SIX HUNDRED MILES of trekking through rugged country had taken a huge physical toll on Truganini. Her legs were now so swollen that she could barely walk. As they approached the town of Launceston, Wooredy had to carry her heavy bundle as well as his own. Their epic trek was a remarkable achievement, but no one in Launceston was about to hand out any accolades; the town bristled with hostility.
The whole colony was now under martial law and the burghers of Launceston were gearing up to rid the island of whoever remained of the original owners. They were not of a mind to make any exceptions for Truganini and her companions, who were all on the point of being thrown into jail to join the despondent Peevay when George Whitcomb, the clerk of customs, came to their rescue. Whitcomb was shocked to see Robinson’s emaciated state and very concerned for his vulnerable guides. He took them all to live at his house, out of harm’s way.
In the first days of October 1830, the town was beginning to resemble an armed camp. The governor had decreed that every able-bodied male—settler and convict—was required to muster into a militia. Reinforced by three military regiments, they would form a human chain and march south, converging with another human chain moving eastwards from Hobart Town. This pincer movement—known as the Black Line—would push all the original people of the colony onto the narrow Tasman Peninsula, where they would be captured and removed from the colony. The word on many lips was extirpation, an antiquated term from the Middle Ages that meant to pull something up by the roots; it had come to mean ‘destroy totally’, or exterminate, and was usually applied to unwanted animals, such as wolves or vermin.
The colonial bureaucracy was totally absorbed with minute preparations for this preposterous manoeuvre and almost every settler had caught the scent of adventure. In such excitement, Robinson’s epic mission of conciliation was almost completely ignored. No matter where he turned, all he heard was talk of ‘the extirpation of the original inhabitants’, he complained in a letter to his wife. He thought the Black Line was morally indefensible, logistically absurd, and that it would never work. No one paid him the slightest heed. Only the sardonic editor of the Colonial Times thought the venture was ludicrous, reminding readers that ‘the colony was even more mountainous than the highlands of Scotland’—given such terrain, he opined, ‘the folly of the undertaking must be apparent’. It was not.
Robinson did manage a hasty meeting with the distracted governor to secure a second mission to the north-east corner of the island, to locate any remnant clans in that region. Sightings between Pipers River and Cape Portland had fed fanciful rumours among the hypervigilant settlers that as many as seven hundred people might still be at large in that region.
As the Black Line began a cumbersome sweep southwards, Robinson set off in the opposite direction. Privately, he discounted the large number of claimed sightings—he doubted there were more than fifty original people in the whole eastern half of the island. No matter how many there were, he wanted to get to them before they were caught up in the Black Line.
Now that the governor’s priorities had changed from conciliating the original people to removing them from the colony, Robinson’s mission was no longer a friendly meet-and-greet. His instructions were to make contact with the remaining people and get them to accompany him to the coast. He was then to signal to John Batman, who would be waiting with an armed party and boats at Spring Bay, to come and take them away. That was never going to happen; Robinson loathed John Batman and deeply resented the fact that the governor had given this ruffian equal authority to Robinson.
For the past two years, Batman had been in charge of roving parties tracking the Plangermairener clan of Ben Lomond and the Pyemairenerpairnener clan from the Pipers River region, who were implicated in occasional attacks on stockkeepers. His method was to launch surprise night attacks on their camps, killing as many men and youths as he could. Women and young children were the only captives his roving parties turned over to the authorities, although some of the boy children he kept for himself. Like his friend John Helder Wedge, Batman liked to have boys living with him. Terrible stories about Batman’s unbridled violence had reached Robinson in December 1829 when he rescued Batman’s women captives and their children from brutal conditions in jail.
No way was Robinson going to allow a murderous lout like Batman into his operation. He had formed an alternative plan, which was to create a temporary holding station on Swan Island, just off the north-east tip of Van Diemen’s Land, where he would contain all the people he could find. He kept this plan for capture and confinement close to his chest, telling nobody.
The mission party consisted of Truganini and Wooredy, a chastened Peevay, finally sprung from jail, as well as Truganini’s friend Pagerly and her husband Kickerterpoller. Truganini and Wooredy were Robinson’s closest associates, yet even they had no idea of his true reason for tramping around the north-east. All they knew was that being with Robinson kept them safe and allowed them to continue their nomadic life.
Robinson took the view that the authority granted him by the governor extended to the sealers’ captives on the Bass Strait islands. To facilitate the removal of these women—known to the clans of the north-east as Tyreelore—he co-opted James Parish, a former sealer, to be the boatswain for one of the whaleboats attached to his mission. Parish was sent to Preservation Island, where he found his one-time compatriots defiant. They would never relinquish their captives, they told him; they had just as much right to the women as the governor did. In any case, most of the women were hidden in the bush on nearby Cape Barren Island, where Parish would never find them.
John Brown was one sealer who did agree to surrender one of the three Tyreelore he held: Tanleboneyer, a woman in her mid twenties who had been taken from Oyster Bay. And James Munro relinquished one of his four slaves: Bullyer, aged about nineteen, whom he had stolen from Cape Portland when she was a small child. Parish also secured the release of an old woman named Ghonyennener, who ran away as soon as they reached her country at Pipers River. Tanleboneyer and Bullyer became part of Robinson’s mission. Having been with the sealers for a decade or more, they could provide a wealth of information about this renegade community.
The stories they told were grim, describing a life marked by extreme brutality and privation. In addition to their continual sexual violation, and being traded between the men for sealskins, they were forced into the dangerous and exhausting work of hunting seals and skinning them, as well as catching and plucking albatross and mutton birds. Bullyer stretched out her arms to show how the sealers tied women to trees to ‘flog them very much, plenty much blood, plenty cry’. More than a dozen lashes of a rawhide whip was a common punishment for taking the hardtack biscuits or sugar, she explained. Any woman who failed to club enough seals or catch enough birds could be cruelly mutilated, or even killed. Life was so dreadful that pregnant women often aborted the child by beating on their belly, as Bullyer herself had done. Others took their infants into the bush to kill them when the men were not around. Sometimes it was the men who did the grisly deed.
For almost as long as Bullyer could remember, this had been her life. She retained a distant memory of being with her clan on the beach at Cape Portland when a group of men rushed their fire, shooting and grabbing. Motherless, and too small to run quickly into the bush, she had been caught by James Munro and had been with him ever since. Six women were taken in that one attack, just as her mother and other kinswomen had been stolen a few years earlier. How many were still alive, Bullyer could not say, but she knew her mother was living with one of the sealers on Kangaroo Island. Bullyer sang the mournful song of the Tyreelore in their island captivity. She explained the meaning of the words so Robinson could copy it down in a rough translation.
Country
You see it
You are going to the country
Go away to it.
Bullyer and Tanleboneyer also performed what Robinson called ‘the devil dance’, which was much the same as the dance he had seen women perform in the sealers’ camps on Robbins Island in the north-west. Here was evidence that women from different language groups were being traded between these far-flung groups of men. Curious about the devil for whom they danced, Robinson asked what they had been taught of Christian belief. The women pointed to the heavens, telling him that the Christian God stopped up in the sky, and his enemy stopped below, at which they pointed to the blue flame flickering in the fire. They were very precise that they danced for a black man who ‘stopped in the bush and was very strong’. They danced to keep him distracted, to deflect his dangerous desires. Truganini recognised that they danced for Raegewarrah, even though Tanleboneyer spoke the name in a language she did not understand.
Tanleboneyer and Bullyer had news for Truganini about her sisters, Lowhenune and Magerleede, who had been stolen from Bruny Island by the sealer known as Black Baker. Her sisters were alive, they told her, although the third woman Baker had stolen had been killed. More disheartening was the news that Baker had traded her sisters to a sealer on distant Kangaroo Island, well out of reach of the colonial authorities.
For several leisurely days the mission party travelled through the grassy plains of the north-east coast. This region had attracted no settlement and Robinson recognised it was country ‘well suited to the natives’. Evidence of their management of the landscape was there for Robinson to see every day, as he traversed large tracts of recently burnt country, some trees still smouldering. Surveying the immense grassy plain and occasional borders of forest through his European lens, he did not see a landscape carefully constructed by thousands of years of controlled burning; he saw a countryside ready-made for cattle to graze and perfect for horseriding. Wooredy’s expert eye recognised a landscape that had been purposely made for kangaroo, and he relished the opportunity to hunt the big boomer kangaroos that were everywhere in abundance in this region.
Compared to her arduous trek to the south-west and up the west coast, Truganini had an easy time in the south-east corner. The simple canoes that Wooredy made from long strips of bark bound together with vines were relatively easy for her to push across the numerous rivers they crossed. The ground they walked was mostly level. Game was plentiful, the late spring sunshine was pleasantly warm. The coastal heath was in full bloom and the people decorated their hair with flowers, adding bird feathers and red ochre for the nightly dances. Sitting around the fire, Kickerterpoller and Peevay vied good-naturedly with Wooredy to recount the pugnacious exploits of their respective clans. Robinson watched and listened, taking notes by the flickering light. Even the tormenting swarm of mosquitoes feasting on his fair skin failed to diminish his pleasure in this bucolic adventure.
There was great excitement early one morning when a feral dog was seen running past their bark shelters carrying a small marsupial in its jaws. The people all agreed that the dog was taking food for her pups and were anxious to find her den, but Robinson insisted they move on. Crunching over the spiky, scorched ground, they sighted two more wild dogs. This time Kickerterpoller sprinted after them, shouting to his companions to help catch the animals. Robinson angrily called them back, remonstrating that ‘it was blacks I wanted, not dogs’.
They reached the east coast at Cape Naturaliste, a little south of Cape Portland, on 19 October. There was no sign of the people, although wide patches of scorched vegetation provided evidence of their recent presence. From the highest point in the landscape they could see spirals of smoke from several cooking fires at Cape Portland. Bullyer urged the party to press on, insisting that once her people had eaten they would move on again. She alone felt the urgency—everyone else wanted to stop to enjoy the bounty that Truganini and Pagerly brought up from the ocean floor.
After feasting on cooked crayfish and abalone, the party walked north along the beach a short way to reach the inlet of the Musselroe River. On this exquisite piece of coast, the river formed an elongated lagoon behind the beach that was home to huge flocks of ducks and pelicans. In the middle, the water was almost covered with floating swans’ nests. Truganini and the other three women swam out to them, taking about a hundred eggs. Somewhat doubtful at first, Robinson tried one and pronounced it very good. Still it was not his intention to camp at that place, despite the vast food resources on offer.
Later that day, they reached Little Musselroe Bay, where a river inlet had formed a smaller separate lagoon behind, also well stocked with ducks’ and swans’ nests. Here they would make base camp, Robinson announced. The place was gorgeous. Between the lagoon and the sea, a curve of dazzling sand was contained by jagged pink and grey granite boulders. A short distance across the clear turquoise water was the low outline of tiny Swan Island and, beyond, the high peaks of distant Flinders Island were faintly visible rising above the dark blue horizon.
The choice to make camp in such close proximity to Swan Island was of no particular significance to Truganini. What she could see was a sheltered place with an abundant supply of delectable things. The ocean offered up abalone, oysters and crayfish for easy taking. Exceptionally large mussels could be plucked from the river inlet, while dozens of floating nests cradled swan eggs. Beyond the lagoon, new shoots pushing through the burnt ground fed many kangaroos that bounded away in every direction. She and her companions had this veritable paradise all to themselves; there were no settlers for many miles around. Visible shell middens several feet deep indicated this had been a feasting site for clans of the north-east for thousands of years, yet there was no sign of people anywhere in the vicinity.
Bullyer was correct to warn that her kinfolk would move on quickly. She looked in vain for more smoke. On the second day, Robinson took Kickerterpoller to walk across Cape Portland to Ringarooma Bay in order to make contact with the coxswains of the two whaleboats, James Parish and Alexander McKay, so he could increase the range of the search. As they walked, Kickerterpoller found fresh tracks in the burnt ground he said belonged to one small group of maybe five or six people, but no one was seen and there was no smoke.
A glorious sunny day presented them with a grand vista of headland and sea that Robinson thought was ‘altogether the finest country I have ever seen’. There was not a cloud in the sky, yet suddenly the view before them darkened, as if a storm were approaching. Overhead the sun was blocked by a vast mass of migratory mutton birds returning from the Bering Strait between Siberia and Alaska to their burrows in the Bass Strait islands. For almost two hours they watched this continuous stream and still the birds had not passed. Robinson had never seen anything like it.
After locating McKay and Parish, Robinson instructed them to sail around the coast to look for smoke from fires. Eight days later their boats pulled into Little Musselroe Bay with no sightings to report. McKay was told to sail to Hobart to take reports to the governor, and Parish was left in charge of the base camp, while Robinson and his guides walked south to the Bay of Fires. The reluctant Truganini was only persuaded to go on with the promise that Parish would bring his whaleboat to take them back.
For three days, they travelled over the soft sand and rocky points of the scalloped coastline till they reached the mouth of the George River. Scorched shell middens were everywhere, evidence of generations of occupation, with no indication that anyone had been on the coast in recent years. The adjoining bush had not been burnt for several seasons and there were no tracks. Robinson believed the fear of predatory sealers was keeping the people away. Then, to Truganini’s dismay, he announced they would have to walk inland to find them. Having been induced to accompany him on the promise they would return by boat, she was exceedingly put out and complained bitterly that her legs were too painful to walk any further. This familiar complaint did her no good. No boat was coming and they would all have to walk.
As small compensation, Robinson allowed Truganini to dive for crayfish. Suddenly catching sight of smoke in the distance, he refused to let the people stay to cook her catch. With only damper in their bellies, and each carrying a heavy knapsack, they walked along the eastern edge of a high range known to the settlers as the Blue Tier. Tramping up and down gullies, they pushed through dense pockets of slippery rainforest of giant moss-covered myrtle trees and towering tree ferns, every step precarious. Then it began to pour with rain.
Crossing into drier, open bushland, they found that even in the rain, grass fires were still burning, which had the double benefit of reassuring them they were on the right track as well as keeping them warm. The exhausted party finally made camp for the night and cooked the crayfish, hoping the smoke of the smouldering bush would camouflage their cooking fire.
Pushing north-west at daylight on the first day of November, they noticed that all the big trees had recently been stripped of bark and footprints were visible in the wet ground. Tanleboneyer had developed a hacking cough, so Robinson made her drop well behind the party lest she give their position away. The others were commanded to strip off any clothing and drop onto their bellies to crawl forwards. Wisps of smoke were issuing from a long bark hut, which was surrounded by many large, fierce-looking dogs.
Detecting movement, the people inside the hut fled into the bush while the dogs remained on guard, perfectly quiet, apparently reassured by the dark naked bodies of the approaching people. Inside the hut they found spears, waddies and red ochre scattered about. A kangaroo was cooking on the fire, a sure sign, they told Robinson when he joined them, that the occupants would not have gone far.
Bullyer and Kickerterpoller were from the same language group and they walked into the bush calling out in reassuring tones. Quite soon they got an answer: a naked man appeared before them. He was strong and muscular but no longer young, with much scarification on his ochre-stained body and an impressive mop of ochre-coloured hair. Watching from the entrance to the hut, Robinson did not fully appreciate the significance of what he was seeing. Bullyer and Kickerterpoller were speaking with the most powerful man on the east coast: Mannalargenna, the legendary leader of the Trawlwoolway clan.
An awesome warrior and cleverman, Mannalargenna was gifted with special ways of knowing. After victories in rolling wars with clans from the midlands and central plateau, he was believed to be physically invincible. He had been skilfully evading Robinson ever since the mission party arrived at Pipers River. He knew about Robinson because he had recently travelled with two of the women sent from Robinson’s house in Hobart the year before. They had told him this man represented his best chance in country that was crawling with armed settlers of murderous intent. Now it was time to parley.
Robinson approached to present the stranger with the usual baubles, and was clasped in a powerful, aromatic embrace. Mannalargenna then called his four companions, presenting Robinson with two young warriors and his close ally, Trowlebunner, leader of the Plangermairener clan from Ben Lomond. The old woman Ghonyennener, who had run away at Pipers River, was there as well.
Anxious to remove these five people, Robinson told Bullyer to explain that he had come to save them from the imminent danger of hundreds of soldiers and that they should go with him. To illustrate the threat, Robinson traced a line in the ground to indicate the Black Line, and impress upon them that they could not afford to linger in that place a moment longer. Mannalargenna and Trowlebunner did not need the visual aids. After years of debilitating conflict with the interlopers, they understood the determination of the settlers to wipe them out. And they were already well aware of the Black Line.
A few weeks before, these people had been part of a much larger group from the midland and north-east clans, travelling across country to the central plateau to do battle with their traditional enemies, the Lairmairermener, known to settlers as the Big River people. Returning, battle-scarred from the fight, they had encountered a detachment of soldiers travelling northwards to join the Black Line. The soldiers had shot three of them dead. Retribution had followed swiftly: two soldiers were speared to death as they sat by the campfire. Further eastwards, the war party witnessed the Black Line in progress. The sight of this armed phalanx caused great alarm. In order to penetrate the line more easily, the people agreed to separate into several smaller groups. Mannalargenna’s party had slipped through the line on two separate occasions. He had been watching Robinson for weeks, and in a desperate gamble had finally allowed Robinson to make contact. He wasn’t just looking for protection, he wanted to make a deal. Using Bullyer to interpret, he outlined his grievances against the sealers.
Mannalargenna had a long and turbulent history with the sealers. When these strange men first arrived, he had seen the potential of incorporating the interlopers into his tribal power base. Trading sealskins for flour, tea, sugar and dogs, he had established a good relationship with them, and allowed women to go with the sealers for a season to harvest seals on the many islands in the Bass Strait. Seeking to bind the sealers to him, Mannalargenna had encouraged reciprocal obligations and involved them in tribal life. In 1810, he arranged for his eldest daughter, Woretemoeteyenner, to marry the dominant sealer, George Briggs, seeing this as a way of cementing the obligations. Briggs and his compatriots were not interested in reciprocity, and by 1816 Briggs had reneged. The sealers took to stealing rather than trading. What had been a seasonal relationship became a lifetime of slavery for most of the women of the north-east. Sealers now held his four daughters and his sister, who was Trowlebunner’s wife.
Humiliated and betrayed, Mannalargenna sought revenge on the sealers and he wanted his daughters returned. He agreed to go with Robinson only if his conditions could be met. Robinson led him to understand that if the group came with him right away, he would take Mannalargenna to negotiate with the governor. Furthermore, he promised he would personally go to all the islands in the Bass Strait to recover the captive women and return them to their country. Having extracted these promises, Mannalargenna and Trowlebunner agreed to leave then and there, even though one other man and a woman were still hidden in the bush, and another group that included Trowlebunner’s sister and her husband were away at the coast.
Setting off with the five new people and their twenty-three dogs, Robinson was mightily pleased with himself. Writing up the episode in his journal, he was awash with self-congratulation: ‘no guns; no tying of hands; no shooting of men; and to think that I was the means of saving the lives of these unprotected natives’. The newcomers sang, laughed and chatted, one of them unerringly leading the way north-east as Robinson checked his direction on the compass. Although the party was moving at a rapid pace, the men would not be deterred from going after the big kangaroos. They hunted as if they were starving. Soon everyone in the party was walking with a dead kangaroo draped over a shoulder and still the men hunted, leaving the dead animals displayed on fallen trees for their absent companions to find.
Truganini was delighted to be accompanying these strapping male warriors, unlike the truculent Wooredy, who never liked men from other clans around his young wife. He was extremely apprehensive about them and complained to Robinson that the strangers were permitted to carry their spears. Robinson dismissed his concern. He was less afraid of being speared by Mannalargenna and his group than of their disappearing, taking Bullyer, Tanleboneyer and possibly Truganini with them.
By the time they reached Ansons River, Truganini was exhausted and protesting she could not take another step. Several fires were kindled to cook the weighty kangaroos they had been carrying. While they cooked, Mannalargenna’s people painted their bodies with a mixture of red ochre and grease. That night, they performed a series of narrative dances that told of their amorous exploits and the recent military excursion against the Lairmairermener people. Most impressive was the story of Trowlebunner outrunning a settler with a whip who was chasing him on horseback. One of the male dancers bent down on all fours while another leant against his back, and together they pranced around the fire in a mock gallop, while a third man used a branch to make them go faster. Beside them, another man ran on all fours, stopping, then starting again, and shaking his head. The dancers’ exquisite mimicry—recreating the horse, the whip-wielding driver and even the yapping dog—caused great hilarity.
At dawn the next day, the party was startled by a sharp crack in the distance. Although Robinson privately thought it was probably a tree limb breaking off, he was quick to announce it as musket fire. Feigning terror, he said the soldiers of the Black Line were approaching and if they did not get going they would all be shot. His performance was effective. Everyone took off at a rapid pace, with not one of the many dogs making the slightest noise. Robinson was astonished by the skilled control the people had over their fierce dogs, and he was equally astonished when a man and a woman stepped out of the bush to join them. They had been silently following, without being detected. Robinson could now see why he had been so unsuccessful in tracking this group, but stopped short of reaching the logical conclusion that Mannalargenna had deliberately enticed him into finding them.
Observing their skill in negotiating this unoccupied country, Robinson was moved to lament the ‘unfortunate circumstances that prevented them from the peaceful enjoyment of this useless tract of land, so well suited to them’. Those unfortunate circumstances included the whaleboat he was pushing them towards, in which he intended to carry them away from this land that suited them so well.
A cone-shaped hill known as Mount Direction loomed out of the plain in front of them. At the sight of it, Truganini pleaded fatigue once again, asking that they stop to make camp for the night. Robinson dared not take the risk of Mannalargenna and his group slipping away at night, so he allowed Truganini and the others to take the less arduous route around the base, while he and Peevay climbed up and over. Scanning the landscape from the summit, Robinson was reassured to see that his camp was close by, with Parish’s whaleboat waiting for them. He had had no intention of telling anyone about this boat, but Peevay couldn’t wait to reveal what he had seen at the beach. As the party approached the coast, the newcomers grew uneasy and hung back in the bush. Kickerterpoller had to stay behind to persuade them they had nothing to fear, and eventually led them into the camp.
Rain and wind delayed the crossing to Swan Island and Robinson was in a lather of anxiety that Mannalargenna’s people would leave. He pressed baubles and blankets on them to keep them close. His masterstroke was to issue them with clothing. ‘Trousers is excellent things and confines their legs so they cannot run,’ he wrote with satisfaction. The rain stopped and Truganini began to pull up the marram grasses she used to weave baskets, causing the strangers to shout abuse and gesticulate that she would make the rain come again. Indulgently dismissive of such foolish superstition, Robinson closed his eyes and sent up his own prayers for fine weather.
After a sleepless night of anxious watching lest his prize slip away, Robinson was much encouraged to have his prayers answered when the sun rose on a clear bright day with only a light breeze. Telling everyone to put on their trousers and follow him, he walked to the whaleboat and climbed in. Truganini and Wooredy dutifully followed, then the other guides took their seats in the boat, giving verbal encouragement to the five newcomers, who followed suit. Had Mannalargenna and Trowlebunner known Robinson was lying to them, and that his plan was for them to stay on the island, they would never have been so compliant. Having made a deal, they trusted him to keep it.
Once everyone was seated, Parish launched the boat for Swan Island. Flushed with success, Robinson cast himself as the antipodean Caesar: ‘Here was no force, no violence, no tying of hands, no muskets, etc. I said come and they came, go and they went.’ A second trip in the whaleboat two days later brought their new blankets, as well as their twenty-three dogs.
After landing his unwitting captives on Swan Island, Robinson was hugely relieved that he would no longer have to keep constant watch over them. There was nowhere they could disappear to. Swan Island was little more than an accretion of sandhills covered with bracken and coarse grass, providing a nesting habitat for seabirds and penguins. The island possessed the initial attraction of a deposit of high-grade red ochre that the people could use to decorate their bodies and hair, but little else.
Truganini and Wooredy were delighted by the profusion of penguins, and set about pulling the birds out of the burrows to snatch the eggs, only to discover that the whole island was infested with venomous tiger snakes that also hunted for eggs. Truganini was frightened almost out of her wits when she stepped on a snake. Then she dived for crayfish and was driven out of the water by a large shark. This was not an auspicious sign. Truganini knew that nothing happened without a purpose. She had seen a relative eaten by a shark off Recherche Bay and knew it was the work of Raegewarrah. She took an intense dislike to this new place, but even for such a strong swimmer, Musselroe Bay was a daunting distance away, with a treacherous current running through the channel between.
It was soon obvious to everyone that Swan Island was no place to stay, even for a limited time. The groundwater proved to be unhealthy, and for several days the powerful westerly winds known as the Roaring Forties buffeted the island, sending up clouds of sandy grit that caused nasty inflammation of the eyes. It was an ominous beginning for the new life Robinson envisaged for the original owners of the land across the water. ‘The fresh natives seemed not disposed to mirth,’ he noted in his journal during the first evening on Swan Island. All night long his sleep was disturbed by the sound of a woman wailing.
Five days later, the gale-force winds finally dropped and McKay arrived with the second whaleboat, allowing Robinson to get away. Leaving McKay in charge, he set off with Parish on 9 November to fulfil his promise to visit the sealers on various islands and recover their captives, taking Bullyer with him to act as intermediary.
When smoke was seen across the water at Musselroe Bay on 15 November, Trowlebunner identified it as a signal from his sister and her husband, who was leader of the Pyemairenerpairnener people from Pipers River. A fire was kindled to return the signal, and McKay was persuaded that personal contact must be made before the Pyemairenerpairnener would go away again. He agreed to let Wooredy, Peevay, Kickerterpoller and Pagerly take the boat back to Musselroe Bay. Truganini, he kept close to hand.
At the sight of the approaching boat, the people at Musselroe Bay fled into the adjoining bushland. Kickerterpoller stepped ashore and strode up the beach, calling out, and was surprised when a woman ran out to greet him as if he were her long-lost son. It was Luggenemeener, the mother of Maulboyheener, and in a way Kickerterpoller did represent the next best thing to her lost son. She and Maulboyheener had lived with Kickerterpoller at Robinson’s house in Hobart and she had not seen her son since he left with Kickerterpoller on the mission to the west coast in January. She did not know whether he was alive or dead.
Kickerterpoller had little information to give her, only that Maulboyheener had been sent to Hobart in March and arrived at Robinson’s house soon after his mother had been returned to her country. He had run away to find her and that was the last anyone had heard of him. Kickerterpoller explained that the boat belonged to Robinson, and that her brother Trowlebunner, as well as Mannalargenna, were with him on Swan Island. Reassured, Luggenemeener called her husband, Woreternaterlargner, who came out of hiding with their eldest son, a youth named Tillabunner, and three other young warriors.
Tillabunner had previously been captured by Batman and forced to act as a guide for roving parties who called him Mungo or Batman’s Jack. He spoke good English and explained that they were the last of the Pyemairenerpairnener clan. They had recently lost another two men, shot by soldiers from the Black Line. Eager for the temporary protection that Kickerterpoller promised them, the five people clambered into the whaleboat with their seven dogs, landing on Swan Island just as Robinson returned in the second boat with Bullyer, who was also of their clan, and three Tyreelore he had emancipated from the sealers.
After a joyful reunion, Luggenemeener had the miserable task of telling Bullyer that the brothers with whom she was so keen to be reunited were both dead, one of them shot by soldiers only days before. With this awful news, a haunting, aching sorrow swept through the camp. Bullyer’s anguish for her dead brothers became everyone’s anguish for a dead brother, son, father, mother, sister or daughter, and the inconsolable pain of being the survivor. Everyone wept without restraint. Robinson was so moved by this spontaneous outpouring of awful grief that he wept too. He wept for the terrible cruelties visited upon this ‘unbefriended and hapless people’ and for what they had not yet fully comprehended: the irrevocable loss of their country.
One of the three women Robinson had rescued from the sealers was Toogernupertooner, Mannalargenna’s sister, the wife of Trowlebunner. Her emancipation from the sealers was a significant sign that Robinson would deliver on his promises. Even though Robinson had not yet managed to rescue any of his daughters, Mannalargenna was gratified to see that Robinson’s hatred of the sealers was as implacable as his own. He was insistent that Robinson must immediately go back to the outer island and get them.
Robinson had more pressing considerations. There was no longer enough food to be found on Swan Island for the twenty-three people and their thirty dogs, as well as the convict boat crews, two coxswains and Robinson himself. The penguins, the eggs and the small game had all been eaten, and while the mutton birds had arrived in great profusion there was a limit to how many of these greasy, malodorous birds the convicts would tolerate. On 16 November, Parish was sent to Launceston for much-needed supplies.
It was now starkly apparent to Robinson that Swan Island would not work as ‘a proper means of confinement’ and that the people he had enticed onto the island would rebel against it soon enough. For the moment they seemed content, eating mutton birds and spending their days painstakingly grinding ochre. They mixed the powder with smelly oil from the birds to make a carrot-coloured grease with which to groom their hair and paint their bodies for the nightly dances. After adding charcoal, they also rubbed the mixture into the incisions they cut in their chest and shoulders. Robinson doubted he could keep them so occupied for very much longer.
He permitted Wooredy, Kickerterpoller and Peevay to take some of the dogs over to Musselroe Bay to hunt kangaroo. They returned with a kangaroo apiece and news that they had seen smoke from fires to the south-west. Luggenemeener confirmed that this smoke was likely a signal from another group of the original war party, mainly Tyerrerontepanner people from the northern midlands. Robinson considered sending Luggenemeener to make contact, but she insisted her husband come too, which made Robinson suspicious. Fearing they would run away, he ruled that none of ‘the fresh people’ were to leave the island.
Ten days had passed since Parish had gone to Launceston and he had still not returned with supplies. The mutinous convicts were bilious from the monotonous diet of mutton birds and were ravenous for meat and flour. Peevay was so seriously ill that amulets taken from bodies of the dead were fastened to his slender body. It was with a huge sigh of relief that Robinson sighted Parish’s boat on 27 November.
Better even than the food supplies and medicine, Parish brought intelligence that the military commandant in Launceston, who had so rudely dismissed Robinson’s mission, was now praising him for having achieved what thousands on the Black Line had completely failed to do. Robinson was cock-a-hoop to receive a formal letter of congratulations, conveying news that the Black Line had been ignominiously disbanded. After seven weeks of scrambling through the bush in a disorganised fashion, 1650 settlers and convicts, together with 550 soldiers, had managed to capture just one old man and a boy, while Robinson and his guides had obtained custody of fifteen, mostly adult warriors.
Barely containing his glee, he penned self-congratulatory reports to the commandant and the colonial secretary. McKay was rowed to Musselroe Bay with instructions to walk to Launceston and personally deliver these missives. Robinson was pleased to have this excuse to get McKay away from the island, having finally discovered that the man was having sexual relations with Truganini. In the longer term, Robinson determined to get rid of this degenerate and insubordinate convict once and for all.
Robinson was careful not to let news of the end of the Black Line spill to his unwitting captives, for fear they would demand to be returned to their country. Within days of arriving on the island, Mannalargenna had made a very satisfactory match with Tanleboneyer but now he was increasingly restive at being confined to Swan Island with no news of his daughters. To placate the great man, Parish was dispatched to the Bass Strait islands to negotiate with the sealers once more.
Occasional sightings of smoke to the south-west continued to torment Robinson, who calculated it was fires made by a group of not fewer than twenty people. He desperately wanted them. Information from Luggenemeener made him suspect that these people were led by Umarrah, who had absconded from his first mission the year before. Umarrah and his Tyerrerontepanner clan had been part of the big war party that had gone into battle with the Big River people the previous year, when his wife and son had been killed. To get through the cordon of the Black Line, Umarrah had offered his services as a guide, then disappeared into the bush soon afterwards. He was now said to be at large somewhere in the north-east.
Robinson set off to find him, taking Umarrah’s old companions Truganini, Wooredy, Pagerly and Kickerterpoller. For nine days they walked across mountainous country known as the Eastern Tiers, happily hunting the boomer kangaroos and telling stories, not managing to make any contact. Utterly frustrated, Robinson abandoned the search. The last of the Tyerrerontepanner were out there somewhere, of that he was sure, and he was eventually going to get them.
The smoke was seen again on 10 December and this time the old woman Ghonyennener was sent to seek out the group. Her job was to find Umarrah, explain that his compatriots were safe on Swan Island, and persuade him to return with her. Ghonyennener was chosen as the envoy because she was too old to be stolen away and Robinson knew she would want to return to her kin on Swan Island. He arranged for Truganini, Wooredy, Kickerterpoller and Pagerly to stay at the base camp at Musselroe Bay and wait for Ghonyennener to return. Nothing could have suited them better.
For five days, Truganini and her three companions ranged up and down the fecund coastline, filling their bellies with mussels, abalone and crayfish. Although this tranquil stretch of coast was empty of people, they found haunting reminders of them everywhere. At places where sealers could land their boats, the beach was littered with human bones, Truganini later told Robinson. She knew the sealers were responsible for the gruesome bone scatter. She explained how they would entice people to the beach by pretending to trade, displaying flour and sugar, as well as the coveted dogs. As soon as people came close enough, they would open fire on the men, simultaneously grabbing as many females as they could. The women and girls would be rowed away while the dead and dying were left on the sand to rot in the sun. No one remained to perform rituals for the dead.
On 15 December, Ghonyennener returned to the base camp alone. She had found no one and discovered the smoke they had seen was from a fire started when wind ignited embers left smouldering during their previous search. With reluctance, Kickerterpoller signalled for the whaleboat to collect them. One of the convict boatmen picked up an intact human skull from the sand, taking it with him as a memento.
On 11 December, Parish had returned from the Bass Strait islands with six healthy young Tyreelore, all wearing shapeless dresses made of kangaroo skins. On the same day as Ghonyennener’s return, he brought in another five. These stolen women, all from the north-east, included two of Mannalargenna’s daughters, Wotecowidyer and Woretemoeteyenner, as well as Plorenernoopner, a sister of Woreternaterlargner. Women now outnumbered men.
The arrival of the Tyreelore caused a great outpouring of joy. Day and night there was singing and dancing, stamping feet filling the air with clouds of fine black dirt and sandgrit. Over and over again, the Tyreelore performed the ‘devil dance’, which caused Robinson to sourly observe that this heathen devil demanded a great deal of gratification—the women seemed to him ‘excessive in their devotion’. He thought the version of the dance introduced by the Tyreelore was ‘the most obscene that can be conceived’, exhibiting gestures so overtly sexual they could only have been learnt in bondage to debauchery. The dance was wildly admired. All the women joined in, Truganini included. New partnerships were rapidly made and remade. The display of sexual abandon so shocked Robinson that he threatened to send the Tyreelore back to their depraved captors.
He was outraged to find his own guides participating enthusiastically in this sinful display. Kickerterpoller threw himself into the action with gusto, having sex with as many women as he could entice into his arms. As a baptised Christian, he should know better, Robinson scolded, and told him he must mend his bad ways or be sent to jail. Privately, Robinson admitted that he was in no position to control the behaviour of any of the people in his charge. Kickerterpoller was the sole professed Christian among them and if Robinson could not control his immoral behaviour, what hope was there for restraining the rest? He made a note to himself to ensure that in future he must have ‘the proper means’ to compel them to conduct their relationships with propriety.