ON THE AFTERNOON of 31 January 1830, Robinson’s mission party landed on a crescent of stark white sand at the far southern end of Recherche Bay. It was as Truganini had always known it, except for a few abandoned huts left by the Cyprus mutineers. For all the pain of the recent loss of her father, and the death of the baby half-brother she had often carried on her shoulders, Truganini was delighted to be returned to the place of her birth. She sprinted up the beach to gather armfuls of the fleshy pigface. While frolicking in the creek she caught a shy platypus. With Dray and Pagerly, she swam around the rocky outcrop at the far end of the beach to dive for shellfish, retrieving several bags of mussels and oysters. Everyone was in high spirits at the evening feast, except for Wooredy. He felt the presence of Raegewarrah everywhere.
For his entire life, some forty years, Wooredy had made trips to and from this place. As a small boy he had hidden in the bush with his family to observe the arrival of Bruni D’Entrecasteaux. Even then, he had known the pale strangers had been conjured from the sea by Raegewarrah. The malevolent spirit was still present, he knew, embodied in the tree the strangers had carved. Wooredy’s concerns were amplified while hunting the next day when he stumbled upon the decayed body of a woman; the corpse showed no sign of violence nor any attempt at cremation. Raegewarrah had caught her, he was sure of it.
Viewing the body, Dray identified the woman as one of the people who had come with her from the west coast months earlier. She must have shown signs of the fatal illness and been left to die alone, Dray explained, strangely unmoved by this apparent callousness. Robinson was dismayed to observe another display of the belief ‘that no human means can avert the doom to which they are consigned’. This stubborn fatalism about the irresistible force of Raegewarrah deeply rankled with him, even though Wooredy had given him a potent lesson in Raegewarrah’s awesome power on the voyage from Bruny.
As they had sailed down the channel, Wooredy had identified the land they passed as the country of three interconnected clans—the Mellukerdee from the Huon Valley, the Lyluequonny from Southport and the Needwondee from Cox’s Bight—all gone within the span of Wooredy’s adult life. This land was empty now, Wooredy told him. Nobody in that country was left alive.
The survivors of that same holocaust were the five men and a youth who now accompanied the expedition, at the governor’s pleasure. Kickerterpoller, in his early twenties, was from the Pardarereme clan from the east coast. He had been stolen from his people when he was about nine and given to a settler as a farmhand. In his youth, he had run away to join the remnants of his clan waging a guerilla war, until he was captured in 1824. Another man raised by settlers was Robert, who was ‘found’ in a remote area of the midlands when he was a baby and did not even know his clan or real name. Umarrah was the senior man of the Tyerrerontepanner clan from the northern midlands. A famous guerilla fighter, he had been captured by a roving party on 7 November 1828, along with his countryman Parewareter. Trepanner was from the north coast and also had a strong allegiance to Umarrah. Maulboyheener was a youth of about fourteen, from the Pyemairenerpairnener clan from the north-east, who had been captured with his mother by John Batman’s roving party and had been living at Robinson’s house.
Robinson was most impressed with the ‘respectful and compliant’ Kickerterpoller, whose command of English and knowledge of European customs made him an ideal negotiator. Robert, while a very good shot, was timid and not at home in the bush, getting lost on more than one occasion, and was largely consigned to work with the convicts. Umarrah was the most important because he commanded the loyalty of the other men. These men would all have preferred to linger at Recherche Bay, where the hunting was good and the shellfish plentiful. They were aliens in this country, did not know the language or customs and had no wish to meet the local clans.
Dray, however, was most anxious to start for the west coast and so too was Truganini, who had kin among the Ninine. Wooredy was not at all enthusiastic. He was inherently hostile towards the toogee—his collective name for people from the west coast—despite his strong cultural ties, and was reluctant to travel into their territory. Wooredy’s superb tracking and hunting skills made this steady fellow the lynchpin of Robinson’s mission, and he judged that Wooredy’s determined attachment to Truganini would overcome his reluctance to move.
Wooredy’s misgivings were shared by Umarrah and Kickerterpoller. Both men had previously been co-opted as trackers for roving parties sent out to capture people still trying to survive in the districts under martial law. They were very familiar with this kind of expedition and knew all too well the violent, coercive ways of settlers, which made them suspicious of Robinson’s true intentions. Even though Robinson’s expedition was not a paramilitary organisation like the roving parties, and no one was openly armed, the convicts all carried guns in their knapsacks, and the brace of pistols hidden in Robinson’s knapsack told them this mission was not going to be as friendly as Robinson claimed. Yet they had reason to cleave to Robinson, at least in the short term: no longer confined in some disgusting lockup, they were at large in unoccupied country where they could hunt freely. And no one was shooting at them.
Kickerterpoller had another reason to stick with the expedition. He wanted to be around Truganini and was angling to take her from her ageing husband. It did not take him long to realise that despite his age Wooredy was a consummate warrior and jealously protective of his status. Kickerterpoller adroitly transferred his amorous attentions to Pagerly, although he was never satisfied with just one woman.
Another man with his eye on Truganini was the foreman of the convict support team, Alexander McKay. Technically still a convict himself, McKay was an experienced bushman who had assisted in survey explorations throughout the north-west of Van Diemen’s Land, where he had had many interactions with local clans. Robinson instinctively saw him as a rival. Even as he was forced to rely on McKay’s exemplary bush skills, Robinson despised and distrusted the man, never finding a good word to say about him or any of his assigned convicts. The antagonism was mutual. The convicts were openly contemptuous of Robinson, furious that he should make them walk to the west coast rather than travel by boat.
An enduring perception had taken hold among colonists that the south-west was a terrible place, a geographical extension of the inhuman horrors of the penal settlement at Sarah Island in Macquarie Harbour. Everyone knew the stories of convicts, driven beyond endurance by the cruelties of the penal system, who had escaped into the hinterland never to be seen again. One convict bolter who survived his encounter with this terrible land was sustained throughout his ordeal by systematically murdering and eating his companions. If the rigours of this hellish environment could drive a man to cannibal depravity, why would any Christian willingly set foot on it?
George Augustus Robinson was an odd kind of Christian. The new colony at the end of the world presented him with a Janus face: both a place where he could climb the hierarchy of civilised society and at the same time a place where the modifying impact of man was barely evident. He reasoned to himself that his object in plunging into the wild was to shine the light of God into the darkness, yet his wholehearted embrace of untamed nature revealed a passion for elemental experience much at odds with his evangelical posturing. He hankered to venture into the heart of darkness and immerse himself in the vast wilderness of this new world, even as his every step was driven by a voracious ambition to be feted and admired by the settler elite who had showered derision upon his enterprise. He was determined to return to their small world as a conquering hero.
Mid morning on 3 February 1830, the mission party began to walk overland from Recherche Bay to the west coast. The sun was shining and Robinson had high hopes. Estimating the distance to Port Davey to be about sixty miles, he figured it would take them three days to cover the ground. He knew nothing of the territory before him; no settler had ever attempted this trek. Striding out with confidence, he had no idea what he was getting into. His expectation was that the men would hunt game to supplement their meagre rations and Dray’s desire to be reunited with her brother would get the party to the destination.
Walking in single file, with the convicts bringing up the rear, the party followed the creek westwards for a mile or so until they reached a flat plain that stretched for many miles, promising easy walking. To Robinson’s dismay, they almost immediately sank into tepid water that rose to their calves. The pretty olive- and rust-coloured grasses that stretched as far as the eye could see grew in a porous layer of peat above a hard quartzite base, which trapped the heavy rainfall in a watery bog. For hours the party pulled their legs through marshland that at times sucked them down to their knees. Reaching higher ground, they were only slightly less dismayed to find an almost impenetrable belt of thick eucalypt scrub. It was almost dark when a viable campsite was located beside a freshwater creek. By then the party were exhausted. They had only covered eight miles.
Just after dawn the next day, Dray found the track on which her people travelled across the tricky terrain. It had not been used for many months, and in places it was swallowed by rainforest, which meant clambering over fallen trees slippery with moss, then a steep descent down a cliff face with almost every step causing a cascade of small boulders. After much slipping and stumbling they finally reached the southern coastline. As they made camp, heavy rain began to fall that persisted throughout the night.
At sunrise, disheartened and drenched to the bone, the expedition set off once more, climbing up and over rugged country covered with dense forest, punctuated by huge outcrops of barren rock with jagged edges, some sharp as knives. By the time they reached the southern coast again they were sweating profusely in the baking sunshine. They walked for several hours along a wide arc of squeaky, shifting sand pounded by heavy surf. A mile or two behind, the burdened convicts stumbled and cursed.
That night, camped at the bottom of a deep coastal ravine, Robinson was very apprehensive. The party had covered no more than twenty miles, and supplies were running dangerously low. The cracking pace had allowed no time for hunting, and there were no local people to render assistance. They had passed many bark huts of the Needwondee, completely deserted. Wooredy said all these people had been snatched away by Raegewarrah.
The fourth day involved negotiating a passage across a daunting mountain range that consisted of a series of polished quartz summits. Much of the time they crawled on hands and knees, clinging onto the wiry tufts of grass or the pitiful, wind-stunted trees. Even in these dire circumstances, Robinson was reaching for the sublime. Painfully hauling himself up to a bare summit, he turned back to watch the line of convicts cautiously winding single file around the mountain opposite, and was swept with regret that he did not have drawing materials on hand to capture such a romantic scene.
His companions were not so uplifted. After persevering all day in this unforgiving terrain without any food, they were at the point of total exhaustion. Truganini was smaller than anyone else in the group, and she could barely walk because her legs were badly swollen, a common complication of second-stage syphilis. Kickerterpoller was no longer compliant, and boldly remonstrated that this was not the way to travel. Even a roving party moving through cleared country on level ground did not go at such a pace, he protested. The indefatigable Wooredy was the only one not prone with exhaustion. Scanning the ragged, precipitous coastline, his sharp eyes located a schooner lying offshore, in a bay about six miles ahead. It was the support ship, the Swallow, which by sheer luck was not yet at Macquarie Harbour, the intended rendezvous, having been driven back by strong winds. The random meeting was lifesaving.
The colonists called the place where the Swallow was anchored Louisa Bay, but Wooredy knew it to be where the creator spirit fell from the sky into the sea. For many millennia it had been a ritual meeting place for all the clans of the south-east, and it was home to extensive shell middens and hidden rock paintings. Here his father and grandfather had built the sturdy canoes they took to distant Maatsuyker Island to hunt for seals. There were no more seals to hunt on Maatsuyker—they had all been killed by the sealers, who had stolen so many Nuenonne women.
Re-energised by the prospect of food, Robinson and his guides followed Wooredy in a headlong scramble down the mountainside, reaching Louisa Bay by late afternoon. Two hours later the shattered convicts arrived.
Watching Truganini gleefully diving for crayfish, Robinson ruefully acknowledged how close they had come to starvation. He was convinced that in the future he would have to defer to his guides and their way of doing things. Without their food supplies and local knowledge of the bush he would not survive the trip to Port Davey. ‘My greatest confidence was in the natives,’ he confided to his journal. ‘They were well acquainted with the resources of the country and would not allow me to want.’
For the next six weeks, Robinson kept to the meandering, leisurely pace of his guides, for whom travel was subordinate to the requirements of hunting and food gathering. Truganini and Dray knew how to find their kin, but neither was in any hurry to do so. Slyly deflecting Robinson’s pursuit, the two women spent their time diving for crayfish, oyster and abalone, or collecting small wild plums, sweet red berries and edible roots. The men went hunting for wallaby, wild duck, and an elusive animal somewhat bigger than a dog, with distinctive stripes on its back. Although there were many semicircular grass-covered huts, no people were ever sighted.
As the food became more plentiful, the terrain became more difficult. Moving from the coast further west towards Bathurst Harbour meant pushing into mountainous country covered with a tangle of trees that grew almost horizontal. Beset by mizzling rain that never let up, they were forced to crawl along precipices or wade for miles through thigh-high water. Impervious to the brutal terrain and the perpetual rain, Robinson found the experience thrilling. He stuck close to the guides, sleeping beside their fires and sharing their provisions of abalone, crayfish and wallaby meat.
The scornful convicts made camp a considerable distance away, spurning the freshly caught food in favour of their Christian supplies of damper and salted meat. Nor did they want any part of the heathen singing and dancing that went on every night.
Robinson was a fascinated participant in the nightly ceremonies, listening attentively as Wooredy told of the exploits of the creator spirit who made man from the kangaroo. The stories were sung with a repeated, chanted chorus, and Robinson inserted himself into these rituals by playing his flute, to his companions’ delight. After years of terror and loss, they were all having a fine time in the bush, reviving their traditional way of life that revolved around hunting and ritual. And Robinson was there to make sure the surly men with guns were kept at a safe distance.
So began a system of mutual support and protection that for Truganini and Wooredy lasted thirteen years. They might not have properly comprehended Robinson’s intentions, but they understood that their relationship with him had undergone a profound change. In contrast to his earlier behaviour, where his efforts had been bent on making them like himself, in the wilderness it seemed as if he was in the process of becoming one of them. True, he did not strip off his clothes and go hunting naked as they did, but he shared the food they caught and was at pains to make himself part of their rituals and daily activity. He watched and listened—writing up copious notes in his journal.
In the middle of March, the party reached the vast waterway of Bathurst Harbour. They had been walking for six weeks without any contact with the inhabitants of the south-west, who proved no more accommodating than the primordial landscape. The Ninine were ‘fleeing before my approach as the clouds flee before a tempest’, Robinson wrote in exasperation. At Bathurst Harbour, he was able to make contact with the Swallow again, and get a whaleboat to take them across the wide expanse of water to make camp at the head of the harbour at a spot known as Kelly’s Basin. As they crossed the water, Robinson experienced a surge of expectation when Wooredy spotted something fluttering on the shore. It was revealed to be no more than a pathetic flag planted by three convicts who had escaped from the penitentiary at Sarah Island, many miles to the north. Their bleached skeletons, still in tattered government-issue clothing, were an unsettling reminder of how inhospitable this place could be for intruders.
While squatting on the ground to register this grim find, Wooredy suddenly pointed to smoke rising in the distant hills. Robinson’s heart began to race all over again. At last the Ninine were in sight. Truganini and Dray set off in pursuit. In the following days the two women caught up with the Ninine time and time again, but the people would simply melt away into the bush. Only two young women could be persuaded to come with them to meet ‘Mister Robinson’. He entertained them with baubles and they were utterly beguiled by the sound of his flute. Still, it took days to persuade them to take Dray to their hiding place. Robinson and Wooredy accompanied them, but Truganini declined to go, pleading exhaustion, although she may have had other reasons for staying behind at the camp without her husband.
Robinson followed Dray and the two Ninine women, pushing a long way through tough scrub. Reaching a hidden clearing, Dray gave several loud hoots, and ten naked women emerged, with six children in tow. After some cautious discussion with Dray, they hooted in turn and an equal number of men appeared, all of them standing more than six feet tall, naked and carrying spears, with dead wallabies thrown around their shoulders. Wooredy told the men he had walked all day to meet with them and how Robinson had constantly called out ‘gozee’, meaning ‘make haste’, which caused great mirth. They kept repeating ‘gozee’, then collapsing into gleeful laughter. Cautiously, they sniffed at the biscuit Robinson offered, before handing it back, and then they amused themselves by stroking and prodding his pale skin and meticulously examining the blue coat he was wearing.
A white man was an object of wonder to them, Robinson thought, but it was not so. The Ninine knew plenty about the pale-skinned men they called num, and what they knew made them very wary. Dray described Mister Robinson to her people as ‘nyrae’, by which she meant ‘good’, and it may have been her description that caused their wonder. The pale-skinned men they knew about would certainly not be described as nyrae num.
These ten families made an impressive group, everyone in excellent health and good spirits. The jocular band agreed to accompany Dray back to Robinson’s camp, laughing and shouting all the way, until they breasted the hill above Kelly’s Basin. Suddenly, they stopped in their tracks and fell silent. Coming towards them were a group of num in a boat. Robinson was livid with anger that the curious convicts had disobeyed his order to stay out of sight. He could not induce the Ninine to take another step. Leaving Wooredy and Dray to spend the night with them, he went alone to his camp.
Climbing the same hill with Truganini the next day, he was distressed to find that the Ninine had slipped away as his guides slept. Truganini and Wooredy followed their tracks for the next two weeks—a game of hide-and-seek in which the Ninine sporadically made contact only to disappear on a whim.
Frustrated by his failure to effect ‘conciliation’ with the local population, Robinson was equally perplexed by the attitude of his guides. He was alarmed when they told him they could round up the Ninine if he gave them his pistols. Alternatively, his convict retainers advised that alcohol would be the most effective weapon, explaining ‘it would only be necessary to make them drunk and you could take them anywhere’. Robinson had expected this kind of crude suggestion from convicts, which is why he had kept them from any possible contact. And he was alert to potential antagonism from men from other language groups. But it was beyond his comprehension that Wooredy should want to capture people to whom he was closely related. Robinson began to suspect that his loyal and trusted companion could be causing the extreme wariness of the Ninine, especially when he heard Truganini warn them that her husband ‘did not like toogee’.
Robinson was genuinely shocked to realise that his entire mission team—guides and convicts alike—believed that the purpose of their travails in this wet and wind-ravaged landscape was to capture the inhabitants. No one appeared to understand him when he reiterated that his friendly mission was to gain the confidence of the west coast clans. Taking captives had never been his intention, he told them. Then what was their task, his bemused companions may well have wondered, if not capture and removal? What other motivation could there be for making this insane expedition through barely penetrable wilderness?
Setting off up the coast in pursuit of his elusive quarry, Robinson left the convicts at his base camp, as well as Wooredy’s two sons and Maulboyheener, who had been unable to cope physically with the rigours of the difficult terrain. Robinson, with Truganini, Dray, Wooredy, Pagerly, Kickerterpoller, Parewareter, Trepanner and Umarrah, proceeded northwards leaving Robert and the three boys behind with the convicts. They were pinned to the coast: on one side was impenetrable forest, and on the other side an ocean that stretched across the world from Africa to smash onto the land with frightening vehemence. Roiling waves broke onto the shore, creating huge hummocks of dun-coloured foam.
On 25 March, they encountered two Ninine men hunting beside the mouth of a wide river. Seemingly oblivious to Robinson, the men asked Dray whether there were num in her party. Reassured there were none, the hunters led the party a short way inland to a clearing with a fire pit. Some thirty people emerged out of the bush to extend a generous welcome. It seemed as if these people had never actually seen num, although Robinson could see they certainly knew of their existence, as they had many dogs, and had somehow acquired an axe.
The two groups held an exuberant corroboree well into the night, causing the dense forest to reverberate with their pounding feet and chanting. The tall, stately Ninine men were superb dancers, Robinson wrote admiringly, bounding from one position to another as they chanted, every part of the body in motion at the same time, even their eyes. Then Wooredy, Kickerterpoller and Umarrah danced in reciprocation. Robinson did not attempt to dance, but he was persuaded to play his flute.
Not only was Robinson obliged to perform, he was also obliged to share his accommodation. As the temperature plummeted and heavy rain saturated the ground, several men and their dogs crawled into his tent and under his blanket. They were packed in so tightly he could barely move. He knew that if he wanted their trust he could not protest against this intrusion and so lay awake, longing for daylight. Sunrise revealed his blanket and clothes to be covered with lice. Disgusted, he stepped out of his tent to find a young woman standing guard in the driving rain. She had been there all night, Dray later explained, to sound the alarm should he reach for the pistols in his knapsack. He was not pleased to hear that the Ninine knew about his guns. Truganini had probably told them. Silently wishing the firearms gone, he determined to never again take his guns with him on a search party.
When the wild weather cleared, the Ninine indicated they would swim across the river to move further up the coast. Against stern opposition from Wooredy, Robinson insisted his party must cross the river after them. None of the men, Robinson included, could swim. Wooredy constructed a narrow reed canoe that Truganini, Pagerly and Dray pushed across the river. Kicking their strong legs through the water, they returned time and time again, to ferry Robinson, his knapsack, his tent, and all the provisions. Begrudgingly, Wooredy agreed that the women could push him over on the canoe, and he was followed by Kickerterpoller. The last to cross was Umarrah, who had a terror of deep water.
Over the next four days they stuck close to the Ninine. All the men went hunting together, while the women dived off the rocks for abalone, or foraged for mushrooms and wild figs. When they were not hunting, the men meticulously decorated their bodies with feathers and ochre. Every night was spent in energetic corroboree. Robinson always played his flute, and while he did not join in the dances he did submit to having his face painted with ochre. The two groups formed an amicable fellowship, except for Wooredy, who grumbled to Robinson that these savage people would spear them all, or run away and leave them stranded. He pleaded with Robinson to take them captive and send them to Hobart. With evident scorn, Truganini interrupted, telling Robinson that her husband made ‘too much talk’ because he ‘no like toogee’.
After the corroboree concluded on the fourth night, Robinson had no visitors in his tent and slept well. Waking at first light, he became painfully aware that the Ninine were stealthily moving away. Seeking an explanation from Dray, he learnt they feared Wooredy, who had stolen some of their spears. Also, Truganini had told them that Kickerterpoller and Umarrah had worked with roving parties capturing people in the east. Despite Dray’s assurances to the contrary, her people had decided no one in the party was to be trusted. With his rations almost exhausted, Robinson knew there was no way to induce the people to stay. It was best to let them go, he decided, to ‘shew them that my motives was pure and free of chicanery’. There would be another time.
Wooredy was having none of this high-minded talk about taking no captives. He was humiliated by Robinson’s weakness in not asserting control over the Ninine. His vehemence puzzled Robinson, even though Kickerterpoller and Umarrah were just as resentful. As always, Robinson was oblivious to the implicit message he was giving these three men who considered themselves already to be captives. Captivity was the new order in which they lived. It was apparent to them that the convicts he left back at Kelly’s Basin were also Robinson’s captives. Why then would he not capture the Ninine?
From that point onwards, Robinson’s daily journal entries detail a steady deterioration in his relationship with his male guides. He worried that his trusted companion Wooredy was about to abscond, while Kickerterpoller was no longer seen as compliant, instead described as ‘innately wicked’ for acting independently and walking off to hunt whenever it suited. Umarrah continued to appear a model of attentiveness until, a few weeks later, he coolly gathered his dogs and his companions, Parewareter and Trepanner, and disappeared into the forest, leaving Robinson almost apoplectic.
The disgruntled Wooredy was dispatched back to base camp at Bathurst Harbour to tell Alexander McKay to bring up Robert and the convicts as well as all the rations. He also carried instructions to the skipper of the Swallow to sail to Hobart with Maulboyheener and Wooredy’s two young sons. When Wooredy returned with McKay, Robinson thought he was ‘displeased’, failing to gauge the emotional impact of his decision to separate the father from his children, and send them to a fate Wooredy could not possibly know. Seeing truculence rather than grief, Robinson directed Wooredy to go with McKay to fetch rations from the penal settlement on Sarah Island as well as medicine for the virulent skin infection he had caught from a Ninine man who shared his blanket. Truganini was also sent with McKay. Had Robinson been aware that McKay was having sex with Truganini, he would have kept her at his camp.
As long as Dray was with him, Robinson could nurture a hope of making a successful conciliation with her people. Leaving Kickerterpoller and Pagerly to wait with the convicts at the camp, he set off with Dray to walk up the coast. Soon they fell in with another group, all well known to Dray, and spent a night with them. Once again several men came to lie under Robinson’s blankets, but on this occasion he slept soundly. He woke at dawn to find that everyone had disappeared, he was entirely alone. Dray was gone too. Thoroughly scared, he reflected that he had depended too much on her, ‘for which the Lord was humbling me’.
Humbled indeed he was, as he struggled alone for days with his heavy pack, stumbling over sharp rocks and wading through chest-high streams, fearing being swept to a watery death at any moment. Should an escaped convict have come upon Robinson at this time he would have had difficulty making out what kind of man this was. He was half-starved, shoeless, wearing a tattered shirt and two hessian bags bound around his legs with bark. His skin was blackened with a mixture of gunpowder and urine he had applied to his horrible rash. The infection had glued his eyes till he was almost blind. It was fortunate that Truganini and Wooredy came across him as they were returning from Sarah Island.
Despite his pitiful condition, and his desertion by Dray, Robinson remained determined to continue up the coast. Kickerterpoller would be no help to him, as he did not know these people, and Wooredy was now resentful and belligerent. More than ever before, Robinson was dependent on Truganini. She made an effort to entice people she saw in the distance, but the suspicion that she herself had sown among them meant they kept well out of reach. It was Wooredy who managed to locate one small band by the mouth of a river. They had fled before Robinson and Truganini caught up, except for a lone man who remained on the hill above. He was anxiously watching his daughter, who had leapt into the sea in terror. She was being buffeted by huge waves smashing against the rocky outcrop to which she clung.
Over the din of the violent waves, Truganini implored the girl to come back to the nyrae num, but the girl was more afraid of Robinson than the rough sea. Plunging into the breakers, Truganini swam out and pulled her back to shore, where she stood quivering in such evident terror that Truganini could only retreat. The next day Truganini located the family again, and once again the daughter leapt into the sea to be dashed against the rocks, cutting open her breast. Truganini swam out again but this time could not induce the girl to return to shore.
Resigned to failure, Robinson continued up to the north-west corner, traversing a treeless coast indented with numerous sandy coves. Wooredy knew they were under surveillance but he only caught fleeting glimpses of any watchers. Nearing the mouth of the Arthur River, they had to walk through waist-high foam thrown up by the rush of fresh water into the sea. They could not see where to put their feet and kept tripping on driftwood logs that had been deposited by the river surge. These logs were ideal for constructing a raft, and on 10 June the party was able to cross the tannin-stained water, although the strong current made swimming the multiple crossings very arduous for Truganini and Pagerly.
Walking some short way inland on the north side of the river they saw the country was newly burnt and found substantial bark huts belonging to the Tarkiner people. On 12 June, Wooredy located fresh tracks that led him back to the shore, where he found an infant girl wrapped in a kangaroo skin and a boy aged about six with a skin over his shoulders. The boy was sobbing in distress, and was even more terrified by Robinson’s attempts to amuse him with a lacquered box. From a hill above, Truganini observed a group of adults swimming out to a rocky island to hide. She ran down to the shore and dived into the ocean and swam out to persuade them to return to their children. A tall warrior came out of hiding to hurl large rocks at her until she withdrew. The best Robinson could do was wrap each of the children in a blanket and drape them with ribbons and baubles, to show the parents that his intentions were friendly. He hoped they would be more receptive the next time he came by.
By June they had entered the massive sheep runs of the Van Diemen’s Land Company, which had been founded by a group of London merchants who had been granted a royal charter to more than 200,000 acres of hunting country to graze their sheep. Climbing to the top of Mount Cameron, Robinson could see the attraction of this remote corner. A broad plain of tussock grass had been created by burning, interspersed with small belts of tea-tree forest, which made it perfect for kangaroo—and for sheep. This country was not dissimilar to Bruny Island, although wilder and with a more exposed aspect. The extensive plateau stretched across to Cape Grim, where a majestic cliff rose abruptly from a sea dotted with an archipelago of grassy islands. This coastline, once home to tens of thousands of fur seals, was now almost denuded by the sealers, although the island still provided nesting sites for huge flocks of albatross that coated the cliffs with silver guano.
On reaching Cape Grim on 14 June, the mission party enjoyed the hospitality of Joseph Fossey, superintendent of the Van Diemen’s Land Company establishment at Cape Grim. Fossey was most unusual among the colonists in that he had a high regard for the original people and was full of admiration for Robinson’s project. These ‘discordant qualities’ put Fossey at odds with other company employees, most pointedly the company manager, Edward Curr, a callous pragmatist who believed that the continued existence of the original people on, or near, the Van Diemen’s Land Company land was incompatible with the company’s primary purpose of grazing sheep. He considered Robinson to be on a fool’s errand and that the sooner the people were gone the better.
While the mission party was at Cape Grim, they heard terrible stories about the wanton killing of the local clans. One of the company shepherds blandly informed Robinson that two years earlier he and three others had shot an unarmed group of about thirty Pennemukeer and Pairelehoinner, who had gathered at Cape Grim to collect mutton birds. Their bodies had been thrown off the cliffs onto the rocks in retaliation for the killing of a large flock of the company’s sheep. What was to be done, the shepherd plaintively enquired of Robinson, when the blacks kept spearing them and killing their sheep?
This massacre was not a singular act. The company employees openly boasted of their murderous intent towards the local people. Another shepherd told the wife of a sea captain, who visited the area in 1828, that they wished ‘to extirpate them entirely’.
Confirmation of the Cape Grim massacre and other killings came from a Pairelehoinner youth Robinson met in the sealers’ camp on nearby Robbins Island on 19 June. Peevay (also known as Tunnerminerwait) was aged about fifteen and well acquainted with the treachery and brutality of the num. As children, he and his three brothers had survived an ambush by sealers in 1820 in which all the adult men had been killed and seven women abducted, possibly including his mother. His father was probably a victim of either internecine warfare with other clans or the routine violence of Van Diemen’s Land Company employees, which together decimated the clans of the north-west coast. Peevay had been driven into a dependency on the Van Diemen’s Land Company, and was fraught with apprehension. He had learnt to speak English while working as a shepherd. For the past ten days he had been working with the sealers, who called him Jack. He suspected they intended to kill him.
Also at the camp were six women, all wearing cumbersome dresses made of kangaroo skins, with red caps pulled down to their eyebrows. One woman was from a local clan and the other five had been abducted from various clans from the east coast. These five threw themselves on Truganini in sheer joy at finding someone they could talk to. They were kept in such cruel conditions that Robinson determined to take them away. The sealers would not surrender the women, although they did allow Peevay to go, to his undisguised pleasure.
Robinson was very impressed with this industrious and capable young man and gave him special attention, spending hours learning his language and personal history. Recognising that a dependency on Robinson was a more promising prospect than the Van Diemen’s Land Company, Peevay demonstrated his loyalty by informing Robinson that his brother Pendowtewer and a Peerapper youth named Nicermenic were still living on Robbins Island. Robinson was very keen to get them, rationalising to himself that it would be ‘the greatest act of humanity to take them out of the hands of their enemies’.
Peevay was sent back to Robbins Island by boat to locate Pendowtewer and Nicermenic, as well as two others, to assure them of Robinson’s goodness and persuade them to join the mission. Actually, Robinson had no intention of keeping these people with him as they were superfluous to his needs and would have to be supplied with rations. They were worth money. Thanks to the bounty the governor had just introduced for any people captured alive, he would be paid five pounds a head. All he had to do was keep them with him till they reached the port at Emu Bay. This, too, he regarded as a great act of kindness.
Before leaving Cape Grim on 25 June, Robinson gave a special dinner in his tent in appreciation of Fossey’s generous hospitality. The storekeeper and other company employees were invited, as were the two couples: Wooredy and Truganini, and Kickerterpoller and Pagerly. For the occasion, Truganini and Pagerly wore shapeless smocks made from blankets, whereas Wooredy and Kickerterpoller ‘looked remarkably well’ in the smart red jackets and cream trousers that had been gifts from the commandant of the penal station at Sarah Island. Dinner consisted of roast duck and mutton, accompanied by giblet pie, potatoes, vegetables and plum pudding, with rum and port wine to follow. It was a far cry from the privations of the previous six months.
After a round of spirits, Truganini and her friends sang for Fossey, who was greatly impressed and much taken with the flirtatious Truganini. ‘I often think of her singular expression respecting me,’ he wrote to Robinson a few days later. ‘Could I meet with one as faithful as she is to you—black or white—it might work a great change in me: an evening companion would be exceedingly agreeable …’ Fossey’s use of the phrase ‘an evening companion’ was highly ambiguous. Robinson would certainly have been affronted at any suggestion that his relationship with Truganini was anything more than paternal.
The headquarters of the Van Diemen’s Land Company was on the north coast at Circular Head. From here Edward Curr commanded a sweeping view dominated by the stump of an old volcano eroded over millennia to produce bold, steep-sided bluffs that rose five hundred feet out of the sea. Curr was icily polite to Robinson, offering him a room at his house, which Robinson declined, preferring to pitch his tent among the bark huts his guides erected near the jetty. He did accept invitations to dine with Curr. On these occasions his fellow diners did not include any of his ‘sable companions’.
It was at Circular Head that Wooredy received the first news of his sons since they had been sent away four months earlier. Letters received from Mrs Robinson, written in April and early May, reported that Maulboyheener and Wooredy’s sons had arrived safely from Bathurst Harbour and were living in the annex of her house in Hobart. The two older boys, Maulboyheener and Myunge (she called them Jemmy and Davey), were to be admitted to the Orphan School.
She also reported that Maulboyheener’s mother had left her house by the time her son arrived, having been released from detention by order of the governor. Together with Umarrah’s wife and four other women living in the annex, she had left Hobart on 18 March by bullock cart, guarded by two constables. The six women had been taken to Launceston jail, and kept there for ten days—on the advice of John Batman who had originally captured several of the women—before being released into the bush. The hope was that they would find any clan members who still remained and persuade them to surrender. This came as unwelcome news to Robinson, yet by some mysterious process his guides had already learnt this some two months earlier, precipitating Umarrah’s abrupt departure from the west coast in mid May. By now, Umarrah had found his way over the Western Tiers, taking the migratory routes from the west coast to the ochre mines of the Surrey Hills, into his own country, where he was reunited with his wife.
On reaching the port at Emu Bay at the beginning of August, Pendowtewer and Nicermenic were put aboard the Van Diemen’s Land Company ship bound for Launceston, to be forwarded to the governor in Hobart. Peevay was distraught as he watched the ship weigh anchor and the wind fill its sails. ‘With them had fled his hopes,’ Robinson observed as the tears streamed down Peevay’s anguished face. Robinson himself could not help but be moved by this heart-wrenching scene, noting that ‘the affection of these people is very striking’. He was quick to find a self-justifying rationale: the Peerapper and Pairelehoinner people were now so few in number that to leave these two youths in their country would expose them to the dangers of being shot by a shepherd or speared by hostile clans on the west coast. Sending them into the care of the governor was the most humane thing to do.
Robinson was therefore greatly annoyed to discover the men never made it to Hobart. After languishing in the horrid Launceston jail, Pendowtewer was released back into his country by order of the governor, and it was years before he was caught again. Nicermenic was stolen from the jail by John Helger Wedge, the assistant surveyor. The previous year, he had kidnapped Nicermenic’s younger brother from the west coast and kept him as a kind of household pet, known to the settlers as ‘Wedge’s boy’. When the boy died in August 1830, Wedge came to the Launceston jail and simply took Nicermenic away, together with two brothers, Lacklay and Merape. Within weeks, the three had escaped and were raiding around Port Sorrell, including robbing a sealer’s boat.
Lacklay and Merape were recaptured and sent to Robinson on 21 September, while Nicermenic remained at large for another year. Lacklay and Merape were closely connected to Peevay’s clan and spoke the same language. Their arrival at Robinson’s camp at Port Sorrell comforted Peevay, who was still bitterly grieving the loss of his brother and friend. The very next day he ran away with them, only to be captured by a roving party four days later. It was a hard lesson for Peevay, one he learnt well. In the Launceston jail he refused to escape with the other two, hoping that Robinson would free him and extend his protection once more. Robinson did just that when his exhausted party limped into Launceston in early October.