Rocky Cape Christian Community

William Lanney, 1835 -- 1869, caught with the last band of free-roaming aboriginal tribes in Tasmania. "Why does he look so sad," one of my students (a Maori child) asked when I showed them the picture.

In 1824 a group of England's wealthiest land-owners and investors met in London to establish the Van Diemen's Land Company. King George IV chartered the company and granted them 500,000 acres of land "beyond the ramparts of the unknown" in what is now northwestern Tasmania (then known as Van Diemen's Land). Not long afterward, the first ships loaded with company overseers, purebred sheep from Germany and Spain, and great stores of building supplies, horses, and equipment docked at what is now the port of Stanley, just west of our place, and the ambitious project got under way.
 
What the arriving British (with the host of convict labourers soon placed at their disposal) failed to take into account was that the northwest coast of Tasmania was "already known" and had been populated for thousands of years. No, the people that lived here, could not show them a piece of paper, written in English, stating the land was theirs. Neither did they claim territory, or anything else, as "private property." But they lived here, ate the food and sheltered themselves with what the land produced. They raised their children here, lived in large communal groupings along the seashore (some of them inhabiting the caves at Rocky Cape) and took care of their old people until they died.
 
On first encounters with the British, the Rarerloihenaa and Pennamukaa people that lived in our area were curious and friendly. They carried no weapons. But after British sealers and VDL Company shepherds began to carry off their women, attitudes changed.
 
The tribal people began to fear and dislike the newcomers. When they killed and ate VDL Company sheep, expecting their owners to be just as willing to share as they willingly shared themselves, they ran into cruel opposition. VDL shepherds rounded some of the tribal people up and chased them over a cliff into the sea, shooting after them as they hurtled to their deaths on the rocks and in the surf below (at a place west of us, now inappropriately called Suicide Bay).
 
Both convict labourers and sealers kept coming for more girls to take to their isolated stations along the coast. When tribal men attempted to defend their wives and daughters, they got shot at and ridiculed. Some convict labourers delighted in capturing and mutilating the men, showing off dried body parts as souvenirs. Others they shot to feed their dogs. Man traps got set around VDL Company storehouses in which tribal people lost their arms or feet (chewing themselves free, if possible).
 
Some British settlers kept tribal children as pets, securing them in cages, and showing them off as curiosities to visitors from abroad. But as the situation deteriorated and both sides grew more vicious in their retaliation, the government and the Church of England (with its missionary program keenly supported by Queen Victoria) stepped in to help.
 
The government paid a missionary, George Robinson, to round up all that was left of the tribal people and take them to a reserve on Flinders Island (between Tasmania and the mainland) where they could be duly civilised and converted to the Christian faith. The job was a huge one, and George Robinson with his tribal mistress, Truganini (he had an English wife and children in Hobart as well), took a long time in getting it done.
 
Finally, in October 1842, James Blomley and William Proctor, British sealers working the coast west of here, caught the last group of free Tasmanian aborigines at the mouth of the Arthur River. Sealing had become less than profitable (after most seals had been killed and their breeding grounds destroyed) so they opted to claim the bounty of 50 Lb. sterling, per head, on the captives they brought in.   
 
Both Blomley and Proctor had aboriginal "wives" from New South Wales. Using them as a lure, they got the last tribal group -- an older woman and a man, and five boys ranging in ages from their upper teens to about three years old -- to board their boat, and took them quickly to the VDL Company's Woolnorth Station.
 
None of the group resisted or attempted escape. They just settled into what one writer described as "deep melancholia" when taken to the Flinders Island reserve. Like the rest of the captives there (still numbering about 150 at the time) they lost their initiative to hunt, to fish, or to grow food. No more children got born among them, and every year more and more of them died.
 
The woman and the man captured at the Arthur River soon died. So did four of the five boys. The only survivor of the group, a boy (seven years old when the sealers caught him) got the name William Lanney and was taken with a handful of others -- all that remained of many thousands of Aboriginals thirty years earlier -- to Oyster Cave, south of Hobart, when he was thirteen years old.

 
Truganini, William Lanney, and Bessie Clark, the last three tribal people of Tasmania, at Oyster Bay, in 1866.
 
* * * * *
 
On the Flinders Island reserve, William Lanney had learned how to speak a halting English. The missionary had taught him about God. But after the rest died, and he lived in Oyster Bay, alone among the British, he had a rough life.
 
The people of Hobart Town and on the docks where they gave him work, made fun of William behind his back -- "King Billy" they called him, and joked about his naiveté. But when Prince Albert (Queen Victoria's husband) came to visit, they proudly displayed him as the "last of the Tasmanian race." Scientists, already sold on Darwin's theories, suspected Tasmanian aboriginals were a missing link in the evolution of the human race and took for granted they needed to die out in the great struggle of the "survival of the fittest."
 
On several occasions British sailors took "King Billy" with them as a ship's handyman on whaling excursions into the cold waters of the Southern Ocean. They gave him liquor and taught him how to smoke. On his last trip out, Billy took sick and came home even more withdrawn than usual. Someone found a bed for him at the Dog and Partridge tavern in Hobart, where he died during the night of 2 March 1868. He was approximately 34 years old.
 
Scientists, learning of King Billy's death, moved quickly. Breaking into the morgue that night they sawed off his head and stole his skull for transport to a British museum. Members of the Royal Society, in an attempt to salvage what was left (and furious about the theft), cut off and preserved his feet and hands -- for scientific research -- the following day.  
 
A fire had gone out. A race was gone. But did this end the greed and suffering and "survival of the fittest" in Tasmania?  
 
Living as I do in a community whose buildings sit in a circle around what used to be the Van Diemen's Land Company's Detention River stockyards until the late 1950s, I cannot help but remember King Billy, and all that laboured and struggled and died at this place without God. Innocent blood? No more innocent, I am sure than the blood of the unborn poured out daily (full term abortions commonplace in Australia), and the slaughter of children's souls in broken homes under gods of sport and corruption on home entertainment.
 
* * * *
 
King Billy. "Was he really a king?" my students asked when we studied his life in school.
 
Maybe he was.
 
And when I walk the bush trails of our lovely VDL property along the creek while the tide goes out, I see his face and think it strange -- yet wonderful -- how a king should have worn a crown of thorns.
 
Peter
 
Rocky Cape Christian Community
19509 Bass Highway
Detention River, Tasmania 7321
Australia
www.thecommonlife.com.au