect it.

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