BY THE LATE 1820s, John Batman’s district in the north-eastern part of Van Diemen’s Land had suffered seventeen Palawa attacks. In July 1829 a war party plundered a stock hut belonging to Batman, and in August some of his men were speared and a stonemason in his employ was killed.
Batman was now called upon by the government to act. And, just as he’d once turned on his employer back on the mainland, he now turned on his neighbours, the Plangermaireener clan. He must have realised that success here would give him the leverage and respectability he needed, so he was enthusiastically employed in the Black Line: the formation of a human chain across the island to drive the Palawa from their lands into a so-called manageable area. The Oyster Bay, Big River, North Midlands and Ben Lomond people were to be physically driven like cattle southwards and eventually surrounded. This farcical plan was easily evaded by the local people.
Batman believed that the only way to beat the canny guerrilla fighters was to bring in the equivalent – to all intents and purposes, Indigenous mercenaries. He requested and was granted men from southern New South Wales. The once conciliatory pastoralist, who had dealt fairly with the local people, was now a semi-sanctioned government bounty hunter. He took to rounding up the Plangermaireener with the help of his ‘Sydney blacks’ (none were actually from that region). His first two recruits were John Pigeon, a Warrora man from Shoalhaven, and Tommy (who would later be known as John Crook) from the Wollongong area. Pigeon had been in the Bass Strait Islands with sealers and knew something of the local language. Later other Indigenous men would join: Quanmurner (aka Joe the Marine), Bill Bulletts, Joe Bungett (aka John Stewart), Old Bull and Macher (aka Mackey).
That year, Batman wrote to British Colonial Secretary John Burnett about his difficulty in capturing the local people. In his explanation he asked if he could ‘follow known [Aboriginal] offenders once they had made it to their own ground’. He wanted to pursue them outside the settled areas, as he was confident he could beat them in their own territory. One of his neighbours, the artist John Glover, hardly flinched when asked what he thought of Batman. ‘A rogue, thief, cheat and liar, a murderer of blacks and the vilest man I have ever known,’ he said, having seen at close quarters what Batman was capable of to serve his own cause. Glover captioned one of his Tasmanian paintings Batman’s Lookout, Benn Lomond (1835) ‘. . . on account of Mr Batman frequenting this spot to entrap the Natives’. Batman fervently harassed the locals, driving them from place to place within their formerly safe retreats.
There were others who made their feelings clear.
While Arthur insisted his policy was to treat captured Palawa with humanity and kindness, he armed the roving parties. He also encouraged their efforts by augmenting the military along the settlement frontiers in order to hem in the local people. Batman correctly took this to mean the government had a laissez-faire attitude to the consequences. The grazier reported all of his murders to Arthur in the full knowledge that the lieutenant-governor would turn a blind eye to his activities.
Once Batman was given a licence to capture (and kill if he felt it necessary), he wasn’t given to compromise. Always conscious of his lowly standing in society, he did everything possible to counter it – including murdering people in order to become the best bounty hunter in the land. He may have naively believed that working so diligently for the authorities would somehow remove the stigma associated with being a currency lad.
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IN SEPTEMBER 1829, Batman and his posse attacked an encampment of about sixty to seventy Plangermaireener. There were also people present from the Oyster Bay, Ben Lomond, Campbell Town and Stoney Creek tribes.
Batman, using the skills of Crook and Pigeon, had followed this party after finding a number of hastily built huts that had been abandoned as they travelled. At the east side of Ben Lomond, Batman and his men could hear the Palawa not far off. Batman’s group nudged forward as quietly as possible, then halted when they had come to about twenty paces from the assembled tribes. He ordered men on his right flank into position so they would rush the congregation with such speed that the Indigenous people wouldn’t have time to defend themselves and would surrender immediately. But in the jostling of positions, two muskets struck against each other. The dogs gave off the alarm, and pandemonium ensued. According to Batman:
[The Palawa] Were in the act of running away into the thick scrub, when I ordered the men to fire upon them, which was done, and a rush by the party immediately followed, we only captured that Night one woman and a male child about Two years old, the party was in search of them the remainder of the Night, but without success, the next morning we found one man very badly wounded in his ankle and knee, shortly after we found another 10 buckshot had entered his Body, he was alive but very bad, there was a great number of traces of blood in various directions and learned from those we took that 10 men were wounded in the Body which they gave us to understand were dead or would die, and two women in the same state had crawled away.
Of the sixty or seventy people present, about fifteen were either dead or would die of their wounds. Batman paid no heed to those said to be dying and concentrated on a woman, a child and two men who were still alive. He reported later to Arthur that he tried to take the two men to his farm, but they couldn’t walk. After trying everything he could think of to make them move, he found he could ‘not get them on’. He didn’t mince words: ‘I was obliged therefore to shoot them.’ When Arthur read this, he made the note that Batman ‘shoots wounded natives because they could not keep up’. But Arthur never reproved Batman to his face. He later wrote that Batman ‘whose sympathy for the much injured and unfortunate race of beings was second only to that of George Augustus Robertson, had much slaughter to account for’. It was clear that Batman was quite capable of murder under any circumstances.
For his own reasons he took into his fold the woman, Luggenemenener, and her two-year-old son, Rolepana. He doted on the boy and asked Arthur for a special dispensation to rear him, which was against protocol: Aboriginal people were to be rounded up and sent elsewhere for ‘protection’. By taking in a child he was openly defying both Arthur and the man Arthur had by now charged with corralling the Indigenous people into so-called safe harbours, George Augustus Robinson.
Robinson had established a settlement where he could ‘civilise’ the Aborigines on Bruny Island, on the south coast. In 1829, he was asked by Arthur to ‘bring them in’ – that is, all the Palawa. Robinson realised that to do this, he needed to understand their customs and language. He would mount six expeditions in all over five years, accompanied by Indigenous people, informing the Palawa of the governor’s ‘humane intentions’.
Those he persuaded into captivity were sent to live at a permanent settlement at Wybalenna on Flinders Island. By 1839, due to his experience in Van Diemen’s Land and knowledge of Indigenous culture, he was appointed Chief Protector of Aborigines at Port Phillip.
Despite Robinson’s so-called ‘friendly mission’ to remove all Palawa (and their children) to Flinders Island, it seemed that Batman was rendering such a magnificent service that he got his way – he could keep the children who should have been sent to Flinders Island. Rolepana would later become one of his most steadfast followers, renamed Ben Lomond. Luggenemenener, of less use to Batman, was sent to Campbell Town Gaol and separated from her son; she died in March 1837, an inmate at the Flinders Island Settlement. Robinson, no doubt piqued that Batman could ‘keep’ the people he was trying to take into so-called safety, would later write an unpleasant character assessment: ‘This is a bad and dangerous character,’ he would write later in his journal about Batman. ‘He married a prison woman. He has recently lost part of his nose from the bad disease. Recently turned his wife out of doors because the prisoner servants said they saw the cook in the bedroom with his wife. He took her back.’
In October 1829, Batman captured a party of eleven Indigenous people, but six men escaped. Batman personally retained a young man named Mungo and an infant boy he christened John Allen. Both were reportedly sons of the Oyster Bay chief, Mannalargenna. Batman claimed these boys were at his homestead with the consent of their parents, and that they were ‘as much his property as his farm and that he had as much right to keep them as the government’. Later observers have said that Batman abducted all three of the Indigenous children he took in that year. And while there’s no doubt he fed and nurtured them, there is also no doubt that he would use them for their bush skills whenever he could.
Batman used clandestine methods for capturing Palawa in line with their own hit-and-run tactics. Some of these methods involved using Aboriginal women as bait. In all of this, he had the help of his Aboriginal mercenaries. All seven of these so-called Sydney blacks were repatriated to New South Wales after the Black War, but they all eventually came back to work for Batman. He once praised them to the Launceston Advertiser: ‘No possible means could ensure the desired effect better than the Sydney blacks. They had their dexterity in the use of the spear, their quickness in guarding themselves from any spear wound by means of their shield, (made of the iron bark tree) . . . and their usefulness in providing themselves and company with game.’ He failed to mention that Crook and Pigeon had been issued with muskets.
Through Batman’s auspices, the Indigenous men who worked for him were classified as ‘semi-civilised’ by contemporary whites. They were held up as examples of well-behaved Indigenous people who were useful and practical for the invaders’ mostly acquisitive purposes. These mercenaries did Batman’s will in exchange for food, arms and goods, and yet they were never totally disenfranchised from their own culture – because Batman wanted them to place at his disposal all their bush skills.
In all, Batman and his men, with the help of Robinson, are said to have brought in for ‘protection’ well over 350 local people. James Backhouse, a Quaker missionary who recorded much of the violence in Van Diemen’s Land, visited Batman in 1833 and reported that he had murdered at least thirty Palawa.
But back in 1831, only a year after his successful raiding and bounty-hunting exploits, Batman had made efforts to transform himself into a conciliator. In Launceston that year he helped Arthur to strike a deal with the Palawa who hadn’t been killed or moved on: they could stay in their districts and be given flour, tea and sugar, in exchange for ‘a good white man’ (Batman of course), being allowed to dwell among them. Batman also insisted that two of his senior Indigenous men, John Pigeon and John Crook, should receive a hundred acres of land for their efforts.
It has been estimated about 700 Palawa were murdered in the Black War, but this number can’t be substantiated. It is thought that about 170 Europeans died too. The Palawa, of course, were far less numerous than the Europeans on the island. There may have been no more than 2000 to 3000 Palawa in Van Diemen’s Land before the Europeans came. The Black War wreaked far greater havoc on their social fabric than on the Europeans on the island. They never recovered.
At the time, many Europeans claimed to believe that the removal of the Indigenous people was a necessary evil. ‘Our right, is derived, as most rights are, from might,’ thundered the Launceston Independent in 1831. ‘That this is a good title, every page of history, both sacred and profane, affords abundant precedent.’ The Tasmanian historian John West said much the same thing a few decades later, but his words seem laced with guilt: ‘That law, which gives strength the control of weakness, prevails everywhere: it may be either malignant or benevolent, but it is irresistible. At length the secret comes out. The tribe that welcomed the first settler with shouts and dancing, or at worst looked on with indifference, has ceased to live.’