[The following highlights the cruelty of British Bushrangers, considered the lowest-of-the-low in British colonial society in modern Tasmania. In particular, it depicts several representative example of how they treated the native Tasmanians.]
An index of their endemic hatred and casual violence towards the Aborigines was provided by one of their number, who told a Tasmanian historian that he ‘liked to kill a black fellow better than smoke a pipe,’ adding ‘and I am a rare one at that, too.’ Another confessed that he would ‘as leave shoot them as so many sparrows’.
Despite his innocent-sounding name, a man called Lemon was accustomed to use them as target practice, while others confessed to feeding their dogs on Aborigines shot specifically for that purpose. Their relish for murdering the men was more than equaled by their sexual appetite for the women, and a bushranger called Carrot found a way of satisfying both urges almost simultaneously. After slaughtering a Tasmanian man, he then abducted and raped his widow and forced her to carry her husband’s severed head around her neck ‘as a play-thing’.
The most infamous of all bushrangers was a Yorkshireman transported for highway robbery in 1812, called Michael Howe. Styling himself ‘Lieutenant-Governor of the Woods’, Howe was a ruthless murderer, who kept a diary of kangaroo parchment where he recorded his bad dreams in blood. Having taken an Aboriginal partner, known as Black Mary, Howe had picked up much of his bushcraft directly from her people and ran a daring convict gang which pillaged remote farmsteads all the way from Hobart to Launceston. However, he was not averse to turning his native skills back upon Black Mary’s own race. One favourite Aboriginal ruse he admired was their ability to approach seemingly unarmed while dragging a spear behind them between their toes. Howe apparently adapted the technique so that he could lay a gun at his feet, make friendly gestures towards approaching Tasmanians and then shoot them, working the trigger with his toes.
Source:
Cocker, Mark. “The Black Crows.” Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe's Conquest of Indigenous Peoples. Grove Press, 2001. 136-37. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Davies, The Last of the Tasmanians, p. 62.
Hughes, The Fatal Shore, p. 414.
Travers, The Tasmanians, p. 109.
Further Reading:
Michael Howe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Howe_(bushranger)
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