TWO CRAGGY FISTS of land, joined by a long, thin neck of sand, made up the island of Lunawanna Alonnah, the country of the Nuenonne clan. An extensive coastline facing into the ocean provided nesting burrows for the inexhaustible supply of mutton birds that migrated every year from Siberia. Rocky outcrops were perfect nesting sites for equally numerous penguins that migrated from the sub-Antarctic. Undulating forests of bull kelp sprouting from rock ledges along the shore gave protection and nutrition to crayfish and abalone, while oysters and mussels grew in the myriad tidal rock pools. Further out to sea, tiny, barren islands were nurseries for the fur seals the Nuenonne would hunt in ocean-going canoes they constructed from rolled bark bound together with reeds.
On the western side, an extensive, deep channel separated the island from the much larger landmass Abel Tasman had named Van Diemen’s Land. On the sandy coves of the western side, scallops, oysters and mussels were easily harvested, while sheltered lagoons and inlets were nesting sites for the black swans whose eggs were considered a great delicacy. Such abundant food sources supplied the varied Nuenonne diet. They did not bother to harvest scalefish, which they regarded with revulsion.
Over many millennia, using a regime of controlled burning, the Nuenonne created large areas of open grassland to support a plentiful population of wallaby. Continually moving from one end of the island to the other along a network of paths, family groups would camp for short periods at certain food-gathering sites. Here they constructed domed shelters made of pliable branches, bark and grass that could accommodate two or three adults with children.
The Nuenonne enjoyed reciprocal rights along the south-east coast of the large island, the territory of the Mellukerdee and Lyluequonny, as well as into the coastal country to the west that was the territory of the Needwondee and Ninine. All these clans were from the same language group, with interlocking kin relationships. Twice a year, the Nuenonne would voyage in canoes down the channel to gather food and engage in ceremony with these clans who had travelled overland from their country.
Since the beginning of time, it seemed, the Nuenonne had maintained this healthy, happy life, the continuity of people and place uninterrupted by invasion or traumatic upheaval. In the early nineteenth century, the senior man of the clan was Manganerer, whose wife was possibly a Ninine woman. In the second decade of the century, a third daughter was born to them: Truganini. She entered a dramatically changed world, one in which the timeless reassurances of Nuenonne life no longer held. Raegewarrah had been loosed upon the land.
In the cosmology of the Nuenonne, Raegewarrah was an intangible force of evil that could permeate all things. The full force of Raegewarrah was held in check by the creator spirit they knew as Mouhernee, who lived as a star in the Milky Way. A perpetual struggle between these two forces had maintained the world in a precarious balance until two avatars fashioned by Raegewarrah floated in from the ocean and came to rest under a great fluted cape on the southern section of Lunawanna Alonnah.
From the cover of the trees, the Nuenonne watched the two floating islands pulled by clouds come to rest at the end of the sweep of bay. Two-legged creatures were disgorged into large canoes that brought them to the beach, where they walked along the sand to collect water from a small stream. Though they were not naked—their pale bodies were all but concealed by bright coverings—it was obvious to those who watched that these were men. They walked and made language like people, so they must be the dead returned, drained of all skin colour by the rigours of their journey. The Nuenonne could not have known that these ghost men had been following a map that named the country as Van Diemen’s Land and the beach where they stepped ashore as Adventure Bay. All for the taking, so Captain James Cook believed.
Cook was agreeably surprised on 28 January 1777 when he landed on the beach at Adventure Bay in the HMS Resolution’s longboat to see eight naked men and a boy approaching with the greatest of confidence. Cook was unaware that these people believed they were meeting their own dead returning as pale shades of their former selves. Being treated as some kind of kin, rather than as trespassing aliens, Cook and his officers were not to witness the fierce territorial attachment of the Nuenonne to their country. The British mariners mistakenly supposed the inhabitants to be uninterested in the concept of property, and that they were, as the ship’s surgeon wrote, a people with ‘little to lose or care for’.
Cook had already taken possession of the whole east coast with no consideration of the property rights of the owners of the land. His maps told him that the place where he stood was still part of the east coast of the country he had claimed for his King. It was reassuring to believe these guileless people would not mind the expropriation of their territory; to imagine they might not even notice the loss of it.
On the third day of Cook’s visit to Adventure Bay, a larger group of Nuenonne men came down to the beach, joined soon afterwards by a small party of naked women, who allowed their bodies to be examined without the slightest show of modesty. Bodily examination was one thing; penetration was quite another. Every inducement or entreaty for sex from the crew was rebuffed. After an hour of being prodded and stroked, the women retreated into the bush, leaving their men to fall asleep in the sun. Observing the men stretched out on the sand without any concern for their safety, the surgeon concluded that they were even more deficient in intelligence than ‘the half-animated inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego’. They showed complete indifference to the food, the medals and the beads the English sailors gave them, and they lacked even the most basic technology: a maritime people without the wit to figure out how to fish with hooks was sure evidence of profound mental retardation, he reasoned.
Twenty-five years later, a group of French explorers under Nicolas Baudin came to investigate the southern coast of Van Diemen’s Land and came ashore at various points on Lunawanna Alonnah. By then the Nuenonne were no longer ‘without jealousy of strangers’; they no longer saw the ghost men as their kin. The tranquillity of Nuenonne life had been ruptured by violent incursions from the penal settlement established at Sydney Cove on the east coast of New Holland in 1788. Within ten years, a renegade coalition of time-served convicts and deserters were active in the coastal sealing grounds of the Southern Ocean. These brutal men answered to no authority and made sudden, murderous raids on the coastal clans of Van Diemen’s Land to steal women to catch the seals and be their sexual slaves.
When Baudin and his well-meaning scientists arrived, they immediately noticed that the Nuenonne showed palpable terror at the sight of a musket, keeping a careful distance from the stick that spat fire. Although the French mariners enjoyed some happy interactions with the Nuenonne men—dancing and exchanging songs—no amount of singing and dancing could induce the women to come within arm’s length. At the slightest movement towards them, the young women would leap to their feet and flee into the bush. Truganini’s father Manganerer could well have been one of those men dancing and singing with the French sailors, and her mother among the young women making sure to keep out of the strangers’ grasp.
Only a short sail from the northern tip of Lunawanna Alonnah was a wide river estuary where the Nuenonne would often hunt. The British called it Derwent River when they established a second penal settlement in 1804, named Hobart after the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies. Many convict and supply ships now sailed past Nuenonne country (which the English had renamed Bruny Island) to enter the Derwent. Crews often came ashore on the northern tip of the island to cut grass or get water. Pretty soon, escaped convicts and deserting seamen came to hide out in the extensive bush cover, bringing with them mayhem and disease. By the time of Truganini’s birth, the Nuenonne clan was diminished and traumatised.
Manganerer was camped with his wife and three daughters on tiny Partridge Island off the southern end of Bruny Island, sometime around 1816, preparing for his seasonal visit to Recherche Bay. By cover of night, a group of sailors stealthily landed in a whaleboat and rushed at the family as they sat around their fire. Manganerer and the children dashed into the safety of the darkness as the sailors held fast to his wife. In the unsteady, feverish light of the fire, Truganini may have seen her mother resisting the sailors with their flailing fists and knives, before they vanished into the dark, leaving her ripped body leaking a pool of blood. The violent death of her mother was a profoundly traumatic experience indelibly etched into Truganini’s memory.
In the years that followed, Truganini became only too familiar with the sight of male convicts deployed on the island, cutting timber, mining salt and burning shells for lime. In 1818, James Kelly secured a lease for a farm at the northern point, where he used convict workers to raise poultry and grow grain and vegetables to provision the passing ships. These convicts were alienated and brutalised men, without supervision, left to their own devices and supplied with muskets to hunt the ever-diminishing game—as well as any Nuenonne who might get in their way. Their rations of flour, tea and sugar were used to lure the Nuenonne women for sex.
In a matter of years, the seal colonies that had sustained the Nuenonne for millennia had been wiped out in the southern waters. Sealers remained active in the many islands that dotted the Bass Strait between Van Diemen’s Land and the northern landmass of New Holland. These men would appear sporadically, on the hunt for women. John Baker was an African American sealer, commonly known as Black Baker, who brought his boat to Bruny Island sometime in 1826. Either with inducements or under the threat of a gun, Baker got Truganini’s two sisters and a third woman into his boat and spirited them away to a life of slavery in the Bass Strait. Truganini never saw her sisters again.
The killing of seals was replaced by the killing of whales. The annual migration route of the southern right whale passed close by Bruny Island, and in 1824 James Kelly established a shore-based whaling station at the southern end of Adventure Bay, where he employed upwards of forty men in the busy months. By 1828, there were two whaling stations at Adventure Bay and another at Trumpeter Bay, employing over eighty men. A reciprocal relationship developed between the original people of the island and the men who worked at the whaling stations: in return for sex, whalers would give the Nuenonne flour for damper, plus tea and sugar for which they had developed an addiction. In this exchange, the motherless Truganini came to appreciate that sexual attraction was a key asset she possessed in the struggle for survival.
Given the desperate situation of the Nuenonne in 1828, it was remarkable that Truganini’s father did not lead his clan to attack the intruders in retaliation for the abduction of their women, the increasing destruction of their food sources and the alienation of their land. The accommodating Nuenonne were a stark contrast to the remnant clans in the ‘settled districts’, who had taken to engaging in sporadic guerilla warfare against the waves of immigrants from Britain arriving to take advantage of free land grants. Up to 2560 acres was on offer to gentlemen with capital to make a start in the colony. In the Derwent River valley, on the east coast and in the midlands, these would-be farmers, fresh from England and Scotland, found fine expanses of grasslands, intricate networks of tracks through the bush, and a pleasing balance of open and timbered landscapes that offered the attractive prospect of making a fortune. That this land was so perfectly formed for productive use must show the hand of God: the idea that this superbly adapted landscape was the product of thousands of years of skilful land management was beyond them.
These new settlers could not understand why the original owners resented the dispersal of game from the grasslands, and believed that as freehold owners of the land it was their right to shoot dead anyone suspected of spearing their sheep or stealing their potatoes. Retaliatory spearing of farmers and stockkeepers drove the settlers into an angry frenzy. In every isolated farmhouse, settlers lived in fear of the unseen black enemy, imagining their own family as the target of an irrational attack that would not spare the women or children. In response to this hyper-anxiety, the governor authorised armed roving parties to scour the country for miles around the sheep runs and wheat farms, capturing or killing any people still trying to eke out an existence in their traditional country.
Driven to distraction by rising hysteria among the settlers, Governor George Arthur was forced to proclaim martial law in November 1828, expelling all the original people from the settled districts. He communicated the law through storyboards that were nailed to trees in the bush. Even if the people were able to decipher the narrative in the clumsy pictures, its absurdity was obvious. The original owners would not leave, the colonial secretary complained, because they were ‘possessed with the idea … [of] their own rights over the country in comparison with the colonists’. Unwittingly, the governor had given every enraged settler a licence to shoot any original people should they appear in their own traditional hunting grounds.
Nuenonne country was exempt from this martial law. Though there were some leaseholders on Bruny Island, no settlers had yet been granted freehold title. The Nuenonne were regarded as role models for what was expected of the original people of the colony: they were unobtrusive, friendly and helpful. Captains of ships that called into Bruny Island or Recherche Bay reported that the Nuenonne were always useful to them, enthusiastically joining the crews in hunting and diving for shellfish. In May 1828, the overseer at the saltworks on Bruny Island travelled to Hobart with a man he called Bruny Jack and his wife Nelson. The couple were handed over to be guides for a roving party operating in the midlands. The Hobart Town Courier approvingly reported the recruitment of these tractable natives, observing that they ‘displayed great quickness of understanding and force of mind’.
The editor had been equally impressed when Manganerer and other senior Nuenonne men persuaded a ship’s captain to take them to Hobart to express to the governor their grievances over the abduction of women and the decimation of game that was their primary food source. Governor Arthur listened respectfully to the Nuenonne elders, impressed by their intelligence and adaptability. He was something of a rarity in colonial administration in that he was genuinely concerned at the gross injustice being done to the original people of the colony. The great pity was that his humanitarian concerns did not produce humanitarian responses.
This well-intentioned governor had his eye on Bruny Island as a potential incubator for a policy of conciliation and civilisation. The man he appointed to be the agent of this policy was George Augustus Robinson, an ambitious tradesman of limited education who had emigrated to the colony in 1824 in the hope of securing a more comfortable social niche for himself and his large family of five children. Remarkably, Robinson gave up his successful trade as a builder to become the butt of derisive jokes as custodian of ‘the blacks’. He claimed to be solely motivated by a desire ‘to do them good, to ameliorate their wretched conditions and raise them in the scale of civilisation’. Nevertheless, he was canny enough to negotiate with the governor to double the salary on offer and secure a land grant that would not have been available to him as a mere tradesman.
What conciliation and civilisation might mean for the Nuenonne could be gleaned from Nelson when she reappeared on Bruny Island in a dazed state in January 1829. After being taken as a guide, Nelson had been forcibly separated from her husband and kept at the camp to be raped by the soldiers, while Bruny Jack was taken into the bush where he was repeatedly beaten. While attempting to escape, he had been shot by a soldier, ‘not knowing he was tame’, as the Hobart Town Courier explained. Wounded, he ran to the river and plunged under the water, but he was unable to swim. Each time he surfaced to breathe, the soldier fired, until eventually he didn’t come up again. Returned to Bruny Island, Nelson died a few months later.
Truganini was George Augustus Robinson’s first point of contact with the Nuenonne. He found her, in April 1829, living with a gang of convict woodcutters just across the channel from Bruny Island at Birch’s Bay. She was a lovely young woman, diminutive and fine-boned, with her hair cut close to her scalp, which emphasised lively dark eyes and a generous mouth. He thought she was about sixteen or seventeen. Impressed with this young woman’s obvious intelligence and grasp of English, Robinson took it upon himself to take her back to her father on Bruny Island.
Robinson was profoundly disturbed by the prevalent carnal exchange between convict workers and local women in the colony, and he obsessively documented stories of abductions and violence, yet nowhere did he record that Truganini had been forcibly abducted. Though he was under no illusions about the brutal nature of the sexual transaction, it was not apparent to him that she was with the woodcutters under duress. It was two years later that she told him how one of the woodcutters had beaten her while others held her down.
Robinson’s land grant on Bruny Island was 500 acres, fronting onto an inlet immediately across the channel from Birch’s Bay on the western side of Bruny Island. His land abutted a much larger grant of 2560 acres that had been awarded to Richard Pybus, recently arrived with his family from England. Robinson named the waterfrontage of his grant Missionary Bay and here he intended to create a thriving Christian community for the Nuenonne.
He understood it was important to make the senior man, Manganerer, his ally if he were to succeed in this venture, and by returning Truganini to her country he hoped to win her father to his cause. He did his best to coax Truganini into being a chaste Christian woman, encouraging her to wear a shapeless smock made from blankets to cover her nakedness. She preferred to be unencumbered by clothing and generally went naked, rather to Robinson’s discomfort.
Just as he’d hoped, Truganini’s presence at Missionary Bay encouraged Manganerer to move there with his second wife and young son. A dozen or so demoralised and sick people followed him to receive the daily allowance of half a pound of biscuit and a pound of potatoes that Robinson provided.
Within the limitations of his own evangelical understanding, Robinson tried to make sense of the narrative of calamity they presented to him. It came as no surprise to him that the evil force of Raegewarrah was omnipresent in the worldview of these people, whom he judged to be sunk in darkness and savagery. Recognising the Miltonian parallel in the competing forces of good and evil that ruled their lives, he appropriated the name Raegewarrah to stand in for the Devil, determined to show them that the malevolent force that had delivered the apocalypse would be defeated by his God.
Robinson saw the original people as very low in the hierarchy of creation, yet not irredeemable. His self-appointed mission was to lift them from their state of savage ignorance. They must put their trust in God, he told them, and, by extension, in him, George Augustus Robinson: the good father sent to save them from obliteration.
Instruction in the Christian faith was central to Robinson’s scheme, as was instruction in the principles of European civilisation, such as wearing clothes, living in houses and growing potatoes. Most especially, he wanted to instruct the Nuenonne in the principle of labour. To this end, he had persuaded the governor to provide him with extra daily rations of a pound of meat and discretionary allowances of tea and sugar for those who could be made to work. This strategy was entirely unsuccessful. The people were disinclined to labour, and the tea and sugar they craved could always be found elsewhere.
Essential to Robinson’s scheme was that he must be the sole source of food and authority for the distressed Nuenonne. He was enraged by threats to his authority from men of the lower orders who had frequented the island for years. In his daily journal he railed against this debauched riffraff who gave generous gifts of flour, tea and sugar to the women in order to make them ‘subservient to [the men’s] carnal appetites’. He issued a steady stream of haughty directives, ordering these men to immediately cease their vile inducements and bring the women living with them to his mission, failing to grasp that this mutually exploitative association was well established. His moral outrage had no effect on either party: the women ignored his pious lectures, and the recipients of his letters simply laughed at him.
The contrast between the airs Robinson gave himself and his disreputable calling as the custodian of dispossessed Nuenonne made him the object of open derision, on Bruny Island no less than in Hobart. Even the assigned convicts jeered at his lowly social status. The more he was ridiculed for living in a hut among the Nuenonne, the more he sought to use them to transcend the class barriers that rendered him so vulnerable. His ambitious plan to put an end to the jeers was to create a model Christian community at Missionary Bay, complete with church, schoolroom, houses and a farm. Under his benign tutelage, the Nuenonne would shuck off their heathen beliefs and savage ways and be incorporated into settler society as a simple peasantry.
As much as the exploitative carnality of convicts and whalers outraged Robinson, his major concern was that their alternative source of food would reduce the Nuenonne’s dependence on him and prove ‘an insurmountable barrier’ to his civilising mission. There was little he could do about it. Most of the women continued to visit the whaling stations, or Kelly’s farm, a practice the men seemed to accept with the same equanimity with which they rebuffed Robinson’s invitation to build huts to live in. Instead the men spent endless hours painting their bodies with red ochre and charcoal and dressing their long ringlets with a pomade of animal fat and ochre.
Robinson hung around making notes about their habits and picking up a few words. After a couple of weeks he had learnt enough words to offer a sermon of sorts. As death was their current preoccupation, his aim was to correct their belief about what happened when they died. Using their own language, he preached that there was the one God up in the sky, who was good, and the Devil in the fire below, who was bad. The good people who accepted his God would travel up to the sky when they died, whereas the bad ones would go into the fire. He liked to think his few listeners were attentive to the message of salvation he was offering, but instead they were puzzled. The sky was the realm of the creator spirits, they told him, and after death the Nuenonne went far away across the sea, possibly to England. There were plenty of the Nuenonne dead in England, they insisted; their grandfathers had seen some of them.
The two or three women who stayed around Missionary Bay spent their days diving for shellfish or collecting wild fruits and ferns, grinding ochre, and treating the wallaby skins to make cloaks and small pouches to carry relics of the dead. Truganini liked to collect tiny luminous shells from the beaches, clean them till they shone and then string them into exquisite necklaces. She gathered bundles of iris leaves, dried them over slow fires, and twisted the leaves into threads that she plaited and wove into globular baskets. In May, a month after he’d arrived, Robinson took several of her baskets to Hobart as gifts for the important people of the town. The editor of the Hobart Town Courier was impressed with the handiwork, declaring that the baskets ‘would not disgrace as a reticule the hand of a London lady’. Robinson fancied that in Truganini’s pursuits he had found the makings of a cottage industry.
Returning from Hobart, Robinson was delighted to see that Truganini had found a companion, a young woman named Dray from the Lowreenne clan on the remote west coast. Dray had walked overland to Recherche Bay with her husband and others from his Ninine clan, most of whom had stayed at Recherche Bay. She was part of the smaller group, including her husband and one child, who had voyaged in canoes for the annual visit to their Nuenonne kin on Bruny Island. It was never obvious to Robinson what kin Dray was to Truganini, but the two young women behaved like sisters.
Another new face at Missionary Bay on Robinson’s return was Wooredy, an important Nuenonne elder in his forties who had left his semi-permanent camp on the southern part of the island to come to visit Manganerer. A renowned warrior, Wooredy was also a cleverman, so knowledgeable in ritual and healing that the convicts and leaseholders on his island called him Doctor. Like Manganerer, he went naked and wore his hair in the traditional fashion: long greased ringlets coloured with red ochre that fell over his eyes like a mop. Born more than a decade before settlement, Wooredy was witness to the arrival of some of the first colonists in 1804, just as his father and grandfather had watched Captain Cook land at Adventure Bay in 1777. Stubbornly attached to his customs, Wooredy was determined to induct Robinson into the Nuenonne way of life.
As the two senior men, Wooredy and Manganerer took Robinson hunting on the narrow neck leading to the south island, where the wallabies were more abundant. Although the hunters carried long spears, their weapon of choice was the shorter waddy, made of hard sheoak wood, that they threw with great dexterity, never failing to stun a bounding animal. Returning to Missionary Bay, Robinson sought to impress them with his own food-gathering skills. He threw a hooked line into the channel to catch some rock cod that he grilled over a fire. Unwittingly testing the limits of his companions’ agreeableness, he tried to persuade the men to eat the fish. Reluctantly, they took a bite, but they would not swallow it. It took some time to make him understand that it was only shellfish that was a critical part of the Nuenonne diet; they never ate scalefish and harvesting shellfish was exclusively women’s work. Men never learnt to swim and would rarely, if ever, enter the water.
Girls were taught by their mothers to be expert swimmers, which made them invaluable food gatherers. As game food of wallaby and possum became scarce, the Nuenonne were more dependent than ever on large fleshy abalone, as well as crayfish, scallops, oysters and mussels. A man might starve without a woman to harvest shellfish.
Truganini was a superb swimmer; she was constantly in and out of the water. Watching her exuberant swimming and diving for shellfish, Robinson could see yet again how critical she would be to his strategy. He inserted himself into her routine, using his dinghy to take Truganini and her friend Dray to places that would otherwise be difficult to reach. The young women would leap from the boat with woven bags around their necks and small sticks, sharpened at one end, clenched between their teeth. They’d dive into the water and use their toes to lever the large abalone shells off the rocks, securing them in their bags. They could stay under for a considerable time before surfacing to take a breath, diving again and again until their bags were full.
Robinson used these outings to interrogate Dray about her clan and the long journey she had made from the south-west coast. He was able to glean that there was a well-used track from Port Davey to Recherche Bay. Truganini told him how she had also walked this track with her father for reciprocal visits. One day, sitting alone in the boat while the women dived below, he decided he would take them to Port Davey to establish contact with the still-numerous Ninine and the other coastal clans further north. No sooner had he returned to Missionary Bay with the abalone harvest than he was off to Hobart to put this plan to the governor.
In July, a group of three Ninine families suddenly appeared at Missionary Bay. Their arrival occasioned great joy, such were the bonds of affection between the two clans. Robinson was no less delighted to see them. He had high hopes that this group would convey him to the west coast on their return journey, providing him with both food and protection. He was severely put out two days later when the group announced they were returning home and made no offer to take him. Robinson’s only hope was that they would give their clan a favourable report of his good intentions. Further complicating his plans, Manganerer took his wife and son to South Bruny, where Wooredy was camped. From there they and the Ninine would travel to Recherche Bay together.
Dray elected to stay behind with her friend Truganini. Robinson judged these two young women to be the most intelligent and tractable of the dozen people left at his mission and that they would benefit from interaction with respectable women. Having dressed them in smocks, he took them to visit a ship that had run aground on the other side of the channel. The bored English ladies on the stricken ship were thrilled to meet Truganini and Dray, with their short-cropped hair, whom they first took to be two beautiful boys. Assured that they were in fact female, the women took the two into their cabin, where they rummaged through their travelling wardrobes to find gorgeous dresses of silk and satin to replace the shapeless smocks. Truganini and Dray emerged from this entertainment utterly transformed. Robinson was shocked to see that rather than being dressed simply as would befit a maid, each was dressed as if she were a belle in a drawing room in London’s wealthy West End.
Truganini and Dray were much pleased with their transformation, but on their return to Missionary Bay the fancy gowns were quickly swapped for the shapeless smocks, which were in turn soon discarded. However, the lovely dresses were donned again when Robinson took Truganini and Dray to Hobart to display them to the colonial elite. The two young women were presented to the governor, who was duly impressed with their metamorphosis under Robinson’s tutelage.
It was a terrible blow to Robinson’s pride that as soon as Truganini and Dray returned to Missionary Bay they cast off their European finery and ran off to Adventure Bay. The migrating whales had returned and the whalers were back at the station. More haughty letters were sent to the whalers, to be met with more scornful resistance. In early August, Robinson attempted to retrieve Truganini and Dray from the whalers, only to be insulted to his face. He was doubly humiliated when the young women ran away from him and hid.
On his journey back from Adventure Bay, Robinson found Wooredy’s camp, near the narrow neck between the north and south of the island. Wooredy and his sons were away hunting, and his pregnant wife, evidently very ill and weak, was able to indicate in words and signs that the people from Port Davey had not yet left the island. Some of them had fallen ill, just as she had. She also let him know that Manganerer was nearby with his wife and son, readying to travel to Recherche Bay. While they were conversing, Wooredy returned and greeted Robinson with evident pleasure, proudly introducing his three sons. He was very solicitous of his wife and promised to bring his family to Missionary Bay in the near future, once she was well again.
When Wooredy did come to Missionary Bay, a month later, it was in very changed circumstances. He arrived in mid September with his two older sons, carrying one in his arms, even though he was so ill he could barely walk himself. He told Robinson that his pregnant wife and youngest son were loggerner nene, meaning ‘dead in the fire’, as were all the people from Port Davey.
A few days later, Manganerer also struggled into Missionary Bay in a shocking state.
Disaster had struck Manganerer for a second time on his trip to Recherche Bay. Instead of the Ninine people he had been expecting to meet at the bay, he had encountered the convict mutineers who had seized the government brig Cyprus. These men abducted his wife and sailed away with her to New Zealand, then on to Japan and China. Hastily constructing a sturdy ocean-going canoe, Manganerer had attempted to follow them but had been blown far out into the Southern Ocean. His son had died and he himself was half dead from dehydration when he was found by a whaling ship.
The tragedy was almost too much for this proud man to bear. He had endured the murder of his first wife and the abduction of his two older daughters by the intruders, and now they had taken his second wife. His only son was dead and his remaining daughter had abandoned him for the whaling station. His distress was compounded when he discovered that in his absence almost all of his clan had succumbed to disease, as had all but one of the people visiting from Port Davey, who were under his protection.
It would not be the whalers’ carnal appetites that proved the insurmountable barrier to Robinson’s plans for his civilising mission with the Nuenonne: it was the influenza virus. Instead of dispensing the fruits of civilisation, Robinson was reduced to an impotent bystander in an apocalyptic nightmare. ‘Death hath visited with dire havoc,’ Robinson confided to his journal on 23 September, ruefully noting that only fourteen Nuenonne remained to receive the benefit of his proselytising. These traumatised survivors were slashing their faces and bodies in grief, in no state to heed his Christian platitudes.
His evangelical commitment was sorely tested by the daily burial rites, in which he was expected to participate. Traditionally, the Nuenonne burnt their dead, and then collected the ashes and a bone relic to wear as a ritual keepsake. With so few able-bodied survivors, the cremation rituals were reduced to a brutal minimum. Missionary Bay became littered with charred remains, some only partly consumed by the cremation fire and subject to the ravages of the many abandoned dogs.
By October, only a handful of people survived at Missionary Bay. Manganerer was barely clinging to life, a broken man. Within a few months he, too, would be dead, from venereal disease. The only male capable of decisive action was Wooredy. The Doctor had not been able to save his wife or most of his clan, but miraculously he and his two sons were restored to full health. In this very able fellow, Robinson recognised an indispensable ally. Wooredy was bound to Robinson by ties of obligation, and not just for the food he provided.
Wooredy needed a new wife and had set his sights on Manganerer’s adolescent daughter. He made it clear that his support was contingent on Robinson’s exercising authority over the whalers to secure Truganini. That she plainly preferred the attention of the whalers, Wooredy pragmatically acknowledged; his wife had been a regular visitor to the whaling station before she became ill.
Wooredy was not alone in his desire for Truganini; many men found her desirable. Robinson himself had undoubtedly been very taken with Truganini from the first moment he set eyes on her. Whatever desire he felt for her was powerfully tempered by his visceral horror of the venereal disease she had contracted. He expressed righteous resentment at the sexual liberties taken by other men, but his journals provide no suggestion that Truganini ever became his sexual partner. The role he cast for himself was even more intimate and binding than that of a lover: he was the good father who would protect and save her.
Robinson understood that it was much to his advantage for Truganini to be partnered with Wooredy. More letters were delivered to the whaling station, demanding her return, but even when the whalers left at the end of the season she did not come to Missionary Bay. With Dray and another friend, the recently widowed Pagerly, Truganini travelled north, crossing Richard Pybus’s grant to reach Kelly’s farm. It was reported to Robinson that all three women were so debilitated with venereal disease that they could hardly walk. Eventually, it fell to Manganerer to shoulder the humiliation of recovering his reluctant daughter; she would not hide from her father.
As well as retrieving Truganini and Dray, Manganerer was also able to remove Pagerly, whom he took down to his camp on the Neck to be his new wife. Neither Truganini nor Dray was well enough to travel much beyond Kelly’s farm. They reappeared at Missionary Bay in late October, apparently cured of the ‘loathsome disease’, most likely syphilis. Rather than the women being cured, the disease had entered the latent phase when the symptoms were no longer evident and the women no longer contagious.
Truganini returned to Missionary Bay very reluctantly. Robinson found it a disturbing puzzle that she should continue to invite sexual exploitation by brutal and depraved men when a decent man such as himself could provide her with shelter, warm clothing, food and all the tea and sugar she might want. He would never understand that her predilection for sex with convicts and whalers, no matter how violent they might be, could be a psychological adaptation to the trauma of her short life—what modern psychiatry would describe as Stockholm syndrome.
Wooredy was ecstatic with gratitude, attributing Truganini’s return to the awesome power of Robinson’s magic paper. Notwithstanding Robinson’s and her father’s encouragement, Truganini was not interested in her Nuenonne suitor. She scornfully declared Wooredy to be Raegewarrah personified and rejected his overtures with tears of rage. In no way discouraged, Wooredy maintained his attentions until she resentfully submitted in October 1829, in ‘dread apprehension’, so Robinson recorded, of violating the cultural norms that required her to accept a suitor who had chosen her.
Confident that he had now secured Wooredy’s fidelity, Robinson sailed to Hobart to finalise plans to leave the charnel ground that Missionary Bay had become. He had hatched a much grander scheme to lead a civilising mission overland to Port Davey and then up the remote west coast, contacting all the clans in the west and north-west and bringing them under his protection. He called this audacious project his ‘friendly mission’. Dray, who was pining to be reunited with her people, would be essential to this mission, while Truganini and Wooredy had kinship connections and spoke the language. These three would be his intermediaries in his process of ‘conciliation’.
He returned to Missionary Bay on the sloop Swallow on 29 January 1830, having garnered the governor’s generous support for his plan. He had secured a supply vessel, a team of five convicts to provide logistical backup, and the promise of assistance from the penal settlement in Macquarie Harbour. In addition, the governor released into Robinson’s custody several men from various clans who had been captured by roving parties and were languishing in jail. Months earlier, Robinson had rejected a request to take these men to Missionary Bay, protesting that it would be ‘impossible to keep hold of any number of natives within a certain space … unless proper means of confinement were put into effect’. This principle of ‘proper means of confinement’ would guide his modus operandi for the next five years.
He had sailed back to Missionary Bay primarily to collect Dray, Wooredy and Truganini, and when they could not be found he sent the party of convicts to the Neck to convey these people to a nearby embarkation point. The next day, four adults and two children were taken aboard the Swallow, willingly enough. Among them was Pagerly. Manganerer had died days before, and his widow could see more possibilities for her future life with the men in Robinson’s expedition than her precarious existence with the whalers. Dray was keen to make the journey, desperately wanting to be reunited with her brother. Wooredy was looking to Robinson to secure his own survival and that of his two sons, Myunge and Droyerloine. His recalcitrant young wife was unwavering. She had fixed on Robinson with a fierce determination: he was her father now and he would be the agent of her survival. Wherever Robinson went, Truganini would go.
Heaven only knows what sort of excursion Truganini thought she had embarked upon. Many times she had gone to Recherche Bay with her father in his bark canoe. Nomadic treks through the south-west to Port Davey were part of the timeless, seasonal pattern of her life. The purpose of a journey was the journey itself, a ritual interaction with the land over which they moved, recorded and recreated in stories and songs. A journey encompassed return, a completion, in accordance with the natural cycles of the environment. To journey for the purpose of reaching a destination was an entirely new concept. Not to return was unthinkable.