[The following is in regards to British settler farmers in modern-day Tasmania, and the way that they treated the native black Aborigines when they came across them.]
[…] it is a credit to European historiography in Tasmania that so much evidence of their hidden deeds has reached the light of day. That many of the stockmen openly boasted of their actions is also a powerful indication of the extraordinary values of their time and place.
Typically, they were indifferent to the edicts of Hobart vetoing the use of poisoned flour, which had been sanctioned in New South Wales to stop Aborigines from stealing settlers’ supplies. In Tasmania, the natives had the contaminated product actively urged upon them, sometimes even before any theft had been attempted. Another tactic was to gun them down while pretending to hand out food, one stock-keeper hitting nineteen with a swivel gun loaded with nails. Another managed to rip open an Aborigine’s stomach while seeming to offer bread at the end of a knife. One farmer, obedient to the ban on poison, found an equally effective deterrent for Aboriginal theft. When the Tasmanian band, which was accustomed to stop and shelter in his outhouse, arrived one day, the farmer watched to see the results of his alternative measure. After a short time he had his first volunteer, the Aborigine immediately leaping back in terror from the tempting flour cask, his hand snapped off in the jaws of a concealed gin trap.
Another landowner proved that casual brutality was by no means the preserve of Tasmania’s criminal underclass. Encountering a lone Aborigine on his land, the farmer started to fool around, holding an unloaded pistol to his own temple and pulling the trigger, laughing at the click of each empty chamber. Once he had demonstrated the game, he then encouraged his companion to join in. This time he handed over a fully loaded weapon, and the Aborigine held it to his ear and blew his own brains out.
Inevitably, the all-male work force on isolated Tasmanian farms became as lonely as the sealers in the Bass Straight, and stockmen regularly kidnapped Aboriginal females in order to work off their frustrations. The standard practice was to chain them up and then turn on the charm, one suitor thrusting a burning stick into the skin of his would-be partner until she succumbed to his advances. The commonest form of foreplay, however, was a good beating with a bull whip.
It is worth noting that having these women expressed a sexual dimension to the pervasive settler concern to possess and occupy Tasmania’s Aborigines. Ownership of the living object could, of course, eventually pall. Two stockmen, bored of their ménage á trois, took the shared third party and pegged her out spread-eagled on the ground, then left her to die.
Sometimes the liaisons were the product of chance encounter, like the two Britons out hunting birds who happened upon an Aboriginal party. Although the Tasmanians fled in panic, one of their number was a heavily pregnant woman and she was forced to drop behind and hide up a tree. The bird hunters found her and shot her down, the trauma of which caused her to miscarry. Finally the dying woman dragged herself off to a creek and buried her head completely in mud, while the sportsmen looked on in amusement.
Occasionally, things did not go as the stockmen had hoped. One individual chained up his female prize, flogged her with a bull whip and raped her, only to find himself surrounded by the rest of her group at a later date, who then speared him to death.
Source:
Cocker, Mark. “The Black War.” Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe's Conquest of Indigenous Peoples. Grove Press, 2001. 140-41. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, p. 139.
Travers, The Tasmanians, p. 147.
Plomley, Friendly Mission, p. 346.
Davies, The Last of the Tasmanians, p. 61, 65.
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