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Written Thesis in Submission for the Candidature of Doctor of Philosophy RADICAL TASMANIA: Rebellion, Reaction and Resistance: A Thesis in Creative Nonfiction: Volume II: The Selected Histories by Robert Hodder School of Behavioural & Social Sciences & Humanities University of Ballarat PO Box 663 University Drive, Mount Helen Ballarat, Victoria 3353 Australia Submitted in September 2009 Copyright © Robert Hodder 2010 Robert Hodder Radical Tasmania: The Selected Histories Table Of Contents Tasmania Map of Selected Histories________________________________________ 3 …so many of them always coming in big boats _______________________________ 4 The Hagley Clique ____________________________________________________ 11 Earth Bound! _________________________________________________________ 18 Coming Out, Speaking Out and Marching Out_______________________________ 29 Fellow Slaves!________________________________________________________ 47 About PAR __________________________________________________________ 57 Sexist Swine of Swansea________________________________________________ 65 Keeping Labor Out of Town_____________________________________________ 75 Save Our Sisters ______________________________________________________ 88 List of Abbreviations _________________________________________________ 110 Endnotes ___________________________________________________________ 111 Bibliography ________________________________________________________ 165 2 Robert Hodder Radical Tasmania: The Selected Histories Tasmania Map of Selected Histories 3 Robert Hodder Radical Tasmania: The Selected Histories …so many of them always coming in big boats1 The History and Legend of Tarenorerer’s Guerrilla War in Van Diemen’s Land In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, General Assembly resolution 260 A (III, Article 2), 9 Dec 1948.2 At the river shore there was another body washed up.3 The Tommeginer guerrillas stood waiting.4 A dog barked. The woman scowled at the animal and uncocked her fowling piece as the sealers in their cockleshell skiff, alarmed at the dog, rowed about to drift back with the outgoing tide towards the river mouth to flee for the strait.5 As though obeying a silent order, her brother lowered his dogwood spear.6 They relaxed. The mutt dropped its head. The woman patted it, sighing. She was Tare.ree.nore or Tarenorerer or Tarereenore, also known as Waloa or Walloa, alias Te Nor, alias Walyer, of the Tommeginer, a clan of what was vaguely termed the “North” tribe.7 She was from the north coast, near Timelener, also known as Toinblinnoke or Toimblinnore and now called Table Cape.8 This is on the island known by some of its original inhabitants as Trowenner or Trou.wer.ner and also as Lou.trou.wit.ter.9 The island was renamed in 1642 by Dutch explorers to Van Diemen’s Land and renamed again by British invaders in 1856 to Tasmania. Tarenorerer’s rage roamed far and wide from 1828 to 1831 at the height of what the whites called the “Black War”.10 So what is in a name?11 Tarenorerer’s names translate to one meaning: sealer’s woman.12 We do not know her childhood name, before she became, in effect, a possession of sealers—whether by her own will or by force.13 Her adult identity was mostly as someone else’s possession, as property, as a slave.14 Then she began to resist the sealers and the rest of their British 4 Robert Hodder Radical Tasmania: The Selected Histories ilk, the luta tawin.15 She had learnt to despise them as she despised the “black snake”, the island’s most venomous reptile.16 In her last days, after betrayal by men and yet more slavery, she was forced to change her name again.17 The British authorities took Tarenorerer from sealers except they did not recognise her at first, but an excited friend did; unwittingly uncovering the identity of the warrior who had been dubbed the “Amazon” and who would be referred to by historians as a “Joan of Arc” and the “tigress of the north”.18 She had waged her campaign as part of a general struggle of her people which their enemies dubbed a “battle with a shadow”.19 Near Antill Ponds they came out of the shadow, armed and firing.20 Convict labourers scattered for the third time in five days. The warriors taunted them in outrage. “Parrawa, Parrawa,” they shouted. “Go away you white buggers. What business have you here!”21 Soon Mr Harrison will ask for a detachment of redcoats to protect his property and convict labourers. He will get only a constable from the field police.22 Time was when the Aborigines would fly from the presence of men with guns, yet now they will face even the soldiers sent in pursuit of them.23 A soldier was speared on Mrs Burns’s property24. The constable, a convict on ticket-of-leave, patrols up from Antill Ponds to Mr Eddie’s place. The previous evening, Aborigines had appeared here from out of the heavy forest at the base of the tier and chased another nameless, convict stock-keeper around a perfect weed-fringed marsh and across the baked midlands.25 It was fine sport. Mary lead the chase and could have killed the stock-keeper as they had killed others, yet the real game was to send a message to Mr Eddie.26 The constable, heavily armed, surveys the more open bush, cleared of undergrowth where the cattle graze. A woman, her hair cropped short in the traditional style, draped in seal and possum skins and a necklace of gems reflecting pink and blue over disks of mother-of-pearl on her otherwise bare breasts, with what could have been a gunpowder horn hanging half out of view, had strode out into that hard and cutting sunlight while watching him.27 As he looks her way, she yells abuse in a pretty English. “Shoot me, your royal bastard. Shoot, your most imperial bugger. Come on. What’s the matter?” She grins, bends over and dares him with her giggling arse. “You are scared, constable coward. Fire, you white bugger! Shoooot!”28 Damn, it is her, for sure! he thinks. 5 Robert Hodder Radical Tasmania: The Selected Histories Jorgen Jorgenson, the Danish “King of Iceland”, now dethroned and “Viking of Van Diemen’s Land”, can feel his skin prickle.29 But she is just out of accurate range of his Brown Bess, even with its load of scything buckshot, and he knows that she knows she is.30 He could try a long shot if he reloads with a solid ball. 31 Yet it is a trap for certain, he reckons.32 Even if his shot finds its target then he would, no doubt before he could reload, be rushed by her comrades, surely hidden, waiting for her command.33 According to the press, there could be hundreds of them.34 His fingers stroke the engraved fleur-de-lis on the handle-butt of his Miquelet pistol.35 Only one more shot and only at close range; it would not be enough to stop them. Then he would have only his socket bayonet, now hanging from his belt as a spare sidearm. Not much of a defence against a flurry of spears. If he is lucky, they might finally priest him by smashing his skull with their heavy, ironbark waddies. 36 If not, a mob of squabbling devils would gnaw at his wounds before he took his last breath.37 Jorgenson, the life-long adventurer, tries to control his shivering by glaring into his opponent’s brazen eyes. She laughs another challenge. And vanishes. Tonight her warriors might enjoy the mild, natural brew from the sap of the cider gums higher in the tier.38 Jorgenson’s flannel shirt is sticking to his furious chest. He turns slowly, keeping an eye on the shadows around, to walk back over the chewed country to the Main Road.39 He curses the Governor for not sending him the horse he was promised for this pitiless job.40 …Let’s see if the blacks can outrun the Viking on a horse, he muses. My kingdom for a horse!. Now it was Jorgenson’s turn to laugh. 41 The constable will give his report to Mr Eddie and Mr Harrison and their chums over mugs of rum in the nearby White Hart Inn.42 Vengeance ferments naturally in Jorgenson’s blood.43 Jorgenson would get a chance to vent his humiliation, alongside the genocidal mercenary, John Batman, and many other like-minded sons of empire, in a brutal plan devoid of any negotiation with the Aborigines.44 Meanwhile, the colonial government experimented with a ruse. On the 30 March 1829, George Augustus Robinson, anointed “the conciliator” by Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur, began his journey to disempower, by whatever means profitable, the Aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land.45 Ostensibly, his “friendly mission” began as one of peaceful contact for future negotiation.46 But this was against the background of a total war being waged by Arthur 6 Robert Hodder Radical Tasmania: The Selected Histories and the “settlers” on the Aborigines. Already, in 1828, Arthur had forbidden all natives from entering lands seized by the British and he had then followed this with a proclamation of martial law.47 This passed legal licence for the capture, and in effect, the killing of Aborigines by men sworn as officers of the Crown, such as the bounty hunters recruited to the “Roving Parties”.48 In October 1830, as Robinson was searching the country of the north-east to lure “ferocious Aborigines” into what would be revealed as prison on the Furneaux Islands, Arthur began his master military campaign, the “Black Line”.49 This was a strategy to drive the Aborigines before 2000 soldiers and civilians, stretched across the north from renamed Quamby Bluff (Lartitickitheker) in the Western Tiers to Saint Patrick’s Head (Wimmerterwalehennor or Wummerterwalenennor) near the east coast, into the bottle-neck of peninsulas in the south-east now called Forestier and Tasman (Nallerwanene).50.

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