OFF AUSTRALIA

Taranaki Daily News, 5 December 1929, Page 12

OFF AUSTRALIA

KANGAROO ISLAND HISTORY RECALLED. A HAVEN FOR. PIRATES. . Strange ghosts went back 'to Kangaroo Island recently, if all the phantoms of its past —whalers, ex-convicts, and captured Tasmanian gins—shared tho celebration of the present, and former residents, says a writer in the Adelaide Observer. In 1819, before settlement in South Australia, Captain George Sutherland, in an official dispatch, described the settlers of that period as “little better than pirates.” Before the dawn of Australia’s history, charred trees and heaps of bones already whispered strange stories of the largest island off the mainland. Captain Flinders, on his voyage to Terra Australis in 1802, marked the signs of former landings, and pondered, but did not solve, the problem of tho stricken trees. Inclined to the theory that La Perouse had passed that way before him, he left the island to its mysteries, having first given it its name as a “tribute” of gratitude for so seasonable a supply of half a hundredweight of kangaroos’ heads, forequarters, and tails to be stewed for soup. PIRATES AND WRECKERS. But others besides explorers discovered the advantages of Kangaroo Island. Crews of whaling and sealing ships who stayed behind when their boats left, escaped convicts and runaway sailors, found it a haven from the sea and the requirements of civilisation. Men from Nantucket and New Bedford joined forces with felons from Van Dieman’s Land in one of the most savage white communities known to the Empire in their time; Captain George Sutherland, commander of the brig Governor Macquarie, made a voyage to the island from Sydney in 1819, and gave a graphic picture of the unofficial settlement, “There are no natives on the island,” he wrote. “Several Europeans assemble there, some who have run from ships that traded for salt, others from Sydney and Van Dieman’s Land who were prisoners of the Crown. These gangs- joined after, a lapse of time and became the terror of the ships going to the island for salt, etc., being little better than pirates. “They are complete savages, living in bark huts like pirates, not cultivating anything but living entirely on kangaroos, emus and small porcupines, and getting spirits and tobacco in barter for the skins which they lay up during the sealing season. They dress' in kangaroo skins without linen, and weai - sandals made of seal skins. They smell like foxes.”

The gallant Captain Sutherland was a humane man, especially for his time, and he records his horror of the outstnding historical ■ feature of the settlement —the savagely inhuman treatment of natives, which was to be. reflected later by a series of murders of white settlers along the coastline. Puss and Bet, “the last of the Tasmanians,” wretched remnants of a dying race, were among the aboriginal women whose bones were left on that alien shore after a life of slavery. TRUTH IN FICTION. . Major Lockyer, in 1827, described' the Kangaroo Islanders as. “a complete set of pirates going from island to island along the southern coast, from Rottnest to Bass Straits, having their chief resort or den. at Kangaroo Island, making occasional descents on the mainland and carrying off by force females.” He advocated ' the equipping of a Government cutter of ten guns to check their infamous proceedings. A more intimate picture of the islanders at this period is given in that delightful study, “The Kangaroo Islanders,” by W. A. Cawthorne, which first appeared in serial form in a journal called The Illustrated Adelaide Post. Mr. Cawthorne, whose father was the first lighthouse-keeper at Cape Willoughby, was intimately associated with the places he described, and his story, though cast in the form of fiction, is a truthful account of the state of aflairs in 1827, when the population numbered 40 souls, living under the rule of a chief known as “Abyssinia." Under the leadership of Captain Aleredith, an historical character, the crew of a British brig go ashore at Kangaroo Island and discover the island homes of a savage colony. LAIlf OF WILD BEASTS. The huts were of wattle filled with clay, and about them a dozen black women were preserving skins. The wild scenery, the howling dogs, the settlers clothed in skins and without shoes or hats, the swarms of uncouth half-caste children, were a revelation of a mode of life rougher than the sailors had ever met with. The place, wrote Air. Cawtjiorne, smacked of the freebooter and the outlaw; the very scent of the locality suggested the lair of the wild beast. Small wonder that the sailors who had visited the mainland had wild tales of ourang-outangs who captured women and made them slaves and drudges. “Wrecking was one of the legitimate sources of income according to the political and social constitution of the empire of Kangaroo Island. They appointed themselves general receivers of wrecks, and were frequently called upon to exercise their office and peculiar functions to the benefit of all concerned. It was singular how frequently they would kindly pilot a ship out. of danger of reef and current, and yet, withal, by some unlucky chance, make shipwreck of the very object of their solicitude.”

Cawthorne, while describing the islanders as less than human in appearance and manners, insists that they had some savage virtues. Alurder, rapine and debauchery were balanced by feats of endurance and stubborn courage.

About 1827 the Sydney Government sent a vessel to remove the worst offenders. and the black women and their children were liberated on the mainland. When the first official white settlers arrived, they found a comparatively orderly community. Robert Warlans, selfstyled '“Governor of the Island,” ruled in place of Abyssinia of infamous memory. On the arrival of Mr. Samuel Stephens, the first manager’ of the South Australian Company in this State, “at a meeting of a few scattered inhabitants, the self-elected Governor was called upon to abdicate, which he did, magnanimous-

Kangaroo Island had turned its face towards order and progress, and speedily .became the Arcadian, a?)fl ful spot that it is'to-day.