The Sea Inside

to which Mr./Robinson was clinging while endeavouring to cross/the river Arthur to get away from some natives/who had form’d a plan to kill him. but not being/able to swim he owes his life to Truggernana.

    The artist attempted to create a realistic portrait, but succeeded only in painting a dream. In his soft-focus and almost symbolist images, Duterreau depicted Tasmania’s dwindling inhabitants in lush, highly composed and posed pictures. It seems fitting that his best-known work is incomplete, a study for a greater canvas.
The Conciliation
is a conversation-piece in the manner of Zoffany; Duterreau called it a ‘national picture’. It shows George Robinson in his white duck trousers and navy cutaway coat and floppy cap, set against the elegant nakedness of the native people with whom he is portrayed in an unequal alliance, wagging his finger as if to lecture or admonish. He seems inappropriately, flamboyantly overdressed, while their loincloths are a modest invention by the painter. In reality, their naked bodies were protected from the elements by ochre and animal fat, and their heads decorated with dried mud. They are accompanied by the dogs brought by white men, now used by the Aboriginal people to kill kangaroos; one hound sniffs provocatively towards a grey wallaby.
    As I look at it, in the parquet quiet of Hobart’s museum, the canvas seems to transcend its history; what it meant at the time, what it means now. The entire arrangement has a mortal definition; it is divided by lines. The whiteness of its central figure asserts itself over the darkness of the others. Thin shafts of spears which could kill bisect the composition, giving it a modern tension. At its centre, next to Robinson like a dark mirror, is Truganini, pointing to her protector and lover, and to the future of her people.
    But it was already too late. The island asylums to which they were led by Robinson were little better than penal colonies. His vision was betrayed by reality. In 1803, when it was first settled, there were about ten thousand Aborigines in Tasmania; by 1835, when Robinson took charge of Flinders Island, fewer than one hundred and fifty remained.
    In their unnatural confinement, disease took its toll. Even the clothes they were forced to wear, partly to inhibit any attempt at escape, caused them to catch cold when they got soaked in the rain, and as with Native Americans, fabric was the conduit of infection. ‘Among savages, the blanket has sometimes slain more than the sword,’ wrote the Reverend West. Some would bleed themselves to assuage their pain, blood streaming down their faces; it was the only way they could react to the helplessness of their fate. Others simply gave up the will to live. ‘They were within sight of Tasmania, and as they beheld its not distant but forbidden shore, they were often deeply melancholy,’ wrote West; he claimed that more than half those held on Flinders Island had died from ‘
home sickness
, a disease which is common to some Europeans, particularly in the Swiss soldiers’. Many starved themselves; healthy spouses who were bereaved ‘would immediately sicken, and rapidly pine away’.

    (Nor were their white visitors immune to such subtle suffering. In 1826 another of my distant cousins, Isaac Scott Nind, had sailed to Van Diemen’s Land as an assistant surgeon in the 39th Dorsetshire regiment. Sent to the remote settlement of King George Sound in Western Australia, he became fascinated by the local tribes and later wrote a report on their culture for the Royal Geographical Society. But after five years in the wilderness, isolated with fifty others, two dozen of them convicts, Isaac was slowly going mad. He told the sergeant he’d rather see the back of a man than his face, and one day grabbed the commandant’s hand and, in tears, began to blurt out an account of his past sins – then repeated his confession in the soldiers’ barracks. Meanwhile, another man climbed a nearby mountain every Sunday to pray to God for relief. Soon after, Isaac was sent home to England, suffering from a nervous breakdown.)
    The settlers had no vocabulary or context for what they faced; that which they did not understand, they ignored, or destroyed. The Aboriginal people had both, but in their despair, seemed to prefer to die. In a charity shop in Surrey I once found a 1950s edition of James Frazer’s
The Golden Bough
. Slipped into the pages on sympathetic magic, among accounts of Aboriginal