TRUGANINI AND THE other guides returned to Launceston in September 1831, finding it to be more congenial on this occasion. A local newspaper had smoothed their way with exultant reports of their success, possibly provided by Robinson himself, eliding the inconvenient facts that most of the Stoney Creek band were still at large and Umarrah was responsible for the death of at least one settler. In this telling, Umarrah had been transformed from murderous savage to potential saviour with his prediction that he could easily capture all of the Big River people. ‘If all this is true (and we have every reason to believe it is),’ the editor gushed, ‘we rejoice.’
Seamlessly, Umarrah had resumed his role as one of Robinson’s most trusted guides; he was promised a meeting with the governor to present his grievances and seek restitution. Robinson even secured a new wife for him—Polare, a Punnilerpanner woman from Port Sorrell.
Robinson had gone to the Launceston jail to interrogate Polare and another woman captive about the recent murder of two settlers at Port Sorrell. He took with him Lacklay, who instantly recognised Polare as a woman from his country taken into the Luggermairrernerpairrer clan of the Western Tiers, allies of the Lairmairermener. Polare was thrilled to meet one of her clansmen and proved to be a willing informant about the Big River people among whom she had lived. She appeared to Robinson to be a perfect guide and intermediary for his new mission. He arranged for her to be released into his custody, then married her to Umarrah.
As well as satisfying Umarrah’s desire for a wife, Robinson was anxious to keep Polare out of the grasp of his nemesis, Alexander McKay, who had the effrontery to come to the jail when Robinson was there, brandishing a letter from the colonial secretary giving him permission to take female captives as guides. He was accompanied by a Tyerrerontepanner woman named Karnebucher, who became agitated as soon as she saw Robinson.
During 1829 and 1830, Karnebucher had lived at Robinson’s house in Hobart with her young son Meelerleeter, and had been one of the women sent back to her own country in May 1830. She had subsequently been recaptured with her husband and sent to the Campbell Town jail, from where she was removed by McKay. Her husband was presumed dead and somehow her son had come into the possession of John Batman, who had baptised the boy Jack Allen. Karnebucher begged Robinson to take her to Umarrah, who was of her clan, and to get her son returned to her.
McKay protested that Karnebucher was his guide and belonged to him. Although Robinson was sure McKay had taken the woman for his own sexual gratification, there was nothing he could do except rail about it in his journal. When Umarrah heard about Karnebucher he insisted that she be taken away from McKay and included in the mission party. When Robinson proved unable to do so, Umarrah raised the matter directly with Governor Arthur.
The long-promised audience with the governor took place in Launceston on 6 October. Both Umarrah and Mannalargenna related the extensive history of abuse their people had suffered from settlers and sealers. They emphasised how much they wanted to remain in their own country, unmolested, as Robinson had promised them. Governor Arthur listened respectfully and then arranged a private meeting with Robinson later that night, at which John Batman was also present, much to Robinson’s disgust.
Dispensing with any niceties, Robinson launched into a litany of complaints about the lack of consideration his mission had received and demanded that all the other roving parties must be under his direction. He singled out Alexander McKay as a brutal, disreputable fellow, unsuited to the object of conciliation, who took women with him to serve his own depraved purposes. He then turned his outrage on Batman, for having stolen away two young boys who must be returned to their parents. He further demanded that the seven men Batman had imported as trackers from New South Wales be attached to Robinson’s mission. Finally, he delivered a scathing assessment of the governor’s decision to allow the women he had rescued from enslavement to be returned to the sealers, who were nothing but a bunch of brutal outlaws.
The governor found all this voluble carping insolent and irritating, but he was buoyed by Robinson’s boast that he could capture the Big River people. He delivered to Robinson a long-desired triumph, telling Batman to surrender the two stolen boys he called Jack Allen and Ben Lomond and to transfer his trackers. McKay was ordered to deliver Karnebucher to Robinson, and the master of the Charlotte was instructed to sail around the Bass Strait islands to collect Mannalargenna’s daughters to be reunited with their father.
In return for getting his way, Robinson was straightaway to proceed to the midlands, where an area would be set aside ‘constituting a kind of home’ for his guides, with a hut to be built for Umarrah and another for Mannalargenna. In this way, the governor appeared to be fulfilling Robinson’s promises. However, Arthur fully understood that the settlers would never countenance any part of the colonial mainland being set aside for the original people. No such area was ever set aside, and no huts were built. Indeed, none of the governor’s instructions were carried out, except one: Batman’s trackers were transferred to the police constable Anthony Cottrell, who was instructed to work under Robinson’s direction.
The mission to capture the Big River people left Campbell Town on 15 October. Robinson was on horseback and everyone else walked: Wooredy and Truganini, Mannalargenna and Tanleboneyer, Umarrah and Polare, Kickerterpoller and Pagerly, in addition to the youths Maulboyheener, Peevay and Lacklay. A boy known as Richard, who had recently been recovered from a settler’s farm near the South Esk River, was a last-minute addition. There was also a resupply team, with four assigned convicts and a packhorse.
To curtail Kickerterpoller’s improper dalliances, Robinson left three Tyreelore behind, taking only Tanganutura, and she was probably the one who told Robinson that Kickerterpoller was planning to kill Wooredy and take Truganini for himself. Robinson recognised it as a vain boast. Truganini was hardly a devoted wife, but she showed no interest in the husband of her close friend Pagerly, while Wooredy had made a full recovery from his mystery ailment and was, as ever, the jealous warrior determined to see off any threats to his status.
As soon as they were away from Campbell Town, all the guides except Richard cast off their woollen trousers and smocks and smeared their bodies with ochre and oil. They wore only thick kangaroo-skin cloaks draped over their shoulders and carried knapsacks containing a blanket and food supplies. The men also carried a firestick and a squat waddy, while the women carried digging sticks, with a sharpened end like a chisel to dig for grubs and peel bark from trees to make huts. The women also carried small bone implements, glass to cut their hair, and the precious red ochre, along with a flat stone, to prepare hair paste for the men.
Umarrah, Mannalargenna and Wooredy made a formidable team. Robinson was gambling that their rivalry could be put aside for the cause of capturing their traditional enemy. As it happened, these powerful warriors displayed a remarkable unity of purpose: they were equally determined not to find the Big River people. Having been assured by the governor that they were under his protection, they went hunting, which was much more to their liking than confronting a dangerous foe. For nearly three months, they enjoyed a meandering trek through excellent kangaroo country without coming within cooee of their old enemy.
Mannalargenna’s spirit guide told him the party needed to travel east towards the coast at Spring Bay, where the Big River people would meet with a remnant of Kickerterpoller’s clan, the Pardarereme, known to settlers as the Oyster Bay people. Kickerterpoller was, as always, in lockstep with Mannalargenna, insisting that this was indeed so. Polare concurred, explaining that the Pardarereme people often collaborated with the Lairmairermener. When settlers talked of attacks by the Big River people, they were often unaware that it was clans from two separate nations working together.
Mannalargenna led them south-east in a zigzag procession along the edge of the Eastern Tiers, walking well ahead of the group while majestically holding up a smouldering firestick, regardless of wind or rain. This was rough country of dry peppermint gum forest and shrubby ground cover, where large sections had been burnt to stimulate native grasses for browsing kangaroos. It was still untouched by settlers and their sheep. As the ground was broken by lumps of granite and wombat burrows, Robinson had to lead his horse as often as he rode. ‘Hills upon hills, and succeeding hills and interspersed with gullies,’ he wrote in his journal on 22 October, ‘and in the distance high mountains whose sombre appearance would seem to say this country is formed for the children of nature.’
The children of nature were certainly enjoying their time in this rough landscape, even if he was not. As a precaution against distraction from his pursuit, Robinson had provided his guides with four cakes of high-grade ochre, used by the colonists as a dye pigment, which he had purchased with money from the hire of the gifted boat. He had not reckoned on the considerable amount of time they would spend each day carefully painting their bodies and dressing their hair for ceremony. They danced every night and afterwards Umarrah would compete with Wooredy to sing long epic narratives, each verse with a repeated chorus, keeping the mesmerised group awake until the morning hours. Exhausted, Robinson likened the experience to being trapped in the Arabian Nights.
During the day, they dawdled in the pleasant spring sunshine. Truganini collected grasses and wove ropes to catch possums. Wooredy made spears and went hunting with the other men, killing kangaroos and wallabies in such numbers that they only bothered to bring back the hind legs and tail. The women dried the sinews of the kangaroo tails that they twisted into ornaments to wear looped around their necks. Exasperated, Robinson threatened to tell the governor that they were just hunting and not tracking their quarry. Mannalargenna coolly replied that he could tell the governor that Robinson was just basking in the sun. ‘He is a shrewd man,’ Robinson ruefully acknowledged. Not only was he shrewd, Robinson had to admit that Mannalargenna was the one truly in charge.
Robinson had expected that competition between Umarrah and Mannalargenna would speed the chase, so he was dismayed that Umarrah proved to be as much in thrall to the dictates of Mannalargenna’s mercurial spirit guide as everyone else. Umarrah and his wife Polare were greatly familiar with this country, as was Kickerterpoller, yet they followed wherever Mannalargenna’s tremors indicated without a murmur of dissent. Grudgingly, Robinson conceded that he had no choice but to indulge them, and with increasing anxiety sent up prayers that the mission would be a success. His future depended on it.
As they progressed across the hills, Polare excitedly pointed out the cold ashes of fires, and sites where people had been splitting flints to sharpen their spears. One time she took the party to the hollow of a dead tree, from which she retrieved bundles of spears tied with blankets, a shotgun and a musket, as well as several bags of shot, all concealed for future use.
Still they saw no people. As the days became weeks, Robinson grew very tetchy. He doubted that anyone was nearby, and even if people were lurking in the vicinity, he knew they would be aware of his presence and keep away. It was a source of constant frustration that the hunters refused to quiet the excited barking of the dogs that reverberated around the hills. He was at his wit’s end one day to see Truganini and Pagerly making a large bonfire with the sheets of shed bark that littered the ground, sending billows of smoke into the air that would be visible for miles around.
After two weeks of meandering towards the coast, Robinson dropped his indulgence towards these diversionary tactics and gave Kickerterpoller and Polare an ultimatum: unless they could produce the people at once, the party must turn back and walk towards the territory of the Lairmairermener on the central plateau. Every one of the guides reacted with alarm, crying out that this was very cold country and they would all die if they went there. Undeterred, Robinson pointed out that the weather was mild and that summer was coming. Kickerterpoller continued to protest that this country was full of bad spirits who would kill any strange people, especially if they were carrying knapsacks. For his part, Mannalargenna looked pitiable and pleaded that he was an old man who would expire if he were made to walk that far. Rebutting all these objections, Robinson held firm to his order.
The people shouldered their overburdened knapsacks and walked westwards, keeping to the wooded hills well out of firing range of the extensive farms that spread for miles along the river plains. Robinson had been warned that the settlers and their convict workers all carried guns and would shoot his guides on sight. A settler from the area had told him that ‘a great many natives had been killed in that part’. That was true. Some seventy people had been killed around the Clyde and Ouse rivers in the past few years.
The settler gave an account of an armed posse of stockmen killing seven people at their camp, in reprisal for the spearing of one of their companions. Days later the stockmen tracked the fleeing survivors to a lagoon, where they killed ten more. It was hard to imagine there could be many Lairmairermener left in their country.
In preparation for entering the country of their enemy, the men had paid particular attention to dressing their hair and bodies with red ochre. On 4 November, they crossed the Hobart-to-Launceston road into Lairmairermener country. They walked close enough to settlements to hear cocks crowing. Robinson knew it was essential to keep the people away from the farms, and it proved to be a daily trial. He was much relieved when the resupply team brought fresh supplies of the tea and sugar the people so craved. In vain, he tried to stop their dancing and singing at night, for fear it would invite a surprise attack on their camp.
Even when the party climbed into the heavily forested high country of the central plateau there were signs of settler intrusion. Massive stumps as big as wagon wheels were all that remained of tall eucalypts and giant stringybark trees felled by convict timber cutters using a two-handed crosscut saw. Here the game was plentiful and Mannalargenna hunted kangaroo as though his life depended on it, pursuing them along ridges and down precipitous gullies while his companions watched in awe.
Moving north-west, over many days, they found no more signs of settlers, but plenty of evidence of occupation by the Lairmairermener. The massive stringybark trees had prominent horizontal scars on the trunks where the dense fibrous bark had been peeled off to make huts. There were empty huts, large enough to house several families, marked with perfectly drawn circles. One day they came upon a village where each hut was decorated with drawings of humans and animals, as well as the ubiquitous circles. The meaning of this decoration eluded Robinson, and his guides knew better than to explain what they signified and endure his scornful lectures about their foolish superstition.
The first tangible evidence of the continuing presence of the original people came when smoke was seen in the distance, somewhere near Lake Echo to the north-west. Greatly encouraged, Robinson rode to a vantage point for a better look, only to return to find his own campsite wreathed in smoke: Kickerterpoller had lit the grass in three separate places. Robinson couldn’t believe the man could be so ‘obdurate and thoughtless’ as to do this when it would give their position away. Reaching Lake Echo the next day, they saw the land had been recently fired and in some places was still smouldering. There was no sign of the people.
Polare unearthed more caches containing eight guns with powder horn and some small amounts of powder, but no shot. Without ammunition, the heavy guns were useless, and they had been hidden until the people managed to steal some more powder and shot. It was unlikely that anyone would be coming back for them in the near future.
On 14 November Robinson heard dogs barking and sent his guides to investigate. They returned unanimously agreeing that there was no human presence to be seen—the barking had been a spirit that had come and gone, travelling like the wind. The next day, clearly visible tracks suggested a group of six or seven people with dogs had been close by. Before any search party could be sent to locate them, another grass fire flared, this time lit by Maulboyheener.
‘I cannot effect anything without these people yet I am harassed and perplexed by them,’ Robinson despaired. ‘They are a peculiar people to manage.’ All they wanted to do was hunt, and when not hunting were ‘idling away the time’ digging platypuses out of burrows or looking for the lairs of wild dogs. Even Truganini remained cheerfully indifferent to Robinson’s lectures that ‘the governor did not want kangaroo, but wanted us to look out for the natives’. It was a puzzle to him that his guides were not keen to meet the Big River people yet the moment they saw a settler’s hut they wanted to visit despite the imminent danger, prepared to risk the settler’s guns just to get some potatoes.
By late November, the party had completed a second loop of the central plateau and Robinson was now engaged in a dogged contest with Mannalargenna for control of the mission. Mannalargenna’s spirit told him the Big River people had certainly gone to the east, while Robinson countered that they were certainly still hiding in the north-west. To prove his point, he took them to the top of a hill, from which smoke could be seen rising in the direction of Lake Echo. He triumphantly declared that God was directing him. Who did they choose to believe, he demanded, God or Mannalargenna’s spirit guide? Everyone looked sullen and remained silent. Eventually Polare ventured to ask why he had not stayed at Lake Echo, if God told him the Big River people were there?
This was an utterly one-sided contest. Not Truganini, nor Wooredy, nor any of the other guides chose to take Robinson’s part. Still, the evidence of the smoke was hard to ignore, so back to Lake Echo they trudged. Again they found no people, and again Robinson tried to assert his ascendancy over Mannalargenna. Knowing the old man had a morbid fear of snakes, he snatched up a long tiger snake, still drowsy from hibernation, swung the writhing reptile in the air and snapped it to break its back. As he threw the snake away, he challenged Mannalargenna to do the same. Instead of rising to Robinson’s challenge, everyone shrank away from him in appalled horror.
Lake Echo was near the edge of the Western Tiers, and at that altitude cider gums grew profusely. With the approach of summer, sweet sap had begun to ferment in these alpine trees. Polare, who had lived in this region, showed how to bore a hole into the trunk and insert a straw of rolled bark to suck out the sweet, fermented sap, or else let it drain into their tin cups. They ran from tree to tree, sucking the honeyed liquid till they were giddy with intoxication.
Unseasonably, the advent of summer also brought horizontal sleet and snow to the highlands. The wide expanse of the once tranquil lake took on the appearance of a stormy sea with cresting waves depositing mounds of brown foam on the shores. Robinson thought the view of the dramatic snow-covered peaks to the southwest was sublime, but at night he could not sleep for the cold. As they walked north, Mannalargenna led the party, beating against the wind with his smouldering firestick, and behind him the other men made as if they were spearing the snow.
Their blankets, and even the additional kangaroo-skin cloaks Truganini and the other women had made, were inadequate covering against the cold. Discontent festered. Mannalargenna led the party north-west along the edge of the Western Tiers and down to the Meander River Valley where the climate was milder. This was bad country. There had been massacres in 1828 in which local stockmen and the 40th Regiment had all but extinguished the local Pallitore clan. Mannalargenna was keen to get through this tainted country and kept heading west along the edge of the highlands till Robinson became suspicious of the direction they were headed with such evident purpose.
Mannalargenna explained they were going to get red ochre from a deposit about three or four days’ walk away. Robinson pleaded with them not to ‘fritter away time in such a manner’, but no one was prepared to go back over the Western Tiers until, much to Robinson’s surprise, Kickerterpoller took up his case. ‘What would the governor think of it?’ Kickerterpoller scolded. ‘If the governor asked Mr R, “Where was the blacks?” Mr R must show him the red ochre and say, “There, governor, there is the natives.”’ He was playing to their powerful attachment to the idea of pleasing the governor. They understood only too well that it was the governor, not Robinson, who would determine how they were to live into the future. They walked back into the snow towards Lake Echo.
On 30 December, smoke was seen once again and all the guides went to investigate. The following morning Robinson had just begun his daily journal entry when he was interrupted by a great racket: his guides were returning with the Big River people, who were indeed the remnant of the Lairmairermener and Pardarereme clans. It was not a large group—only sixteen warriors, nine women and a child, with more than a hundred dogs. In his excitement, Robinson did not return to his journal, so he wrote no contemporaneous account of what happened at this longed-for meeting.
In the report he later wrote for the governor, Robinson implied that he single-handedly fell in with the Big River people. According to this vainglorious account, a band of warriors suddenly advanced on him, rattling their spears in a warlike attitude, but he calmly walked towards them and invited them to sit down and take tea with him. After distributing some of the trinkets he kept for this purpose, he promised a meeting with the governor to discuss their grievances. In return, or so he reported, they ‘placed themselves under my protection’. He did not care to explain how he could speak to them in their own language.
Of course, Robinson wasn’t alone as his report implied. His guides were present and so was at least one convict, Alexander McGeary, who wrote his own account of the momentous meeting. In McGeary’s telling, there was never any danger to Robinson. The Big River people knew many of the guides and were happy to join them. Both groups of people ‘kissed and hugged one another—all we had to do was bring them together’, he wrote.
A week later, the Big River people were paraded through the streets of Hobart with their great army of dogs for the jubilant populace to gawk at. Most of the town turned out. At Government House they were met by a full military band, which greatly alarmed them. After being briefly addressed by the governor, the men performed a spear-throwing competition on the grass under the trees. When this circus was over, they were taken to the harbour and put aboard a small ship to be kept securely until the government cutters Tamar and Charlotte arrived from George Town ten days later.
Truganini and her companions were embarked on the Charlotte, and the Big River people on the Tamar on 17 January. The Big River people embarked sedately, but once the ship set sail they erupted into cries of distress, darting about the deck or clinging to the gunwales, and had to be subdued by the crew. The fate of these people might have been the cause of some disquiet for the mission guides—and more evidence of Robinson’s bad faith—yet they seemed quite satisfied to see their traditional enemies sent into exile. For Truganini, it offered further proof of her own special standing. She and her companions did not go to Flinders Island; instead, they were disembarked at George Town and sent to Mr Whitcomb’s house in Launceston, to await Robinson and another mission.
Robinson was not eager to join them. The colonists’ exuberant displays of gratitude for bringing in the Big River people had not translated into the generous financial reward he was expecting. Before he would agree to venture into the wilderness again, he drove a hard bargain with the governor. Three months were spent haggling to secure a further land grant, as well as £1000 in cash, of which £300 would be paid upfront with the balance due when all the people were removed. He put in a good word for his ‘sable companions’, who were awarded a flock of sheep. These animals were not sent to an area outside of Campbell Town supposedly set aside for the guides but straight to Flinders Island, leaving no doubt that this was already where Robinson intended his companions to live out their days.
As Truganini waited for him at their protector’s house in Launceston, she could not have guessed that he had negotiated to be appointed commandant of the Flinders Island establishment and would take up the role just as soon as he had cleared the colony of every last one of the original people.
Flinders Island was no better than Gun Carriage Island: dreadfully exposed and barren with inadequate water. The clans of the north-west believed that the distant islands of the Bass Strait were the islands of the dead, and Flinders Island must have looked to them like that prophecy fulfilled. The chosen site for the establishment was on the west coast of Flinders Island opposite Green Island, where there was good anchorage for ships. Known as the Lagoons, it was on a narrow sandbank adjacent to a swampy tidal lagoon, with no protection of hills or trees, leaving it exposed to the violent winds of the Roaring Forties, which brought driving rain and sleet. The only water came from sinkholes dug above the tideline, and was decidedly brackish. The forty people transferred from Gun Carriage Island were living close to the shore in three large A-frame huts, constructed from tea-tree branches and rush thatch. A fence made from saplings was the only protection from the wind. Many people were desperately ill.
Robinson did not hold back in his denunciation of the place when he took his guides for a short, unhappy visit to the island in February 1832. In his report to the governor, his only positive assessment of the site was ‘its remoteness from the main territory’. Indeed, it was remote; not even a faint outline of the mainland was visible from the Lagoons. Only from the high peaks of the Mount Strzelecki range that rose up behind them could the people have sighted the land they had inhabited for forty thousand years.
It was with great relief that the mission party left Flinders Island a few weeks later, on 12 March, on the next expedition to remove people still known to be living in the north-west corner. By then, Robinson had added two Tyreelore to the party: Plorenernoopner, who was now the wife of Peevay, and Nollahalleker, also known as Kit, who was originally from Cape Grim and had relatives still in that country. He had also managed to extract Karnebucher from McKay, as well as a Pallitore woman McKay had captured in an ambush in the Hampshire hills. Her name was Semiramis, known as Jenny, and she was soon to become the wife of Maulboyheener. Police constable Anthony Cottrell, with the seven New South Wales trackers transferred from Batman, was also included in the party.
The brief exposure to institutional life in exile proved disastrous for the mission. Nearly everyone was ill with dysentery or influenza. Umarrah died of dysentery in the Launceston hospital on 24 March. Two days later, his body was put into a plain coffin to be placed in a hole in unconsecrated ground. Following the coffin, his wife Polare and his companions did what they could to pay him the respect due to a great leader. While they were forbidden to discard all their clothes, they painted their bodies with charcoal and ochre. A curious settler asked why they painted their bodies in this way and received a curt answer from Kickerterpoller: ‘What do you wear fine clothes for?’
The devastated party left Launceston on 4 April, heading into the eastern holdings of the Van Diemen’s Land Company. Most remained ill, and by the time they reached the company outpost at Hampshire two weeks later, Kickerterpoller and Polare could not walk, requiring a cart to carry them. Three others were also very ill. Cottrell took all five invalids by boat to Emu Bay, while the rest of the party rested at Hampshire.
During this hiatus, Mannalargenna was determined not to miss the chance for a trip to the ochre mine. He was completely confident of the way, leading the party across a series of rock-strewn hills with steep ravines into country that Robinson described as ‘a riot of wilderness’. They had to negotiate a passage through moss-covered myrtle rainforest and a horizontal scrub of sassafras so tight that they were obliged to crawl on their bellies, surrendering to the slimy, mouldy leaf litter infested with leeches. Robinson had a horrible time of it, but Mannalargenna refused to stop until they reached a spot where rocks of iron oxide were breaking through the ground. The people dropped to their knees, patting and kissing the earth.
For millennia, people had been coming here for ochre—from the east as far as Cape Portland and Oyster Bay, from the west from Cape Grim and Sandy Cape, and south from the Great Lakes. The exposed rocks were not the best for ochre as they had been scorched by many fires, so the women got to work with their digging sticks to make deep holes. They pulled out big lumps of ore that Robinson guessed weighed five or six pounds each, filling their knapsacks to overflowing.
Returning the next day with the heavy knapsacks, they followed a track that Semiramis showed them through Pallitore country. Although the land showed signs of having been burnt maybe the year before, there were no people left. She took them to a secluded forest, where the debarked trees indicated there had been an encampment. This was the spot where McKay and two Van Diemen’s Land Company employees had killed her husband when they shot at a group of five adults and a boy as they sat by their fire. Her husband, another man and a woman were killed, and one woman managed to escape. Semiramis had surrendered with the boy and had been forced to become a guide for McKay’s party. She did not know what had happened to the boy.
Lying on the ground were shattered remains, including the skull of the murdered woman with her perfect teeth intact. When Robinson bent down to collect the skull, his guides howled in such outrage that he had to leave it where it lay.
The mission party arrived at Emu Bay in early May to find their sick companions were no better. Kickerterpoller was in extremis. Robinson pushed on, after instructing Cottrell that when the invalids recovered they were to be forwarded by boat to the Van Diemen’s Land Company headquarters at Circular Head. To replace them, he added four of the trackers from New South Wales. He scorned these fellows as useless drunks and worried about how their wanton behaviour might affect his guides, but, having observed their skill in making sturdy ribbed canoes from peppermint gums, he could see they would be very helpful to him. He need not have worried. His guides were antagonistic towards the four alien men, except for Karnebucher, who liked having them around as a link to her son kidnapped by Batman. Their news of her boy helped to assuage her bitter grief.
Wooredy was out hunting on the coast, west of Rocky Point, on 13 May when he encountered two company workers riding horses along the beach. The horsemen were friendly enough, offering him a pipe and tobacco and asking if there were any more like him. Wooredy spoke passable English and replied that, yes, there were more with Mr Robinson’s party. As the men parted from him they called out, ‘See you tomorrow at Circular Head. We give you plenty flour.’ That night, as the party slept around their fire, they heard horses’ hooves and men call, ‘Here they are. Cut away, cut away!’ They leapt up to see a group of mounted men approaching at a gallop with guns raised, shooting wildly as they pounded through the camp. By some miracle no one was hurt, although one of the riders was shot in the knee by mistake. Suddenly, the protection of the Van Diemen’s Land Company did not seem like much protection at all.
When they reached the company town at Circular Head, Robinson prudently established his camp around the timber cottages near the wharf that housed the bookkeeper and the indentured workmen. He went out of his way to curry favour with the manager, Edward Curr, sending him some of Truganini’s woven baskets and a shell necklace.
He even organised entertainment in two large tents where Curr and his officers were supplied with grog and cigars to watch the people dance naked. In preparation, the guides ground their ochre and mixed it with animal fat to dress their hair, and the New South Wales trackers covered their naked bodies in white clay. Together they made an imposing spectacle: those in red ochre chanting and rhythmically stamping their feet and those daubed with clay clashing boomerangs against their distinctive bark shields. The entertainment was so well received that Robinson repeated it several times, each time with more elaborate staging.
Pagerly, Richard and Karnebucher rejoined the group at Circular Head. Polare had died of dysentery at Emu Bay in May. So too had Kickerterpoller, leaving Pagerly a widow for the third time in as many years. Kickerterpoller had been baptised, and was given a Christian burial at Emu Bay on 16 May. Robinson took the news of his death as a blow, indulging in a sentimental memory of a devoted and loyal retainer. Conveniently, he suppressed the memory of the ‘obdurate and callous’ fellow whose persistent subversion of his authority had caused him so much exasperation. Robinson never comprehended that it was not to him that Kickerterpoller gave his loyalty, but to Mannalargenna. Equally, he failed to appreciate that Mannalargenna was even now orchestrating a campaign of resistance within the mission party.
The party arrived at Cape Grim in the far north-west corner in early June to find a party of sealers from Robbins and Hunter islands with several Tyreelore, including one of Mannalargenna’s daughters and Tanleboneyer’s sister. Mannalargenna was much animated to see his daughter and demanded that Robinson take the women away, as the governor had promised. He also wanted the sealer arrested who had shot him years before. ‘These poor creatures imagine that I possess power to redress their grievance,’ Robinson moaned. ‘Alas I have no such power, I can only listen to their complaints and promise to enquire about it.’ Mannalargenna perfectly understood that in order to gain his assistance Robinson had boasted that he possessed just such powers; this present demurring did not please him one bit.
Cape Grim was Peevay’s country. His clan was the Parperloihener from Robbins Island, and his eldest brother, Wymurric, had gathered together the remnants of clans whose coastal territory stretched along the north coast from Table Cape to Cape Grim, and down the west coast to West Point. These were the people the mission party was looking to meet. Just how many still survived in the north-west corner, Peevay could not say.
There had been a drastic decline in the original population during the past few years. Incursions by the sealers had severely weakened the clans and triggered internecine warfare over women, although it was punitive action by Van Diemen’s Land Company employees that did the most damage to an already fragile population. A common practice was for lonely shepherds to kidnap a woman to hold as a sex slave—sometimes chained out the back of the hut—inviting retaliation by the clan. The occasional spearing of a shepherd would lead to brutal reprisals in which dozens of people, perhaps not even from the same clan, were wantonly killed. Spearing sheep would invite the same response.
Peevay led the party over miles of grass-covered sandhills that provided sweeping views of the stretch of sandy beach that ran from Cape Grim all the way to West Point. Beyond was the quilted blue of the endless Indian Ocean. Not until they reached West Point on 19 June was Peevay able to make contact with his brother. Wymurric was an impressive man, six and a half feet tall, and with the same expressive face as Peevay. He had been expecting Robinson.
The previous summer, a group of Lowreenne and Ninine people had visited Wymurric, among them Dray, from Robinson’s first mission. She had told him of Robinson’s good intentions, but Wymurric had remained wary. Only months before, Alexander McKay had shot dead one of his warriors and captured his third brother, Pendowtewer, who was brutally beaten. Wymurric was also currently engaged in a debilitating war with the Tarkiner and Peternidic clans from the west coast. Peevay sought to persuade him that Robinson could provide protection.
About a week later, Wymurric and another brother, Penderoin, came to Robinson’s camp. They were very friendly, until Wooredy and Mannalargenna crept up to steal their spears. The two warriors tried to wrest back their weapons and a scuffle ensued. Eventually Robinson intervened, insisting that the spears be returned. Grim and resentful, Mannalargenna and Wooredy handed over the spears and stomped away. The damage was done: Peevay could not get his brothers to stay at the camp a moment longer. Robinson grumbled that his old companions were ‘bad politicians’ who only understood force, rather than the tricks of persuasion.
His own tricks of persuasion appeared to be working. On 16 July, Wymurric agreed to accompany the mission party to Cape Grim, and brought with him nine men, five women and eight children. They were all quite at ease, hunting at every opportunity and singing as they walked. Carefully maintaining a stance of disinterested friendship, Robinson sought to learn their language and customs and was fascinated to be told that they would quiet their children by saying ‘num lagger’, meaning ‘the white man is coming’. This phrase could frighten a child into silence. He believed the terror implicit in this phrase was inspired by men like McKay, never himself. All the while he was considering how best to get these twenty-three people to nearby Hunter Island, which was far enough offshore to serve as a holding depot. From there he could arrange a government ship to deport Wymurric and his people to Flinders Island.
The generous and unwitting Peevay was used as a decoy to trick his two brothers onto a boat, on the pretence that they were all going hunting on Hunter Island. Wooredy did his best to foil the plan by loudly proclaiming that there were no kangaroos on Hunter Island and they would do better to hunt on the shore. Meanwhile, Robinson pretended to be unconcerned about whether Wymurric and his people came or not. Wymurric hesitated but eventually accepted Peevay’s entreaties and climbed aboard. Once he was seated the others were prepared to follow, even though the women still evinced unease about going to the island where the sealers lived. They never came back.
Almost as soon as they were encamped on Hunter Island, Wymurric’s people began to sicken. The first to expire was a nursing mother who died on 30 July, followed the next day by an old man, who was cremated over the ashes of the woman, and the day after that by the motherless baby. Each day, the grieving people coated their bodies with the ashes of the dead as a sign of mourning. Every dawn, a woman would begin the song of lamentations, then others would join in and continue to sing on and off throughout the day. Never again did they mention the names of their departed.
By the end of the month, Robinson was referring to these people as captives and organising for a ship to take them into permanent exile. ‘I practise no deception, nor indeed have I at any time,’ Robinson told himself defensively, ‘to my having acted faithfully toward them I attribute under God my success.’
In August, Peevay’s older brother Penderoin told Robinson about a large group of people from the Peternidic, Tommigener, Tarkiner and Ninine clans camped at the Arthur River. Robinson received this information with glee, delighted at the prospect of adding more people to those already on Hunter Island. In his journal on 3 September, he congratulated himself on having negotiated with the governor to remove all the people of Van Diemen’s Land: ‘By taking the whole I gain not only the reward but the celebrity.’