While Boyce never forgets the impact of European arrival on the aboriginal people who lived in Van Diemen's Land, he explains that his book is "not an Aboriginal history", it "does not pretend to describe Aboriginal culture, strategy or political organisation", the focus is on the convicts and the society they created. Of course this does mean talking about relations with the Aboriginal people and their later systematic destruction. Boyce suggest his work is really a "environmental history", because it's "primary interest is how the environment changed" the settlers. Wary that this summary could be interpreted as me saying Boyce doesn't devote enough time to the Aboriginal people, I should emphasise that the author's extensive appendices describe the genocide in detail and how it arose out of the interests of the new ruling class in Van Diemen's Land / Tasmania and the interests of British colonial rule.
The early, convict, years in Van Diemen's Land are fascinating insight into the world that the convicts, settlers and guards had left behind. Boyce notes that the health of the new outpost was better than that of the class the convicts came from. There was plenty of food and game, land and space. But it didn't remain like this for long. Right from the start England's vile game laws were imposed on the new colony. Boyce summarises the reasons for this:
[T]he main challenge for the authorities was how to restrict food supply. Control of the island's abundant natural resources was recognised as essential to the maintenance o social order and penal discipline. The native animals of the new land were... assumed to be the property of the Crown...The game laws were seen as integral to a stable social order. In Van Diemen's Land during 1804, convicts ate emu and kangaroo, but they had to work for it.
The officers had a monopoly on hunting and thus fresh meat, and this meant they could employ convicts to work for them outside their normal working hours. Thus the game laws helped create both a market for game and strengthened particular social relations.
Simultaneously, outside the lands formally under British control, convicts were able to live a surprisingly free life:
Under the "thirds" system, the Van Diemonian elite offered their convict workers economic independence and social freedom in return for free, motivated labour and guaranteed returns. Stock owners, often resident in the towns, handed over a flock or herd to a worker prepared to risk frontier life and payed him a portion (usually a third) of the natural increase in lieu of wages. The custodian took the animals to the leased or granted land.. while he watched over the animals... while making extra money for flour, tea, sugar, tobacco and run by selling kangaroo skins.Indeed the inability of the authorities to control the convicts and the sheer amount of land meant that many simply slipped into the bush. There some created their own lives and space, and Boyce notes that as the colonial developed the escape to the bush, and the "bushranging" mode of life was particularly associated with a concept of freedom that went far beyond simply not being a convict. In fact the scale of this was, in Boyce's words, nothing less than a "collective convict uprising that would pose a potent challenge to imperial power". Such was the scale of this, that it would be a generation before the situation was brought under control.
There is one further aspect to the story that should be emphasised in this review. This was, what might be called, a reassertion of power by the British authorities. In part this was physical. A new generation of settlers who had nothing to do with the convict system arrived. They parcelled up the land and wrested it back from those who had farmed it before - these were usually convicts who had served their time, but also those working in the "thirds" system. There's an irony here, that this was, in effect a new version of enclosure - land was taken by the wealthy and powerful, and transformed - Boyce emphasises - into a copy of pastoral England. Boyce describes this as a "mass eviction". He also notes that the language used to describe "ordinary Van Diemonian life" by the new arrivals and the authorities was "strikingly similar to the judgements passed on the highland Scvots and rural Irish" at similar times. These were savages who had to be kicked off the land in the interest of a modern (capitalist) agriculture. As one new immigrant said in a letter home "we all came here to make money".
Alongside the redistribution of land from the convict era settlers came a transformation of relations with the indigenous people. While the earlier relations with the Aboriginal people had never been easy -they were often violent. But a balance had been achieved, mostly because the colonial areas were relatively geographically contained. Now, however the aboriginal people posed a threat to the expansion of the colonies, and they had to be eradicated. Boyce's descriptions of the way this was done - systematic lies, violence, rape and murder are difficult, but essential reading. There was no real economic justification for this, Boyce points out that aboriginal resistance had been stopped by military action. But nontheless there was no place in the new country for its original inhabitants. Van Diemen's Land was renamed as Tasmania, in part to sever the mental link with the convict society, but also as a means to forget the original inhabitants. Tasmania though was built on the blood and violent dispersal of the Aborigines.
Its worth noting that Boyce argues that the policy of forced removal of the Aboriginal people was never "presented to, let alone sanctioned by, the Colonial Office in London". It was, he argues, "primarily a local affair". While organisationally this is no doubt true, I think the genocidal behaviour towards the indigenous people can only be understood in the context of a "mindset" created by British colonial policy. As Tom Lawson says in his book on the Tasmanian genocide, The Last Man:
[The authorities in Van Dieman's Land were] trapped within a mindset that they could not recognise made little sense even on its own terms. They were committed to a path that continually sanctioned a greater and greater degree of force, while arguing that force should be avoided. With every approval they opened up new possibilities for violence even while they continued to condemn violence itself. The British government preached protection [of the aboriginal people], while contrarily approving of measure after measure that would escalate violence. It was, at the very least, a form of self-deception.While the British government may not have been explicitly clear on what was happening on the ground, (indeed they were actively deceived by the authorities) what took place fitted a wider, colonial, pattern. I am sure that Boyce wouldn't particularly disagree with this, but I felt it needed to be more explicit.
Nonetheless this is a remarkable history. Boyce concludes:
The black hole of Tasmanian history is not the violence between white settlers and the Aborigines -a well-record and much-discussed aspect of the British conquest - but the government-sponsored ethnic clearances which followed it.
By placing the story of what happened to the Aboriginal people in the wider context of the transformations wrought upon Van Diemen's Land by the original "convict society" and then the further tragedies that took place, James Boyce has exposed the dirty, violent, underbelly to colonial conquest in this part of the world. It is a story that must be understood and this book is an excellent account.
Related Reviews
Boyce - Imperial Mud: The Fight for the Fens
Lawson - The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania
Gammage - The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia
Pascoe - Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture
Moorehead - The Fatal Impact
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