The Sea Inside

but a tithe of the murders committed on these poor harmless creatures, it would make the reader’s blood run cold at the bare recital,’ he wrote, attaching a single footnote as if to spare the sensitive reader:

    * One case may suffice. A
respectable
young gentleman, who was out kangaroo hunting, in jumping over a dead tree, observed a black native crouched by the stones, as if to hide himself. The huntsman observing the white of the eye of the native, was induced to examine the prostrate being, and finding it only to be a native, he placed the muzzle of his piece to his breast and shot him dead on the spot. Hundreds of similar cases might be adduced.
    One white man, however, appeared to have the native people’s best interests at heart. On 30 March 1829, in the middle of the Black War between the settlers and the settled, George Robinson arrived on Bruny Island to create a new refuge, a new colony.
    George Augustus Robinson, born in Lincolnshire in 1791, had emigrated to Australia in 1822. He set up a successful building company in Van Diemen’s Land, but as a man of faith he was also drawn to good works, and with them, perhaps, social ascendency; even his friends found him pompous and vain, ‘more patronizing than courteous and somewhat offensively polite than civil’. By that point the settlers’ cruel treatment of the Aboriginal tribes – usurping their hunting grounds, kidnapping children and killing adults – had reached the point at which a final extermination was suggested, or at least the removal of these unwanted people from the lands which the settlers required. As a Christian, however, Robinson believed conciliation was possible. Appointed by George Arthur, he established a model village in order to redeem the Aboriginal people who, he had to admit, ‘rank very low in the savage creation’, yet were possessed of ‘many amiable points which glitter like sunbeams through the shroud of darkness by which they are enveloped …’
    In pursuit of his task, Robinson undertook a series of expeditions deep into western Tasmania, a place which even now remains a wilderness. With him he took a following of indigenous people, including Truganini, with whom, rumour suggested, he had formed a sexual relationship. Robinson attempted to persuade the people of these remote areas to join the proposed sanctuaries on Swan Island, Gun Carriage Island and Flinders Island, off the north coast of Tasmania. It was during this so-called Friendly Mission that Truganini saved Robinson’s life when he was under attack on the Arthur River; the roles of the vaunted protector of the Aboriginal people and his childlike charges had become reversed. The story was widely reported in Hobart, thrusting Truganini’s image into the public eye as the acceptable face of the savage.
    Among her portraitists was Thomas Bock, himself a transportee (his crime had been to administer drugs to a young woman back in England). Now a well-known artist in Tasmania, he was commissioned by the new governor’s wife, Lady Jane Franklin, to paint its native people. His work is poignant, since it shows how these people looked before their appearance was influenced by the coming of the colonists. In his watercolour of 1837, Truganini appears as a young woman in her twenties, with shaven head and carefully arranged tribal dress; an Antipodean Eve, her breasts bound by a piece of twine. But in his oil painting, Benjamin Duterreau – born in London of French parents, he had emigrated to Van Diemen’s Land in 1832 – created an evanescently beautiful, almost fairy-like portrait of Truganini, painted in recessive blue, green and brown against a crepuscular sky, as if she were already disappearing. It is an image only pretending to be real. Swathed in a kangaroo skin in lieu of ermine, with a shell necklace instead of pearls, she becomes a mythic, regal figure, like an Elizabethan princess in an alien land.
    Was the artist painting his lover? She could be fourteen, or in her forties, this indigenous Mona Lisa. In his sketchbook, Duterreau added a note that summed up her rescue of Robinson in a similarly poetic, if not telegraphic manner:

Truggernana/A native of the southern part of V.D. land & Wife to Woureddy/was attach’d to the mission in 1829/Truggernana has render’d very essential service to the/expedition on many occasions & in a most remarkable manner/Saved Mr. Robinson’s life by swimming & propelling/at the same time a small spear of wood