TRUGANINI SPENT THE first two weeks of 1831 walking down the east coast to the town of Hobart on the Derwent River, the place she knew as Niberloone. Eleven months before, she had been taken from her country and still she was painfully putting one foot in front of the other on a journey with no comprehensible motivation and no anticipated return. Robinson had his reasons, he just didn’t tell his companions what they were.
After an absence of nearly a year, Robinson needed to see his wife. She was grieving the loss of their youngest son nine months earlier, and it was also time to reconnect with his five surviving children. The stronger pull was to make the most of having succeeded where the Black Line failed so dismally. Since the governor was not responding to his prolix reports, he was determined to have a face-to-face meeting. Rather than take the boat, he chose to walk the two hundred miles to Hobart. He took Truganini, Wooredy, Pagerly and Kickerterpoller, which served the dual purpose of curtailing Truganini’s and Kickerterpoller’s sexual adventures and ensuring a reliable food supply.
Long treks in the colonial wilderness lifted Robinson’s cramped puritan spirit. He always thrilled to be roaming about in untamed country in the company of people who were completely at home in that environment. Fancying himself as an ethnographer, he paid close attention to his ‘sable companions’, fascinatedly observing their mental and physical adaptation to the natural world. Watching and recording, he was forming the idea that he could make his name by publishing a book about the original people of Van Diemen’s Land, since they would soon be no more.
It was not lost on Truganini that Mannalargenna was not chosen to go to Hobart, despite having been promised a meeting with the governor. The great man remained on Swan Island, effectively a prisoner, reinforcing a sense of her own privileged status as a partner in Robinson’s mission. Now that Robinson was riding high in the governor’s favour, honour bestowed on him must surely be due to her and Wooredy as well.
That was not how Robinson saw their relationship. Robinson could acknowledge that his guides possessed great skill and intelligence, fundamental human feelings not dissimilar to his own, and the capacity for commitment and loyalty; however, to grant any one of them a relationship of equality would have destroyed the whole rationale for his mission. Truganini was closer to him than anyone outside his immediate family. In the past two years he had spent more intimate time with her than everyone in his family put together. The idea that she might regard herself as a partner in his enterprise would never have entered his head.
For ten days, the party walked steadily down the east coast, moving too rapidly for Truganini’s comfort, even though they stopped periodically to hunt. On reaching Spring Bay, the party turned west towards Hobart, following a track cut through heavily wooded hills along the Prosser River. Littering the track were shoes with gaping soles and other detritus, evidence of the monumental foolishness of the Black Line. Emerging onto the Prosser Plain, they found the land stripped bare and deeply rutted by wagon wheels. The sight of a brush fence extending across the plain as a defensive barrier elicited hoots of derisive laughter, as did the hundreds of bark huts that had been hastily constructed beyond the fence: some basic humpies, others four-posted huts with a veranda, seats and table. Not so amusing was the impact these shenanigans had wrought on the surrounding forest. Many huge trees had been felled, while thousands more had been entirely stripped of bark, leaving great stands to wither and die. The magnitude of the devastation was stunning. ‘Nature had been completely dismantled,’ Robinson wrote in dismay.
Truganini arrived in Hobart just two weeks short of twelve months since she had been taken from her country, after completing a circumambulation of the entire island. She and her companions were lodged in the annex to Robinson’s house. The next day Robinson went alone to meet with the governor.
In the usual run of events Governor Arthur regarded this pompous tradesman with distaste, finding him a tedious blowhard. On this occasion, he was full of praise, rewarding Robinson with an additional land grant of 2500 acres to be taken up anywhere he chose, a salary increase to £250 backdated to 1829, plus a bonus of £100. In presenting himself to the governor as a one-man operation, Robinson did not consciously intend to exclude Truganini and her companions from reward in the way he determinedly ousted rivals like John Batman—he just could not bring himself to acknowledge the enormity of his dependence on them. Belatedly, he suggested that some small recompense for his guides might be appropriate. In recognition of their ‘unremitting exertion and uncommon fidelity’, the governor awarded them clothing and the two couples were given a boat. They never got to see the boat, since Robinson arranged for it to be hired out on the Derwent River with the money paid into a dedicated account that he controlled. They did get to wear the clothes.
Demure in their new printed-cotton dresses, Truganini and Pagerly promenaded daily through the streets of the town, accompanied by Wooredy and Kickerterpoller in trousers and blue coats of fine wool—‘for all the world looking like gentlemen with no shoes on’, mocked the editor of the Colonial Times. Eighteen months before, when Truganini had previously been in town, she’d been dressed in flouncing silks and the subject of curious admiration. Now, the public mood had hardened from well-intentioned curiosity into outright enmity. Only the protection of Robinson as chaperone—and, by extension, the overarching protection of the governor—kept the foursome from facing overt aggression. After nearly three months of daily perambulations, the promenading quartet became something of a fixture around the streets, no more incongruous than the clanking chain gangs of convicts going to and from the nearby Prisoners’ Barracks.
During these tedious months in Hobart, Truganini and her companions were mostly confined to the annex of Robinson’s house, while he made numerous trips into the country to find suitable land for his new grant. Also living in the annex were Wooredy’s sons: Myunge, now aged thirteen, and Droyerloine, aged eleven. Wooredy had not seen or heard from these boys since Robinson had sent them and Maulboyheener away from the west coast nine months earlier. While Maulboyheener had run away to find his mother in May 1830, Wooredy’s sons had stayed behind with Robinson’s family, who gave them new names: Davey Bruny and Peter Bruny. These boys meant the world to Wooredy—they were the future of the Nuenonne.
Robinson still held land in Nuenonne country—only a short boat ride across the water, so close Truganini could almost smell it—but Robinson was never going to take her and her family back to their country. In January 1830, when Truganini, Wooredy and Pagerly were taken away from Bruny Island, Robinson had informed the colonial secretary that the Nuenonne were now ‘extinct’, as were all the clans of the south-east. Since then a great deal of Nuenonne territory had been distributed as large freehold land grants to newly arrived settlers, including a second grant to Richard Pybus of 2560 acres on South Bruny Island.
The colonial authorities made no substantive distinction between Robinson’s guides and the other sorrowful, dispossessed people in custody in Hobart who had been forcibly removed from settled areas, never to return. No matter how tantalisingly close her country was, Truganini would not get to walk the beaches to gather the tiny shells for her necklaces, and Wooredy would not get to teach his sons about their country and clan obligations.
While basking in the governor’s good graces, Robinson took the opportunity to entrench himself as the preeminent expert on the control and management of the original people. He met with the Aboriginal Committee the governor had established, and made the case that all the people captured in the settled districts, whether in jail or living with settlers, should be transferred into his charge. He then outlined his plan to create a permanent asylum on an island in the Bass Strait and identified Gun Carriage Island, a small landmass lying between Cape Barren and Flinders islands. This had the advantage of being sheltered from the full force of the Roaring Forties by the high peaks of those larger islands.
Although the governor and most of the members of the Aboriginal Committee were well disposed to his ideas, the influential chief justice was firmly opposed. He ventured the eccentric idea that it would be inhumane to remove the original people of the colony to a small offshore island. Deprived of their traditional country and nomadic lifestyle, the people would all pine away and die, he argued, which would be a terrible stain on the honour of the British Empire. His alternative proposal was for the governor to make a treaty with important clan leaders such as Mannalargenna, to restrict the remaining clans to a designated area on the mainland where no settlers would be permitted. In such protected areas, the people could continue to live a traditional life free from harassment, the kind of arrangement that had been put in place in the North American colonies.
Robinson had passed through just such a suitable area during his trek in the north-east. The finest country he had seen, he had thought at the time—extremely well suited to the original people yet quite useless for settlers. Only a few months later he strenuously rejected the chief justice’s solution.
More than any other colonist, Robinson understood the intense bond between the original people and country. Having watched the people sing the land, he knew it was the wellspring of their spiritual life and their material culture. For them, land and life were indivisible. Until this bond was completely severed, he believed their souls would never be saved for God. He was not consciously relegating the people to extinction, as the chief justice feared—he had boundless faith in the power of the Christian word and in his own judgement. In this contest with the chief justice, it was Robinson’s judgement that held sway.
The tedium of being confined in Hobart with only a daily walk for diversion was finally broken at the end of February 1831, when Robinson announced he was ready to return to the north-east. Truganini was no doubt relieved that they would go by ship rather than walk all the way. On 1 March, she boarded the government cutter Charlotte along with her family and friends. They were joined by another seventeen people taken from the jail, the colonial hospital, and the households of various settlers. In addition to these twenty-three people, there were two convicts assigned to Robinson and a detachment of six soldiers for the new settlement on Gun Carriage Island.
Robinson’s understanding was that the Charlotte would sail directly to the Bass Strait, conveying himself and these passengers, as well as a supply of rations and building materials. The haughty master of the Charlotte had other plans. He was not about to take orders from the likes of Robinson and arranged to stop over at the penal settlement at Port Arthur, where he would deliver a huge load of stores and four chained prisoners. Furious at this young man’s impertinence, Robinson disembarked to complain to the governor, and the Charlotte sailed without him.
The ship was packed so tight that there was not enough room below decks for all the passengers. With no one to intervene on their behalf, all the twenty-three people Robinson had embarked were compelled to sleep on the main deck, wedged in between the longboats, the stacks of lumber, and the barrels of salted meat. Miserable, and dehydrated from seasickness, they were completely exposed to the elements, drenched in the salt water that splashed over the deck, saturating the rough smocks they were given to wear, which clung to their bodies in the biting wind. Without the protection of the animal fat with which they traditionally coated their skin, they were chilled to the bone. Two days later, when the prisoners and additional stores were offloaded at Port Arthur, they were permitted to sleep in the poorly ventilated hold, crammed together among the remaining stores of building materials and rations.
One woman had died and two more were very ill when the Charlotte called in at the penal station on Maria Island to collect Robinson, who had walked overland from Hobart with his eldest son. Still confined in the hold, the people lay in their own urine and excrement until the stench became so intolerable they were again forced onto the exposed deck to be buffeted by driving rain and gale-force winds. On 14 March, sick and disgruntled, they disembarked at Swan Island.
The Charlotte’s arrival at Swan Island coincided with that of a government cutter conveying four people released from jail in Launceston. One of these was Maulboyheener, who had been feared dead. He had kin relationships or close friendships with almost all the people on Swan Island, and his unexpected restoration brought a spark of life-affirming energy to the demoralised captives. Witnessing the emotional reunion with his mother Luggenemeener, his father Woreternaterlargner and his brother Tillabunner, Robinson had to turn away to hide his tears. No one else felt the need for such restraint. A spontaneous explosion of weeping and joyous celebration rocked the island for the rest of the day and well into the night.
Among those dancing for joy was Peevay, who had finally recovered from his long illness. He had more than one reason to celebrate: the cutter from Launceston had brought the orphaned youths Lacklay and his brother Merape, whom Peevay had last seen about six months earlier when they had run away together from Robinson’s custody. Peevay immediately took charge of Lacklay and the two became inseparable.
All fifty-one people on Swan Island were embarked on the Charlotte the following day for a voyage further into the strait. They were landed on the small Preservation Island off the western end of Cape Barren Island, where the mutton bird rookeries were well stocked with plump young birds. Robinson did not reveal that he intended to move them all to a permanent settlement on nearby Gun Carriage Island. Leaving the people eagerly pulling birds out of the rookeries, he continued on to Gun Carriage Island with Truganini, Wooredy and Kickerterpoller, as well as six soldiers and his convict clerk.
On the most sheltered side of Gun Carriage Island was a self-sufficient village where ten resident sealers had built cottages, made vegetable plots and bred plenty of fowls, pigs and goats. Robinson promised his guides that these productive small homesteads would soon be theirs. He wanted to give them a privileged preview of their new home, in the hope it would mollify their evident discontent, and he was pleased to believe they were entirely satisfied with this bargain. His clerk thought otherwise, noting that Truganini, Wooredy and Kickerterpoller complained vociferously that they did not want to live on this or any island. They wanted to go back to Musselroe Bay, or even Hobart.
All of Robinson’s attention was focused on expelling the island’s current residents. Summoning his considerable reserves of self-righteous pomposity, he directed the soldiers to round up the sealers. Reading aloud from a proclamation, he announced that he was the governor’s appointed envoy and that they must immediately hand over their captive women and leave the island. Disingenuously, the sealers protested that they had no women. Robinson scoffed in disbelief; however, a search of the island revealed none—the sealers had already sent the Tyreelore into hiding on the heavily forested Cape Barren Island. Somewhat deflated, Robinson reiterated his demand that the sealers quit the island, and offered to purchase their many pigs, goats and fowls. The cottages and vegetable plots were simply appropriated.
One week later, all the people were transferred to Gun Carriage Island. As promised, one cottage was allocated to Truganini and Wooredy with his two sons, another to Kickerterpoller and Pagerly, and a third was given to Mannalargenna and Tanleboneyer. Robinson took a cottage for himself, although he did not stay there, leaving almost straightaway for the other islands to find the Tyreelore and expel any remaining sealers. It gave him great satisfaction to think that he could rid the strait of these miscreants and liberate their slaves. ‘It is therefore no small honour,’ he reflected, ‘that I should be the individual appointed to ameliorate the conditions of this hapless race and to emancipate them from bondage.’ He was getting way ahead of himself.
Robinson’s sweep through the islands failed to entice even one woman out of hiding. The Tyreelore were tough and resourceful, maintaining a supportive culture among themselves with their own lingua franca and unique ceremonies. Far from being passive victims, humbly grateful to Robinson for his intervention, they provided an unexpected challenge to his emancipation project. They persistently defied his humanitarian intentions by choosing to stay with the men who had enslaved them.
The ageing householders living in the Bass Strait islands were hardly the depraved and debauched men Robinson obsessively complained about in his journal and official reports. The fur seal population of the straits had been wiped out in the 1820s, and by 1830 that transient life had given way to one of settled domesticity—the sealers had turned to subsistence farming and selling the feathers and oil of the mutton birds. In some households, the brutal intimacy they’d inflicted on the women stolen from Van Diemen’s Land and New Holland had developed into a rough kind of mutual affection. Although infanticide had been practised, a number of children survived to bind these ageing renegades into family units.
The acknowledged leader of the Bass Strait sealing community was James Munro, known as Governor of the Straits. A decade earlier, Munro had established a small settlement on Preservation Island where at various times he kept four or five Tyreelore he had abducted from the coast of Van Diemen’s Land and New Holland. This canny ex-convict had gained a degree of respectability, having been appointed constable of the Bass Strait by the superintendent of police at Launceston. His settlement on Preservation Island served as a trading and administrative centre for the ten sealers who lived on Gun Carriage Island, and the seven more living on Woody Island. Between them, these men ran a small fleet of boats with Munro acting as their agent. They proved more cunning and resourceful than Robinson had reckoned.
Munro was deputised to go to Hobart to petition the governor, taking with him one of his mixed-race children, a handsome boy who could say his prayers. Munro proved to be an excellent foil for Robinson. He was a literate and intelligent man able to persuasively argue that the sealers were victims of an unlawful seizure of their property. By forcibly removing their wives from home and family, Munro protested, it was Robinson who was engaged in deprivation of the women’s liberty, not the sealers. The governor found him a convincing advocate, and agreed that Robinson’s action constituted an unwarranted invasion of the sealers’ domestic affairs. That news took some time to reach Robinson.
Robinson returned empty-handed to Gun Carriage Island on 30 April, when he was met by Truganini pleading with him to take her family away from the island. Far from being gratified by the gift of a cottage, she refused to enter it. Her family were sleeping outside at night, as was everyone else. Wooredy believed Raegewarrah had infested the cottages; he saw evidence of this malevolent spirit everywhere. Many of the people were ill. The ticket-of-leave convict appointed as the medical superintendent was unable to alleviate their suffering. Raegewarrah had already caught two people, whose bodies had been burnt; more such cremations were likely to follow.
At least fifteen people were now dangerously ill, a calamity Robinson attributed to their sleeping outside at night instead of staying warm inside the huts the convicts were building for them. All the blame was heaped on the medical superintendent left in charge, who was denounced as a debauched drunkard. The convict clerk was no better, spending his time soliciting the women for sex. Adding further insult, Robinson discovered that the expelled sealers were returning to the island, and they paid no heed when he threatened to have them taken into custody. They had got wind of the news from Hobart and were no longer cowed by his piece of paper.
Everything was going wrong. Robinson had rid himself of his licentious convict boatswain Alexander McKay by recommending him for a pardon and sending him off to Hobart. Once there, McKay took it upon himself to meet with members of the legislative assembly and traduce Robinson’s reputation. As a consequence, the generous payments made to Robinson were now in dispute. Robinson was furious that this disreputable ex-felon had somehow secured the governor’s approval to set up a roving party in the north of the colony, in direct competition with him. And McKay wasn’t the only one. Another of the men employed as a boatswain for the mission had done the same thing, again with the governor’s backing. Then there was the problem of John Batman, who was still in the roving business, now operating with a group of trackers taken from various clans along the coast of New South Wales.
This array of unscrupulous competitors were all after the big reward on offer for capture of the Stoney Creek band, said to be responsible for several fatal attacks on settlers and stockkeepers around the Tamar River. Almost certainly these were the same people Robinson had been tracking months earlier, led by the wily Umarrah. If anyone was going to claim that reward, it should be him. There was nothing for it but to abandon the management of Gun Carriage Island to the drunken medical superintendent and organise another mission.
On 4 May, Truganini’s wish to be removed from Gun Carriage Island was granted when Robinson gathered her family, together with her friends Pagerly, Kickerterpoller and Maulboyheener, onto the Charlotte and headed for the base camp at Musselroe Bay, where preparations were underway for a new mission. They landed on Swan Island in order to transfer to the mainland by whaleboat. A storm was brewing and the master of the Charlotte was determined to get away. In the confused landing, many of the stores were left on board. The full disaster only became apparent the next day.
Overnight the storm set in, which meant that no transfer to the mainland was possible until the weather cleared. Truganini and her friends were once again marooned on a clump of snake-infested sandhills with a gale blowing and next to nothing to eat. The supplies that had been offloaded were ravaged during the night by an army of rats, and by midday the salt pork was squirming with maggots. The small game on Swan Island had long since been hunted out, the mutton birds had flown away and the mating penguins had not yet laid any eggs. In desperation, Wooredy, Kickerterpoller and Maulboyheener risked disturbing the drowsy tiger snakes to catch the rats, which they roasted on sticks over a fire.
Being trapped on this miserable island with bountiful Musselroe Bay in sight across the water brought into sharp focus the advantages of owning a boat. Wooredy and Kickerterpoller pestered Robinson as to why the boat the governor had given them had not been brought from Hobart and when they would get it. He promised to write a letter, something that always impressed Wooredy, although he maintained nothing could be done till the weather cleared.
Ten days of persistent gale-force winds caused chest infections, and inflammation of the eyes became their common lot. Not even Robinson’s sturdy constitution could withstand a steady diet of rats as sand was whipped into his face all day and night. The infestation of venomous snakes, the screeching penguins and the howling winds combined into nightmarish conditions that wore away his equanimity, making for ‘painful and gloomy foreboding’, he confessed on 15 May. His mood did not improve a week later when the weather finally cleared and boats began to arrive carrying letters and food stores. If anything, it grew even darker.
Robinson’s first act as soon as he had access to a boat was to send Wooredy’s young sons back to Gun Carriage Island. He chose to believe that conditions there were more conducive to their health, even though three more people had died. The despairing medical superintendent reported that the place simply did not agree with the people, and implored Robinson to ask the governor to find somewhere more congenial. Robinson disagreed, blaming the widespread malaise on exposure to the heavy dew that fell at night. The people must be made to sleep in the houses the convict workmen were building, he instructed.
Every letter Robinson received carried more bad news. The worst arrived on 24 May, when James Munro stepped ashore to hand-deliver instructions from the governor. Munro did not try to contain his glee as Robinson absorbed the impact of the order to relinquish the Tyreelore he had taken into his care. Only if a woman determinedly refused to go back could he reject a sealer’s claim to her. Moreover, he was obliged to cease his campaign to expel the sealers from the islands. He saw it as a huge humiliation for the governor to side with brutal and immoral brigands against his high-minded project of emancipation. He took no comfort in being allowed to continue to occupy Gun Carriage Island, since the place was a disaster. He was further humiliated when most of the Tyreelore he had rescued requested to be returned to the sealers.
The only women who stayed were those the sealers did not bother to claim, or those like Tanleboneyer and Bullyer who had formed strong relationships with men on Swan Island. Mannalargenna’s daughter Woretemoeteyenner was one who stayed, but another daughter, Wotecowidyer, returned at her own request to James Everitt and her four children on Woody Island. Mannalargenna saw the removal of the Tyreelore as a very bad omen. It was his first intimation that Robinson was like George Briggs—a man who would not honour his obligations.
Truganini and her companions were eventually transferred to the base camp at Musselroe Bay on 2 June. As soon as the whaleboat reached the beach, Wooredy, Kickerterpoller and Maulboyheener ran off to hunt boomer kangaroo while Truganini and Pagerly took their digging sticks and baskets to get tender fern roots in the bush. Being able to hunt and gather in the food-rich environment of Musselroe Bay, with its several inlets and large lagoons, once again brought to mind the usefulness of a boat. Under pressure, Robinson made a big show of writing a letter to the Aboriginal Committee in Hobart seeking information about the gifted boat. He actually wrote to ask how much money was being paid into his account. Money accruing in an account was hardly going to satisfy Wooredy and Kickerterpoller, but the last thing Robinson wanted was for his guides to have the independence to put to sea.
With everyone returned to good health, the rituals of dancing and singing became an essential part of the daily routine at the base camp. Careful not to stay aloof from the people on whom he relied, Robinson again joined in with his flute. He even danced and sang, stamping his feet in the sand as he repeated the chanted choruses. He was intrigued to hear a song from Maulboyheener’s country and asked for a translation of the words to copy into his journal. Maulboyheener was unwilling to tell him because he might show it to the settlers as a way of stealing his people’s secrets. There was nothing to fear, Robinson assured them, because he ‘was one with themselves’. Did he not eat kangaroo and dance with them every night?
Reluctantly, Maulboyheener gave him the gist of the song. It told how the people had watched settlers arrive in their country on a bullock cart loaded with wood and sacks of flour, then how they had robbed the settlers’ huts to take the flour and firearms. They hid the heavy muskets in the bush and made damper with the flour. This was a song sung by all the clans of the north and east, Robinson was told. Months later, he detailed the contents of this song to the colonial secretary, citing it as evidence of the violent intentions of the people still at large.
By late June, Robinson was ready to begin his new mission to the interior to capture the Stoney Creek band. He had a support party of half a dozen convicts as well as his guides, including Bullyer and Tanganutura, both Tyreelore from the north-east corner who knew the country well. The party began walking south-east from the second base camp on the western side of Cape Portland at Ringarooma Bay, with Kickerterpoller leading the way, followed by the rest of the guides in single file, holding the dogs tied to a rope so they would not bark and draw attention. Robinson and the convict servants brought up the rear.
For once it was not Truganini who was the straggler. The usually indefatigable Wooredy was literally dragging his feet. Around his orange locks and his neck he had wound garlands of aromatic leaves, which he inhaled as he walked to seek relief from a mystery ailment that was slowing his progress. They were making less than ten miles a day.
As they plunged into the rainforest of the Eastern Tiers, their pace slowed even more as they negotiated a passage through soggy, slippery gullies covered with furry thickets of huge tree ferns, on ground made treacherous by moss-covered rotting logs. Robinson completely trusted Kickerterpoller to find a path through the dank rainforest, and was gratified to see that he made notches in the tree ferns as they passed so that no one would lose the way. Moving cautiously through a subterranean tunnel of arching fern fronds, the snaking line of burdened walkers looked sublimely romantic, Robinson thought, even though he had to admit the journey was becoming ‘irksome in the extreme’. Most irksome of all were the tenacious leeches that indiscriminately latched onto every body, naked or clothed. All of the party had blood running down their legs and even the more private parts. At night they found itchy sores developing where the vile creatures had been feeding.
On 6 July, Kickerterpoller suddenly confessed he had no idea where they were. Some of the guides said they should head in one direction, others argued for the opposite. Exasperated, Robinson pulled out his compass and found the way back to where they had camped the previous night. Unrepentant, the people immediately disappeared into the rainforest to hunt wombat and possums.
Kickerterpoller took a different route the next day, into less challenging country, finally emerging onto a freshly burnt plain. Without bothering to request permission, Kickerterpoller and Maulboyheener ran off with the dogs to hunt the boomer kangaroos. Robinson was infuriated to hear the dogs barking, which he knew would alert anyone around to their presence. Returning with several dead kangaroos, Kickerterpoller and Maulboyheener reported that people were close by. They had seen fresh tracks and found a large hut made with freshly cut bark that could shelter eight people or more. Robinson was sure that the resident clan of this region was extinguished, and elated to conclude it must be Umarrah’s band that was within his grasp.
Knowing their old friend was close by, probably watching them, failed to spur his guides into action. Oblivious to Robinson’s urgings, the men kept after the kangaroos and the women hunted possum. Truganini was an expert at catching possums. She deftly wove a rope from the long wiry grass and hooked it around the trunk of a tree to pull herself up, cutting notches in the bark for her feet as she ascended. Once in the canopy, she would grab at the possum to knock it to the ground, where Wooredy would smartly dispatch the winded animal with his waddy as Truganini inched her way back down. When not hunting possums, she and Pagerly wandered off to look for watercourses. It was egging season and there was no keeping them away from the swans’ nests.
A niggling displeasure began to appear in Robinson’s journal entries. He described the hunting and food gathering as if this activity was mere entertainment, inconsequential to his mission. Despite all the evidence of his eyes and ears, he persisted in regarding his guides as children, lost without the care and guidance that he, the good father, could provide. Schooling himself to be patient, he wrote ‘the greatest forbearance is required with these natives when in the bush for they feel more independent and shew a disposition to be idle’. Forbearance was not Robinson’s strong suit. His guides drove him crazy with their disobedience, dawdling and general lack of purpose.
Umarrah must have been highly amused to watch his old companions engaging in an elaborate game that only Robinson did not understand. Whether or not by tacit agreement with Umarrah, the guides continued to frustrate the mission to find the Stoney Creek band, quite deaf to Robinson’s scolding at the folly of their conduct and how it was ‘useless of me to have left my home, my wife, my children to go in quest of their countrymen and to save them from total annihilation unless they co-operated’.
Robinson had been living in the bush for the greater part of eighteen months. He had relied on his companions’ bush skills, slept next to them, eaten their food, sung and danced with them. Without intending to be disingenuous, he had proclaimed that he was one of them. In all that time it had never occurred to him that they might regard this as a reciprocal relationship: that they were trying to induct him into their way of life.
Wooredy took the lead, holding the people spellbound every night with his animated stories of how sky spirits formed the world. He told how two stars came down from the Milky Way to touch the ground and shape the landscape by cutting out islands and making rivers. To inhabit that landscape, the creator spirits drew various species out of the ground. The first man had a tail like a kangaroo and no joints in his knees, which obliged him to sleep standing, so he cut off the tail and rubbed grease into the wound to create joints in order to be able to sit on the ground, which was much more comfortable. He then went up into the sky, where he could now be seen as the bright star in the southern sky known to colonists as Canopus.
Wooredy and Kickerterpoller revealed an intricate knowledge of the sky country, telling stories of the creator spirits who resided in the various constellations of the Milky Way. Truganini told how the Moon emerged from a far distant place over the sea and came to rest at Oyster Bay. As the Moon was roasting abalone over the fire, the Sun tried to seize her and she tumbled into the fire, then rolled into the sea to douse the flames. The Sun plucked her out of the water and swept her up into the sky to be his wife. The dark side of the Moon revealed where she had been burnt. Everyone participated in the nightly ritual narratives and reenactments, asserting in song and movement the palpable reality of their world, at odds with Robinson’s preachings about heaven and hell. Even Truganini, who was in every other respect so attentive to Robinson, remained stolidly resistant to his Christian message.
The only one to show any ambivalence was Kickerterpoller, who had been baptised as a child and grown up with stories from the Bible. He told Wooredy he believed what the settlers had told him, yet he was torn about his spiritual allegiance. He could not understand how the good spirits who lived in the sky, as described by Robinson, could exist without eating food. He accepted that the settlers had one devil and his people had another of their own. When Robinson protested that there was only one Devil, Kickerterpoller replied he did not know about that, as he hadn’t seen the devil, although he had heard him whistle. Once he interrupted Wooredy’s creation story to protest that the Christian story was the only true one, causing Truganini to lash out, ‘Where did you come from, white woman?’
By 24 July, the mission party had walked in one long loop and was heading back to Cape Portland without a single sighting of Umarrah and his band. Once again they were in Mannalargenna’s country and once again Robinson reflected that the land was perfectly suited to the traditional life of the people and would never be of any use to settlers. If only ‘a proper arrangement’ had been entered into earlier in the process of colonisation, he lamented, the people could have continued their life in this country. It was too late now. ‘In a short time the ancient inhabitants will become annihilated,’ he mused in another lachrymose reflection, ‘a great sacrifice of human life by reason of our occupying this land.’
They arrived back at the base camp opposite Swan Island on 26 July, mightily pleased to be back in this coastal cornucopia. Truganini and her companions scattered in search of kangaroos, oysters and swans’ eggs. By means of smoke signals, the coxswain from Gun Carriage Island was summoned, and he arrived with dispatches from the governor addressed to the Superintendent of the Aboriginal Establishment. Robinson was very pleased to be so addressed. The governor informed him that Gun Carriage Island was to be abandoned and that henceforth he would be Superintendent of the Aboriginal Establishment on the more distant Flinders Island, the high peaks of which could be seen on the horizon. This was thrilling news, but he knew it meant nothing if he failed to capture the Stoney Creek band.
Robinson had finally grasped that he was not going to capture Umarrah with his present group of recalcitrant guides. The coxswain was sent back with an order that Peevay and his friend Lacklay be brought to join his party. He was particularly anxious to secure the services of Umarrah’s traditional rival, Mannalargenna, but this would be tricky. Mannalargenna was very angry at Robinson for failing to deal with the sealers and was chafing at the absence of his wife Tanleboneyer, who had been taken away as a guide for another roving party. However, he enthusiastically embraced the offer of escape from Gun Carriage Island, to the consternation of the despairing people he left behind.
Mannalargenna arrived at the base camp with Peevay and Lacklay on 5 August. Using Kickerterpoller as his go-between, Robinson made a formal request for assistance to capture Umarrah. In response, Mannalargenna launched into a litany of complaints, protesting that Robinson had not given him the promised audience with the governor, that he had let the sealers take the Tyreelore away, and that he had allowed Mannalargenna’s wife to be removed from him. In return for any further assistance, he was looking to make a better deal. Robinson made him a firm promise that if there were no attacks on settlers, Mannalargenna and his people could stay in their country, protected by ‘a good white man’ who would live with them and go bush with them so they could hunt. He offered himself as an example of just such a person. The people would be protected from men with guns and supplied with flour, tea, sugar and blankets, he promised.
It was a measure of Robinson’s intense anxiety that he would resort to such a deception. What he proposed to Mannalargenna was the exact same policy he had staunchly rejected, a policy he knew the governor would never countenance—and only days earlier Robinson had dismissed this policy as no longer viable. Foremost in his mind now was the reward for the Stoney Creek people. He must prove that he could do what nobody else could, or lose the governor’s patronage. On Mannalargenna, he pinned his hopes for an illustrious future. What were a few lies in the balance?
Mannalargenna readily took the bait. After nine months confined on a barren offshore island, he was delighted to be back in his own country, although reluctant to move without his wife. Only after Robinson assured him that he had ordered Tanleboneyer be returned did the old man agree to accompany the mission. Even so, he was in no hurry to gratify Robinson’s desires—hunting was the main thing on his mind. In this, he was fully supported by the other guides, who all deferred to him, even Wooredy. Most devoted was Kickerterpoller, who made himself Mannalargenna’s factotum.
Robinson himself was swayed by the awe that Mannalargenna inspired and his legendary prowess as a warrior. He soaked up Mannalargenna’s boastful stories of spearing Umarrah and making him beg for mercy, but Mannalargenna failed to tell him about the more recent alliance with Umarrah in the battle against the Big River people. Ignorant of that connection, Robinson was perfectly happy to cede his authority and follow the great man’s lead. As days turned into weeks, Robinson became scornfully uneasy that he had entrusted his mission to satanic delusion.
Within Mannalargenna dwelt a powerful spirit that protected him and guided his actions, communicating through the twitching muscles of his left breast, rather like the tremors of palsy. Twitches of his shoulder one way or another would indicate the direction in which they were meant to go. After many days of Mannalargenna’s leading the party hither and thither as his convulsions dictated, Robinson was beside himself with frustration. Over and over again, Wooredy and Kickerterpoller solemnly assured him that Mannalargenna’s spirit guide was infallible, and that they would definitely find Umarrah, who was a very clever quarry.
For his part, Mannalargenna gave every indication of relishing the game they were playing as his spirit led them around in circles and the others casually lit fires to give warnings of their presence, or created diversions at critical moments, ensuring no direct contact with Umarrah was ever made. Despite escalating concern that he might be being played for a fool, Robinson persisted in describing this behaviour as stupidity and the devotion to Mannalargenna’s spirit guide as the superstitious foolishness of innocents.
He was also increasingly anxious about Wooredy, who was limping so badly that Robinson had to carry his load. Such was Robinson’s dependence on his ‘old and faithful companion’ that the possibility of losing him loomed as a calamity. How would they be able to get across the many rivers without Wooredy to construct his ingenious canoes? The mysterious aches and pains that had been slowing Wooredy down were probably caused by lymphoedema, a disturbance of the lymph system, possibly as a result of a tick bite, or it may have been the emergence of symptoms associated with the tertiary stage of syphilis.
Soon after leaving base camp, Wooredy had developed a painful swelling in his thigh, which he had tried to alleviate by making deep gashes in his flesh. By mid August, he could barely take a step without crying out in pain. He could proceed no further. Truganini stayed behind to care for her ailing husband while the rest of the party moved on. It was several days before the swelling in Wooredy’s thigh reduced sufficiently to permit him to walk while leaning on Truganini. Slowly, they made their way to the coast.
Stopping to rest about a quarter of a mile inland from the mouth of the Boobyalla River, Truganini made an unsettling discovery. While gathering swans’ eggs for Wooredy to eat, she became curious about a deep indentation in the ground, and after digging further into the hole she uncovered an old wooden chest that contained a jumble of human bones. Days later, at the mouth of the Tomahawk River, she saw two bleached male skeletons lying a few hundred yards apart that no one had tried to hide. Awful though it was, Truganini had seen similar sights before—the beaches and inlets of the north-east corner were repositories of many human bones, invariably male and often shattered by a musket ball.
Wooredy’s condition gradually improved over the next three or four days as they rested at the coast. He was still unable to hunt, so the task of food gathering fell entirely to Truganini. She was well supplied with tea and sugar, as well as flour for damper, but it was swans’ eggs they craved. She was annoyed to discover that sealers and Tyreelore had already come to the bay to raid the nests. Still, she found plenty of abalone to rebuild her husband’s strength.
Isolated from the mission party, Truganini fretted about what would happen to Robinson and her friends if they were to encounter the fearsome Stoney Creek band. Wooredy was glumly convinced they would all be speared. As soon as he was well enough, they journeyed to the base camp at Waterhouse Point to seek news of their companions. On 31 August, they were astonished to see the mission party approaching, in high spirits, swelled by the addition of seven new people and fourteen dogs. Leading the party was their friend Umarrah, singing loudly and looking very pleased with himself.
Much had happened in their absence. Robinson had gained the essential services of two additional Tyreelore, who had been working as guides for other roving parties. One was Mannalargenna’s daughter Woretemoeteyenner, whose presence was needed to remind the old man of what was at stake and motivate him to find the prize, and the other was Plorenernoopner, who had a husband and brother in the Stoney Creek band, making her a vital intermediary.
The addition of Mannalargenna’s daughter did not work the magic Robinson hoped for. The party had spent another week wandering in circles. By 26 August, Robinson had reached breaking point with Mannalargenna. Convinced that the spirit guide was a feint, he accused the old man of ‘dragging the people off their legs for no good purpose’. Sternly, he presented an ultimatum: Mannalargenna would only be allowed to stay in his own country if he could capture the Stoney Creek people.
The next day, Mannalargenna consulted with the tremors in his breast, as he did every morning, and then set off into the bush with his trusty factotum Kickerterpoller, as well as Plorenernoopner. A day later, these three emerged from the bush with Umarrah and his band, all of them in a jolly mood. Unabashedly, Umarrah bounded forward to extend his arm to Robinson for a handshake. He had come to get the same deal as Mannalargenna: he wanted an assurance that he could stay, unmolested, in his own country.
The Stoney Creek band were surprisingly few: six men and one older woman surrendered to Robinson, and three more men remained somewhere in the bush. They were from several different clans, all with bitter grievances against settlers and sealers, chiefly the loss of their young women. Jovial as they appeared to be, Robinson was well aware that these were ruthless guerilla fighters, implicated in the murder of several settlers, with a big reward on their head. It was essential to persuade them to follow him back to the coast. To bind them to him, he glibly promised that ‘if they would not spear white men, they might remain and hunt’.
Having got the Stoney Creek band to Waterhouse Point, Robinson feverishly concocted schemes to lure them to Gun Carriage Island even as he continued to reassure Umarrah that his people would be permitted to stay unmolested in their own country. He even promised that he could keep with them the four Tyreelore in the mission party as their wives. Kickerterpoller effectively scuttled Robinson’s scheme to get the Stoney Creek band into a boat by continually goading them with the prospect of an island prison. In the end, his taunts were more effective than the offer of the Tyreelore. Four people, including Plorenernoopner’s husband, disappeared back into the bush to join their compatriots still at large. Kickerterpoller was pleased to see them go; he wanted to keep the Tyreelore for himself. On extended hunting trips away from Robinson’s watchful gaze, he had been having sex with both Tanganutura and Bullyer.
Robinson did not try to recover the four defectors, because he was confident that Umarrah would eventually lead him to them and the other people still in the bush. Still, Robinson kept a vigilant watch on Plorenernoopner, anxious that she would be induced to go after her husband. He was reassured to see that she wanted to remain with her brother at Waterhouse Point, fully expecting Robinson to deliver her husband back to her. That, he was unable to do. Her husband and three others were captured by a boat crew and sent to Flinders Island, where all four died while Plorenernoopner was on a mission with Robinson.
Umarrah found a less perilous way to avoid island captivity. He boldly declared that he could find the Big River people of the central plateau. Despite the traditional conflict between himself and Mannalargenna, he persuaded Robinson that the two seasoned warriors could subordinate their mutual enmity to capture their common enemy. Together, they had defeated the Big River people once before, and they could do it again. Robinson was very pleased with the prospect of Umarrah and Mannalargenna securing him the reward for the capture of the Big River people.
His displeasure with Kickerterpoller for scaring off most of his quarry boiled over when Kickerterpoller brazenly requested that Robinson ‘put away’ his marriage to Pagerly. Robinson had explained that money for hire was paid on the boat in Hobart and now Kickerterpoller offered Robinson this as an inducement, saying he did not need money; all he needed was tea, sugar and a different woman to sleep with. Thoroughly disgusted at such ‘innate wickedness’, Robinson told him never to speak of the matter again, privately noting that neither ‘one nor twenty women would suffice him’.
Maybe there was one woman who would suffice. Emboldened by Wooredy’s infirmity, Kickerterpoller had renewed his schemes to take Truganini for himself.