Tasmania—Small Island, Unique Story — Watchtower ONLINE LIBRARY

Tasmania—Small Island, Unique Story

BY AWAKE! CORRESPONDENT IN AUSTRALIA

“THIS land being the first land we have met with in the South Sea, and not known to any European nation, we have conferred on it the name of Anthoony van Diemenslandt, in honour of [our] Hon. Governor-General.” These are the words of Dutchman Abel Tasman on November 25, 1642, the day after he sighted the island of Tasmania, the second oldest Australian state.a Tasman saw no people, but he did see the smoke of distant fires and notches cut five feet [1.5 m] apart into nearby trees. Whoever cut those notches, he wrote, either had an unusual method of climbing or were giants! In fact, the notches were for climbing.

Thereafter, Van Diemen’s Land disappeared from the itinerary of oceanic explorers for 130 years, until Frenchman Marion du Fresne and Englishman Tobias Furneaux visited. Captain James Cook arrived in 1777 and, like Du Fresne, he made contact with the island’s unique people, the Aborigines. His visit, however, was the beginning of a tragedy: “To some nations [Cook] opened the path of civilisation and religion,” says John West in The History of Tasmania, “[but] to this race [Aborigines] he was the harbinger of death.” What led to such a tragic outcome?

Tasmania Becomes a “Jail of the Empire”

Transportation, or exile, was the British rod of discipline, and Tasmania became one of Britain’s penal colonies. From 1803 to 1852, about 67,500 men, women, and even children—some as young as seven—were banished from England to Tasmania for crimes ranging from stealing prayer books to rape. Most convicts, however, worked for settlers or on government projects. “Fewer than 10 per cent . . . ever saw the inside of a penal settlement,” says The Australian Encyclopaedia, “and many who did do so were there only for brief periods.” Port Arthur, on the Tasman Peninsula, was the main penal settlement, but the toughest convicts went on to Macquarie Harbour, enshrined as “sacred to the genius of torture.” The narrow harbor entrance gained the menacing name Hell’s Gates.

In the book This Is Australia, Dr. Rudolph Brasch explains another important facet of this embryonic colony—its spirituality, or lack of it. He writes: “From the beginning, religion in Australia [including Tasmania, of course] was neglected and ignored and, at most, used and abused by the Establishment for its own advantage. The colony was established without a prayer and the first service on Australian soil seems to have been an afterthought.” While the Pilgrims of North America built churches, “the early denizens of the southern world,” says The History of Tasmania, “burned their first church to escape the tedium of attendance.”

This already sick morality was infected even further by the abundance of rum. To civilian and soldier alike, rum was “the sure path to wealth,” says historian John West.

Food, however, was scarce at times. During these periods freed convicts and settlers used firearms to hunt the same game the Aborigines pursued with spears. Understandably, tensions mounted. Now toss into the explosive mixture white racial arrogance, the abundance of rum, and irreconcilable cultural differences. Europeans peg out boundaries and build fences; Aborigines hunt and gather nomadically. All that was needed was a spark.

A People Vanishes

The spark came in May 1804. A posse led by a Lieutenant Moore fired, without provocation, on a large hunting party of Aboriginal men, women, and children—killing and wounding many. “The Black War”—spears and stones versus bullets—had begun.

Many Europeans recoiled at the slaughter of the Aborigines. So distressed was the governor, Sir George Arthur, that he expressed his willingness to go to almost any length to ‘compensate for the injuries that government unwillingly inflicted upon the Aborigines.’ Thus, he initiated a program to “round up” and “civilize” them. In a campaign called the “Black Line,” about 2,000 soldiers, settlers, and convicts advanced through the bush in an effort to corner the Aborigines and resettle them out of harm’s way. But the exercise was a humiliating failure; they captured a woman and a boy. Then, George A. Robinson, a prominent Wesleyan, spearheaded a more conciliatory approach, and it worked. The Aborigines trusted him and accepted his offer of resettlement on Flinders Island, north of Tasmania.

In her book A History of Australia, Marjorie Barnard says of Robinson’s achievement: “In reality, though he was probably quite unaware of this himself, his conciliation had a Judas touch. The unfortunate natives were segregated on Flinders Island in Bass Strait with Robinson as their guardian. They pined and died.” The forced change in life-style and diet took over where the musket left off. One source says that “the last full-blooded Tasmanian Aborigine was Fanny Cochrane Smith, who died in Hobart in 1905.” Authorities vary on this. Some point to Truganini, a woman who died in Hobart in 1876, others to a woman who died on Kangaroo Island in 1888. Mixed-blood descendants of the Tasmanian Aborigines are alive and well today. Added to humankind’s ongoing litany of abuses, this episode has appropriately been called “the State’s greatest tragedy.” Moreover, it underscores the Biblical truth that “man has dominated man to his injury.”—Ecclesiastes 8:9.

Tasmania’s Visual Contrasts

Today, unless you visit museums, libraries, or prison ruins, you would scarcely be aware of this beautiful island’s baptism of fire. Tasmania is about the same distance south of the equator as Rome, Sapporo, and Boston are north. And like its history, its geography is one of sharp contrasts, even though no place on the island is more than 71 miles [115 km] from the sea.

Of Tasmania’s total area, 44 percent is forest and 21 percent is national park. These are rare proportions! According to The Little Tassie Fact Book, “Western Tasmania’s world heritage area is one of the last great unspoilt temperate wilderness areas in the world.” Rain- and snow-fed lakes, rivers, and waterfalls—replete with trout—nourish forests of pencil pine, eucalyptus, myrtle, blackwood, sassafras, leatherwood, celery-topped pine, and Huon pine, to mention just a few. Little wonder that the vistas afforded by the high plains of the central-western plateau and its often snow-covered peaks draw nature lovers back again and again.

But “World Heritage” protection did not come without a fight. And people interested in the environment still simmer in opposition to mining, papermaking, and hydroelectric-power interests. The moonlike landscape of Queenstown, a mining town, is a stark reminder of the consequences of thoughtless exploitation of resources.

Native animals have suffered too—notably the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, a tawny, doglike marsupial. Dark stripes across its back and rump earned it the name tiger. Unfortunately, this lean, shy carnivore acquired a taste for poultry and sheep. With a bounty on its head, it was extinct by 1936.

Another unique Tasmanian marsupial, the Tasmanian devil, is far from extinct. Using his powerful jaws and teeth, this muscular 13-to-18-pound [6 to 8 kg] scavenger can consume the entire body of a dead kangaroo, skull and all.

Tasmania is also well-known for its short-tailed shearwater, or muttonbird. After starting out from the Tasmanian Sea and practically circumnavigating the Pacific, it returns each year to the same sandy burrow—a feat that is truly a credit to its Designer and Creator.

Nearby in its own nocturnal rookeries lives another bird—one that “flies” underwater—the lovable, two-pound [1 kg], little-beaked bundle of fur called the fairy penguin. This smallest of all penguins is also the noisiest! Its displays vary in intensity, with voice and body activity at times reaching a fever pitch. When feeling romantic, a pair may even perform a duet to confirm their attachment to each other. Sadly, though, many are killed by fishermen’s gill nets, by oil spills, by plastic items mistaken for food, or by dogs and feral cats.

The Isle’s More Tranquil Face

Look north or east from the edge of the central plateau and you will see Tasmania’s more civilized face, with its tilled, chocolate-colored fields, meandering rivers and creeks, avenues lined with trees, and emerald pastures dotted with sheep and cattle. Near the northern town of Lilydale, around January, the lavender farms in full bloom add to this rural mosaic a pastel mauve with an alluring bouquet.

Straddling the Derwent River, not far from the apple orchards that earned Tasmania the name The Apple Isle, is the capital city Hobart, with a population of about 182,000. It is dominated by the huge bulk of moody Mount Wellington, 4,167 feet high [1,270 m]. On a clear day, this often snow-capped sentinel offers a bird’s-eye view of the city below. Hobart has indeed come a long way since 1803, when Lieutenant John Bowen and his party of 49, including 35 convicts, first put ashore at Risdon Cove. Yes, canvas sails and creaking timbers are gone, but once a year the grueling Sydney-to-Hobart yacht race hints at those earlier days as colorful spinnakers and streamlined hulls sprint past cheering crowds, right into the heart of Hobart.

From a Land of Persecution to a Spiritual Paradise

Geoffrey Butterworth, one of the 2,447 delegates at the 1994 “Godly Fear” District Convention of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Launceston, reflects: “I remember when there were no more than 40 Witnesses in all of Tasmania.” Now there are some 26 congregations and 23 Kingdom Halls.

“But times were not always so good,” adds Geoff. “Back in 1938, for example, Tom Kitto, Rod McVilly, and I, all wearing sandwich boards, were advertising the public Bible lecture ‘Face the Facts.’ It was a stinging exposé of false religion to be broadcast from London via a radio network. When I joined my companions, they were being bullied by a pack of youths. And the police were just looking on! I ran to help and promptly got bashed. But a man grabbed me by the back of my shirt and dragged me away. Instead of thrashing me, the man bellowed: ‘Leave them alone!’ Then, to me, he quietly said: ‘I know what it’s like to be persecuted, mate, I’m Irish.’”

Jehovah blessed those early pioneers, for today the good news of God’s Kingdom has reached all parts of this island of 452,000 people. Many descendants of the early convicts and Aborigines anticipate welcoming back onto a cleansed earth all—blacks and whites—who died so unjustly in those cruel earlier days, for the Bible promises “a resurrection of both the righteous and the unrighteous.” (Acts 24:15) So thorough will this reversal be that “the former things will not [even] be called to mind.”—Isaiah 65:17.

[Footnote]

a The name Tasmania was officially adopted on November 26, 1855. The oldest state is New South Wales.

[Maps/Pictures on page 25]

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Top: Cradle Mountain and Lake Dove

Top right: Tasmanian devil

Bottom right: Rain forest in Southwest Tasmania

Australia

TASMANIA

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