THURSDAY, MARCH 23, 1905. A VANISHED RACE

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIII, Issue 12, 23 March 1905, Page 17

THURSDAY, MARCH 23, 1905. A VANISHED RACE

■r^~i?"jg^ HERE are some strange inconsistencies in the Jj/I'lml colonising methods of English-speaking cotmjejpn'p* tries. These are often at great pains and iM ' S>^r cx Pcnsc to preserve the fauna and flora of the new countries that they annex ; but the aboriginal races are callously left to vanish xJ&rY under the vices, the diseases, and the bruVT^ fcalities of the low Cauoa/sions among the settlers and the State officials. In North America the motto long ran : ' The only good Injun is a dead Injuln.' And in practically every Sitate of Australia the criminal disregard for the protection, preservation, ,and uplifting of the dusky tribesmen suggested that tihey stood lower in the estimation of the white man than the silow-paced koala or the black wattle. A week ago we told how the last pure-blood aboriginal of Tasmania died m 1876, and how the soul of the last half-caste survivor of the vanished race flitted a few weeks ago, That mysterious and interesting race seems to have boen the first owners of the soil in Australia. They were forced across Bass Straits by the presence of heah waves of invaders from New Guinea, artd found at las>t a refuge and a ttuntingf-grouipd among the mouintains and valleys of Tasmania. .• They livdd their wild and uneventful life within their several tribal boundaries till the white man came. And then began the strange, eventful history which ended in

MK*r rapia -extfrpatton: — The~Tasmia>nian aboriginal was a better fighter and readier with his long, spear and heavy, club than his .remiote and dark-skinned relatives on the, other side of Baste Straits. And it took heavier doses of hypodermic leaden arguments to convince him against his will,- He was scarcely Jortunate, too, in the particular class of white man whom the British Government ' dtaimped ' uipon him— -rough and heavy-handed officials and convicts who had ' left their country for their country's gootd.' Yet the Tasmanian aboriginal was not at firsl unfriendly to his white \ibilois\ But one day — it waa in 1804— a party of soldiers turned fifty of them into dead meat at Risdon. The firing (it was subsequently explained) was done in a moment of panic. The murdered blacks had done no unfriendly act. But from tjiat time (says Jose in his ■' History of Australasia ') ' the colonists and the blacks regardjed each other as natural enemies. Every Governor in turn proclaimed that a black man's murder would be punished as severely as a white man's ; but it Was impossible to control the actions of scattered settlers and convict storekeepers on the distant bush farms.' The natives, on their part, plj,e»i their spears industriously on isolated shepherds and lonely homesteads. They found, at one time, a sturdy leader in ah Australian warrior, nicknamed Musquito, wftO haft tteen deported by Governor King to Tasmainita. He was captuieil and died by the hangman's noose. But his de.^th oily exasperated his followers and intensified the already bitter war of races tnat raged over the settled parts of Tasmania.'

. T#e- war of savage wrongs and savage reprisals went wearily on till 1828. In t(hat yeafr Governor Arthur tried a new metftiod of ' pacification.' ' Reserves,' says Jose, ' were set apart for native use, and " capture parties " were seat abroad to bring recalcitrants in to the appointed districts. But most of the parties simply took to hunting down the blacks and killing them. Even Batman, who took every care to explain his friendly motives, found himself more than once forced into a fight. A*t last Arthur's patience gave way. The whites, no knew, had first been in the wrong, but as matMcEs stood they must be protected. He determined to make a line of beaters half-way across the island, who, advancing steadily from north to south and wheeling round their right .flank, should drive the black inhabitants before them into the cul-de-sac of Forestier's Peninsula. For nearly two months the long line kept pace acnoss the hilfs and valleys, through dense bush, o\er difficult rivers, till it was concentrated between Spring Bay and Sorell. Then it closed in triumphantly on East Bay Neck— and found not a soul in front of it ! One old man and a boy, captured on the way, wore the sole trophies of an undertaking that had cost the colorny more than thirty thousand pounds.'

The denouement of Governor Arthur's Grand Battue furnished the solitary element of comedy that lit up the dark tragedy of the Black War in Tasmania. The sequel is soon toM. Arthur had the manliness to admit the failure of nis great swoop and to alter his policy towards the aboriginals. He could not force the blacks into his reserves. He resolved to try the gentler suasion of kindness. He entrusted the new policy wholly t*° a bricklayer named George Robinson, who, as manager of the Btfuny Island reserve, had captured t\he hearts and won the confidence of the tribesmen. With a few of his ' boys,' Robinson went Unarmed to and fro airifoftg the native tribes throughout the Island. Within fqur". years he drew the whole of the aboriginal population, to Hiohartk And then the white residents of the colony learned, somewhat to their chagrin, that one of the most dreaded of all the tribes counted only sixteon men and six-and-twenty souls all told ; and that all previous estimates of the numbers of the hostile aboriginals . had been, greatly exaggerated and founded lesis upon a count of heads than upon the terror which tne spearmen had inspired . The ' remnants of the black

population were (tepofted— in Reference to the fears "6l" the whites— to some islands on the north-east coast. And there, says Jose, they « died off rapidly of mere home-sickness.' Truganini was the last of his race. He died in 1876. And the passing of Mrs. Fanny Cockburn Smith— t.he last half-caste Tasmanian aboriginal— at Port Cygnet on February 24, rings down the curtain on the last scene in the century-old tragedy of that strange and interesting race.