In Tasmania (15 page)

I CLOSED THE DOOR AND WALKED OUT INTO THE COLD AFTERNOON
air, until I no longer heard the scratching of paws on wood, and climbed into the car.

I felt strangely dissatisfied as I drove back to Swansea. I had made my dotty pilgrimage to Mount Vernon, but what had I to show for it? A handful of picaresque images: a spry old lady shooting possums from her veranda; a maid blasted to death through a cedar door; a dump-truck filled with sandstone blocks to build a casino. And, elusive as ever, the Father of the People. He sat in my mind in the same ludicrous position that he once occupied when chairing an anti-transportation meeting at a hotel in Kempton: on an elevated seat ‘festooned with a canopy of laurels and evergreens'.

The road home was deserted, just every now and then the flattened pelt of a road-kill. I drove through Sorell, Runnymede, Buckland, Orford, and was passing through Triabunna when the Aboriginal name dislodged something, and the obscenity struck me. The Tasmanians over whom Kemp assumed his paternal role were European colonists like himself. He was no father to the original inhabitants. In fact, Kemp's life in Van Diemen's Land from his arrival to his death pretty well coincided with their extinction.

THE FIRST EUROPEANS WHO CAME TO TASMANIA NEVER SAW ANY
Aborigines.

One Easter Sunday, I drove south to the Forestier Peninsula to find the monument that marked where they landed in 1642. A sign by the road warned of wombats crossing and over the backs of grazing merinos a black swan chased its hard and distinct shadow. This was pastoral country, and I had to open and close eight gates before reaching the inlet of grey shingle. Across the bay a line of breakers marked a rocky bar. The waves changed from blue to green as they rose over it, and the air had the iodine smell of seaweed.

 

The monument stood in the shade of a stringy gum, an ugly concrete obelisque ten feet high. Cut into a block of Maria Island granite was a stilted inscription to Abel Tasman that concealed a mountain of controversy.

The new colony took its name from the man who had named the old one, a laconic, pious Dutchman who learned his sailing on a mackerel sloop in the North Sea and died in a lingering cloud of disgrace, in Indonesia, suspected of drunkenly trying to hang two impudent sailors with a halter.

Tasman was 39, a captain in the Dutch East India Company, when he sailed out of a hailstorm on the west coast of Tasmania and saw a row of sharp peaks above the slop. ‘This land being the first land we have met with in the South Sea, and not known to any European nation, we have conferred on it the name of Anthony van Diemen, our illustrious master who sent us to make this discovery.' He had been at sea for 72 days since sailing from Batavia, and as he understood it the peaks marked the tip of a continent.

 

Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Eratosthenes, Hipparchus – a lot of people believed in Australia for a thousand years before its discovery. There had to be a commensurate weight – somewhere Down Under – to counter the northern land mass. In the second century
AD
, Claudius Ptolemy, a mathematical geographer from Alexandria, was the latest to write of an ‘unknown Southland' that was crucial, he believed, to maintaining the balance of the world. The
Geographia
's republication in 1478 incited European navigators to look for this
Terra Australis incognita
.
⁶
To further confuse matters, the continent was dubbed for a while
Austrialia del Espiritu Santo
– in honour of the House of Austria – and
Temperata Antipodum Nobis Incognita
.

The French, especially, believed in Australia's existence. In 1504, an expedition under Gonneville was blown off course and spent six months on a land mass east of the Cape of Good Hope, where the only sailor to survive reported that he had been kindly received by the natives. Another Ptolemy was Louis Antoine de Bougainville, who had been present at the fall of Quebec and sought to restore in the south what France had lost in the north. Galvanised by a desire for alternative trade routes, France sent off seven expeditions in the late 1700s to seek Gonneville Land, of which Nicolas Baudin's ‘voyage of discovery to the Southern Lands' was the last. None of these expeditions had marvellous outcomes for their commanders. Marion Dufresne was eaten by Maoris, Kerguelen convicted of fraud, D'Entrecasteaux died of scurvy, while the most famous, La Pérouse, vanished without trace. A fleet sent to find him found only rumours of Aborigines who had waved at a passing rescue ship and, when the telescope was trained on them, appeared to be dressed in the tattered remains of French naval uniforms and ‘making shaving gestures'.

Tasman's discovery of Van Diemen's Land had given a shot of hope to all these navigators. They studied his log closely.

 

The gales continued. Unable to land he was forced south, around what is now Tasman Peninsula, to North Bay. An hour after sunset on December 1, 1642 he dropped anchor into a bed of light grey sand and fell to his knees thanking God.

His patron, Van Diemen, had been eager for him to find ‘precious metals' of the kind that the Spanish were mining in Peru. Next day, Tasman lowered two small boats to explore. As they rowed through the narrows and across a calm bay to Boomer Creek, it alarmed the crew to see columns of smoke rising above the trees. The fires were weeks old, left by the Oyster Bay tribe. If the weather was fine, the smoke might smoulder on in stumps for two months. The tribe had migrated after the duck season and were now in the highlands west of Swansea.

Even though Tasman's men saw no one, they had the impression that they were being watched. On landing, they heard what sounded like human voices and the noise of ‘a small trumpet or gong' – probably a native hen or clinking currawong, a bird that makes a harsh, resounding note on the in-breath as well as the out. And on the trunks of two large blue-gums they noticed freshly carved notches ‘fully five feet apart', leading them to speculate whether the natives in these parts were exceptionally big.

The secrecy of the Dutch East India Company ensured that little was known about Tasman's voyage until the eighteenth century when details of the tall mysterious inhabitants sparked the imagination of Jonathan Swift, who, in the fifth paragraph of
Gulliver's Travels
(1726), shipwrecked his hero on an island ‘to the north-west of Van Diemen's Land'. Four years later, Gulliver was marooned again – driven by a violent storm to ‘a great Island or Continent … on the South-side whereof was a small Neck of Land jutting out into the Sea, and a Creek too shallow to hold a Ship of above one hundred Tuns'. Like Tasman, the captain dispatched a longboat to look for water. At first the crew found no sign of any inhabitants, but above the tree-tops there suddenly appeared a huge creature, as tall as a church spire and calling out in a voice ‘many degrees louder than a speaking Trumpet'. Running away, Gulliver came up against a stile impossible to climb. ‘Every Step,' wrote Swift, ‘was six Foot high.'

Van Diemen had been overly ambitious in his expectations for the voyage. Tasman told his patron that in the absence of any natives to act as guides, his party of 18 men had spent the rest of that day – December 2 – inspecting the shoreline for signs of silver and gold. They had returned to their boats disappointed, carrying bunches of herbs, some gum from the split bark of a black wattle and ‘the voided excrement of a quadruped'. Presented with specimens of dried herbs and the cube-shaped droppings of a wombat, Van Diemen castigated Tasman for not being inquisitive enough.

Tasman, it turned out, had not even set foot in the place. The closest he came was on the following afternoon. In deteriorating weather, he boarded the ship's boat and rowed for the nearest bay, where he intended to plant a flag ‘that those who shall come after us may become aware that we have been here, and have taken possession of the said land as our lawful property'. A strong northeasterly was blowing, splashing water over the gunwales. Gingerly, Tasman approached the inlet, but the waves threatened to dash his hull against the reef and he fingered the ship's carpenter to swim ashore with the flagpole.

The pole that Pieter Jacobaz clung to may have helped him over the reef. From his pitching boat, Tasman directed Jacobaz to the centre of the bay where four tall eucalypts stood in a crescent, and gestured Jacobaz to plant the pole before the tallest. The trunk had been burned and Tasman was unable to decide whether the topmost branches reminded him of a stag's antlers or a rolling pin. The carpenter unravelled the blue, white and red flag of the Dutch East India Company, and swam back through the surf.

‘After its first blunder-born discovery by a Dutchman,' wrote Melville in
Moby Dick
, ‘all other ships long shunned those shores as pestiferously barbarous …' But three centuries later, a group of academics decided to work out where, exactly, the carpenter had landed, and to erect a cairn on the spot. In October 1923, an expedition sponsored by the Royal Society of Tasmania, the oldest scientific body in Australia, left Hobart on the SS
Toorah
. Within an hour the party of 17 had divided into two rancorous camps who stood in the mess room yelling at each other. The director of the Tasmania Museum objected to having been brought on a wild-goose chase, while the leader of the expedition railed against ‘bloody mutineers'. If they had been on his ship, he shouted, he would have known what to do with them.

Unknown to some on board, a maverick member of the Royal Society had nine months previously mounted his own expedition and positioned the landing-place a few hundred yards from the chosen site: not at the head of the inner bay, but on the north side of the reef. He claimed even to have found the stump of the tree described in Tasman's log.

On landing, the party divided. The Opposition pitched their tents at a distance from the Official party and refused to have anything to do with the building of the obelisk. The argument raged long after the memorial was unveiled. At a crowded special meeting, the Chairman, a government botanist, said that tree stumps were of no value to mark the position: blue gums only lived 150–200 years. A former hydrographer, who suffered from heavy stuttering, conveyed to a frustrated audience his opinion that the carpenter had not landed in this bay at all, but in another one entirely. A motion was then carried to alter the inscription on the monument from ‘At this spot' to ‘Near this spot'.

I walked up to the granite plaque to see if anything had been done about it. The obelisk with its little corrugated iron roof had the air of something hastily erected and abandoned. Its builders had not even tidied up the spot where they had mixed the concrete. Nor had they changed the words on the monument: ‘At this spot the expedition under Abel Janszoon Tasman, being the first white people to set foot on Tasmanian soil, planted the Dutch flag on December 3, 1642.'

Tasman wrote that he left his flag and pole as ‘as a memorial for those who shall come after us, and for the natives of this country, who did not show themselves.' In a conscious echo, the Royal Society's inscription informed the rare visitor that their monument was put up ‘as a memorial to posterity and to the inhabitants of this country.' It rang hollow because in 1923 members of the Royal Society were united on one matter. There were no natives to show themselves.

THE GRANITE CAME FROM AN ISLAND OPPOSITE NORTH BAY, A
combination of horseshoe beaches, fossil cliffs and forests of eucalyptus and casuarina. Tasman is thought to have named it after the wife of his patron Van Diemen. Today, Maria Island is a national park, 14 miles long and eight wide. It is almost my favourite place in Tasmania.

Baudin visited Maria Island for nine days in February 1802. During four of those days the French had contact with the Oyster Bay tribe. Much of what little is known about Tasmania's pre-colonial Aborigines comes from material gathered by Baudin and his scientists over the course of these four days.

I take a small boat across to Shoal Bay where the French anchored. A school of dolphins skims alongside us, their fins slicing the water like the tips of a great rotary blade. They converge on a patch of sea where gannets are already diving, the birds mortaring the bay in a line of white explosions. ‘A ball of mackerel,' says the captain.

Up until 1803, Europeans landed in Van Diemen's Land only for fresh water or to repair their ships or to explore. Baudin's prime purpose, as described in the orders he was given, was scientific: ‘to study the inhabitants, animals and natural products of the countries in which he will land'. His expedition was one of the most extraordinary in naval history and yet European historians have neglected it. His three-year odyssey resulted in the first complete map of Australia and the discovery of 2,542 new zoological species, including the emu which came to be painted on the ceiling of the Empress Josephine's bedroom. It also produced a 49-page report that François Péron wrote for Baudin on the behaviour of the Aborigines on Maria Island, which they called Toarra Marra Monah.

Péron was a tailor's son from Cérilly who had lost his right eye when defending the Republic against the Austrians. By some he is considered a manipulative and ambitious bigot, and by others as the world's first anthropologist. He said of himself that he was ‘irresponsible, scatterbrained, argumentative, indiscreet, too absorbed in my own opinion, incapable of ever giving way for any reason of expediency'.

The boat drops me on the beach where Péron came ashore in the dinghy from the
Géographe
. It was here on February 19, 1802, that he encountered the Tyreddeme people of the Oyster Bay tribe. They had crossed from the mainland, five miles away, on canoes made from bundles of reeds.

To begin with, relations were friendly. Péron noticed the regular pattern of sun-and moon-shaped scars that decorated the men's shoulders, arms and buttocks. The scars were raised from the skin, filled in with powdered charcoal, and designed possibly as a badge to signify membership of a particular tribe. The women also had scars and Péron speculated on whether these marks were the result of domestic violence. He noted that the Aborigines bound their sore feet with seaweed and that they wanted bottles, glass beads, and buttons, but not arak, biscuits or bread. They ate birds as soon as the feathers were burned off and were not dextrous at spear-throwing.

The Aborigines in their turn pulled at the gold ring in Péron's ear so hard that it came out. ‘We were so novel to one another!' he wrote. They were fascinated by the whiteness of his skin and also ‘they showed an extreme degree of desire to examine our genital organs.' Puzzled by his clean-shaven face, they wondered if he and his fellow sailors might be female. ‘They never failed to feel in the trousers of those of us who had no beards,' remarked midshipman François Desiré Breton.

As he had with previous tribes encountered on the voyage, Péron attempted to test their physical strength with his dynamometer. He invited them to squeeze this machine between their hands and to pull it up by the handle while keeping both feet planted on the base. The strongest race on earth were the English, with an average measurement of 71.4 kilos. At the opposite end of the scale, Tasmania's Aborigines, ‘the most savage people of all …
the true children of nature
', registered 50.6 kilos.

Their feebleness was confirmed to Péron by their response to a Frenchman's erection. Among the French sailors, Citizen Michel had a ‘slight build and lack of beard'. To prove his gender, Péron persuaded him to strip. But Michel did more than that. He ‘suddenly exhibited such striking proof of his virility that they all uttered loud cries of surprise mingled with loud roars of laughter which were repeated again and again. This condition of strength and vigour in the one among us who seemed the least likely surprised them extremely. They had the air of applauding the condition as if they were men in whom it was not very common. Several with a sort of scorn showed soft and flaccid organs and shook them briskly with an expression of regret and desire which seemed to indicate that they did not experience it as often as we did.'

Their reaction compelled Péron to make an ‘important conjecture'. The hardships endured by these primitive people had led to a drastic weakening of their desires, ‘and to quench them promptly in the midst of winter, and sometime also in the anxiety of lean times'.

To his critics, Péron's anthropological observations are nowhere more questionable than in this thesis, which was interpreted by one school of thought to suggest that the Aborigines were suffering ‘a slow strangulation of the mind' as well as of the body. Henry Reynolds, one of these critics, says: ‘The French assume that this is what they are saying: “What men are these!” They have no idea whatsoever.'

Péron's encounter on Maria Island caused him to throw his scientific principles to the wind and to conclude that the Tasmanian Aborigines were ‘the most feeble people' he had ever seen. But his leader Baudin viewed their behaviour differently. In some way that they failed to understand, the French had transgressed. And Baudin foresaw what would happen if Monsieur Kemp and the British occupied a land not theirs but ‘inhabited by men who have not always deserved the title of savages or cannibals which had been given them'. He warned: ‘You will presently remain the peaceful possessors of their heritage, as the small number of those surrounding you will not exist.'