Nature is bountiful enough: in the world there is not a fairer climate; the gum-trees grow to 350 feet, attesting the richness of the soil; and the giant tree-ferns are never injured by heat, as in Australia, nor by cold, as in New Zealand. All the fruits of Europe are in season at the same time, and the Christmas dessert at Hobarton often consists of five and twenty distinct fresh fruits. Even more than Britain, Tasmania may be said to present on a small area an epitome of the globe: mountain and plain, forest and rolling prairie land, rivers and grand capes, and the noblest harbor in the world, all are contained in a country the size of Ireland. It is unhappily not only in this sense that Tasmania is the Ireland of the South.
Beautiful as is the view of Hobarton from Mount Wellington,—the spurs in the foreground clothed with a crimson carpet by a heathlike plant; the city nestled under the basaltic columns of the crags,—even here it is difficult to avoid a certain gloom when the eye, sweeping over the vast expanse of Storm Bay and D‘Entrecasteaux Sound, discovers only three great ships in a harbor fitted to contain the navies of the world.
The scene first of the horrible deeds of early convict days at Macquarie Harbor and Port Arthur, and later of the still more frightful massacres of the aboriginal inhabitants of the isle, Van Dieman‘s Land has never been a name of happy omen, and now the island, in changing its title, seems not to have escaped from the former blight. The poetry of the English village names met with throughout Tasmania vanishes before the recollection of the circumstances under which the harsher native terms came to be supplanted. Fifty years ago, our colonists found in Tasmania a powerful and numerous though degraded native race. At this moment, three old women and a lad who dwell on Gun-carriage Rock, in Bass‘s Straits, are all who remain of the aboriginal population of the island.
We live in an age of mild humanity, we are often told, but, whatever the polish of manner and of minds in the old country, in outlying portions of the empire there is no lack of the old savagery of our race. Battues of the natives were conducted by the military in Tasmania not more than twenty years ago, and are not unknown even now among the Queensland settlers. Let it not be thought that Englishmen go out to murder natives unprovoked; they have that provocation for which even the Spaniards in Mexico used to wait, which the Brazilians wait for now—the provocation of robberies committed in the neighborhood by natives unknown. It is not that there is no offense to punish, it is that the punishment is indiscriminate, that even when it falls upon the guilty it visits men who know no better. Where one wretched untaught native pilfers from a sheep-station, on the Queensland Downs, a dozen will be shot by the settlers, “as an example,” and the remainder of the tribe brought back to the district to be fed and kept, until whisky, rum, and other devils’ missionaries have done their work.
Nothing will persuade the rougher class of Queensland settlers that the “black-fellow” and his “jin” are human. They tell you freely that they look upon the native Australian as an ingenious kind of monkey, and that it is not for us to talk too much of the treatment of the “jins,” or native women, while the “wrens” of the Curragh exist among ourselves. No great distance appears to separate us from the days when the Spaniards in the West Indies used to brand on the face and arms all the natives they could catch, and gamble them away for wine.
Though not more than three or four million acres out of seventeen million acres of land in Tasmania have as yet been alienated by the crown, the population has increased only by 15,000 in the last ten years. Such is the indolence of the settlers, that vast tracts of land in the central plain, once fertile under irrigation, have been allowed to fall back into a desert state from sheer neglect of the dams and conduits. Though iron and coal are abundant, they are seldom if ever worked, and one house in every thirty-two in the whole island is licensed for the sale of spirits, of which the annual consumption exceeds five gallons a head for every man, woman, and child in the population. Tasmania reached her maximum of revenue in 1858, and her maximum of trade in 1853.
The curse of the country is the indolence of its lotus-eating population, who, like all dwellers in climates cool but winterless, are content to dream away their lives in drowsiness to which the habits of a hotter but less equable clime—Queensland, for example—are energy itself. In addition, however, to this natural cause of decline, Van Dieman‘s Land is not yet free from all traces of the convict blood, nor from the evil effects of reliance on forced labor. It is, indeed, but a few years since the island was one great jail, and in 1853 there were still 20,000 actual convicts in the island. The old free settlers will tell you that the deadly shade of slave labor has not blighted Jamaica more thoroughly than that of convict labor has Van Dieman‘s Land.
Seventy miles northwest of Hobarton is a sheet of water called Macquarie Harbor, the deeds wrought upon the shores of which are not to be forgotten in a decade. In 1823, there were 228 prisoners at Macquarie Harbor, to whom, in the year, 229 floggings and 9925 lashes were ordered, 9100 lashes being actually inflicted. The cat was, by order of the authorities, soaked in salt water and dried in the sun before being used. There was at Macquarie Harbor one convict overseer who took a delight in seeing his companions punished. A day seldom passed without five or six being flogged on his reports. The convicts were at his mercy. In a space of five years, during which the prisoners at Macquarie Harbor averaged 250 in number, there were 835 floggings and 32,723 lashes administered. In the same five years, 112 convicts absconded from this settlement, of whom 10 were killed and eaten by their companions, 75 perished in the bush with or without cannibalism, two were captured with portions of human flesh in their possession, and died in hospital, two were shot, 16 were hanged for murder and cannibalism, and seven are reported to have made good their escape, though this is by no means certain.
It has been stated by a Catholic missionary bishop in his evidence before a Royal Commission, that when, after a meeting at one of the stations, he read out to his men the names of thirty-one condemned to death, they with one accord fell upon their knees, and solemnly thanked God that they were to be delivered from that horrible place. Men were known to commit murder that they might be sent away for trial, preferring death to Macquarie Harbor.