::: TASMANIAN HERITAGE

 

Steps to the
scaffold: II

Pevay has been described as a gentle and intelligent man, with a good sense of humour. He learned English and for a time helped George Augustus Robinson, who was declared chief protector of Aborigines and was, says Cox, “determined to be the saviour of Tasmania’s remaining Aborigines while bettering himself socially. It was Robinson who decided to peacefully round up all those still alive [estimated at no more than 225-250 by this time] and settle them out of harm’s way on an uninhabited island in Bass Strait.

Pevay was a member of the Parperloihener band of the North-West group of eight tribes. Early in his life Pevay had what seems to have been his first experience of Europeans, and like so many such experiences it was violent and bloody and traumatic, perhaps sowing a seed that was not to germinate for two decades.

The story of how the Tasmanians were herded off their island onto Flinders Island, then later taken to Victoria, culminates with their last stand in late August or early September, 1841 when Pevay and his sidekick Timmy — along with three women, Fanny, Matilda and Trucanini — “coalesced into a gang and set out to wreak havoc on white settlers.

Pevay was not reticent about this motive for insurrection: it was revenge, plain and simple. Robinson’s son William testified to that.

’[They were] tired of the monotony not being allowed about at their will. There was a man among them, a man superior in every respect to the others. He [Pevay] had been a leading man, a chief in his own country, and he was the leader of the malcontents here. He talked about what they had suffered at the hands of the white man, how many of their tribe had been slain, how they had been hunted down in Tasmania …

[In Victoria] they had unlimited land to roam over at their will — [Trucanini] aided and abetted them.

The story of their raids — with their scrupulous regard for the safety of women and children — and how they were captured is as eventful and as poignant as that of the Kelly gang.

As Cox writes: “But there is an air of the deliberately suicidal, of harakiri, about this last desperate breakout by five black Tasmanians in a foreign land. Two men and three women on foot, no matter how well armed and led, must have known they could not inflict much damage on white society or evade pursuers for long...Pevay’s cheerfulness on the scaffold suggests that he was not afraid of death and may even have welcomed it, so the breakout may have been his way of ending the despair and anger that beset him.”

Of Trucanini herself, her “allure for white as well as black men was a problem”. She would also abscond at the drop of a hat, daringly escaping time and time again, eventually being part of Pevay’s gang as the wife of Timmy.

The story of their raids — with their scrupulous regard for the safety of women and children — and how they were captured is as eventful and as poignant as that of the Kelly gang. Pevay and Tommy were hanged in Melbourne for the murder of two white whalers.

Of Trucanini herself, her “allure for white as well as black men was a problem”. She would also abscond from white supervision at the drop of a hat, daringly escaping time and time again, eventually being part of Pevay’s gang as the wife of Timmy. Despite some strong evidence she helped Pevay kill one of the whalers, she was exonerated. “Perhaps hanging a woman, even an Aboriginal woman, was unpalatable. Perhaps Trucanini’s tiny stature — she was a little under 130 centimetres tall — worked in her favour.”

The hanging makes the last chapter of this book, describing Pevay as perversely cheerful, Timmy’s sad, slow death and the picnic atmosphere among the white lookers. (All in all, six Tasmanian Aborigines, were executed. The book does not tally deaths from white settlers, although Cox remarks “I do not believe that more whites were killed by Aborigines than vice versa”.

Here is how he sums up their resistance in his Conclusion

Bushrangers? Guerillas? Terrorists? Freedom fighters? What they were, historically, was an affront to an imposed alien law and the powerful military force backing it and victims of British cultural arrogance, and they all paid with their lives.

And what of the British usurpers? How should we judge them? With hindsight it would be easy to condemn them for the extraordinarily rapid demise of Tasmania’s tribal Aborigines and their ancient way of life … and agree that although the British had no official policy analogous to ethnic cleansing, the effect was unintentionally the same.

Of Trucanini, Pevay and other Aboriginal men and women in the early 1800s, Cox writes: "these black Tasmanians did what men have always done when their homes were threatened with invasion and their lives put at risk: fought back.”

It’s an illuminating insight to our early days. Not always glorious, but here acknowledged. ¶

PART I | PART II