Freedom in Chains

The story of Australia's settlement has as its refrain the taming of what celebrated historian Manning Clark called "that rude and barbarous land." The first settlers found themselves in an alien world, and for the convicts among them, the land's harshness must have seemed part of their punishment. The nation's self-image was shaped by those colonists' experiences of hardship, hunger, hostile natives, droughts and floods — their sense, from the outset, of being profoundly at odds with the land they had to call their home.

In Van Diemen's Land, (Black Inc., 388 pages) historian James Boyce argues compellingly that such a story wasn't true for all settlers. His focus is "the ordinary people" of early Tasmania, which as Van Diemen's Land received nearly half of all convicts shipped to Australia. Settled in 1803, it was soon ignored by London (at war with France) and Sydney (busy keeping its own population fed and under control), and, short on food supplies, set about fending for itself. Which it did, as Boyce shows, very well. For where Sydney's thick coastal scrub thwarted hunters, Van Diemen's Land offered wide grasslands teeming with kangaroos and other wildlife that were no match for English hunting dogs.

While in Britain the poor starved, the colonists of Van Diemen's Land enjoyed plenty — kangaroo, oysters, wombat, echidna "stuffed with sage and onion." There was no money for prisons, so many convicts "simply wandered off to live a life of quiet freedom in the well-watered, game-rich bush". With absorbing detail and first-hand accounts, Boyce shows that while life in this new world was hard, it was, for many, better than what they'd left behind. One convict wrote of being "unaccountably indifferent" to the notion of returning home. Hunters, bushrangers and soldiers wore kangaroo and possum skins and copied the Aborigines' moccasins, trying native foods and Aboriginal bush-burning techniques. Within two years of settlement, convicts were living in the bush year-round. Ejected from their homeland before the Industrial Revolution, they had simple expectations and were content to survive as nomadic hunters and shepherds. Nowhere else in the British Empire, says Boyce, "did the British adapt so quickly to the environment." Their dealings with Aborigines swung between cordial and violent, but there was little of the slaughter that was to come.

That all changed in the 1820s. More free settlers arrived seeking their fortunes. As huge land grants were made, convicts and Aborigines were pushed further into the bush. Disgusted by the colony's convict "stain" and keen to reproduce the trappings of English society, the new élite soon had an ally in Lieutenant Governor George Arthur. "If my hands are strengthened," wrote Arthur in 1825, "I hope to make transportation a punishment which, at present, it certainly is not." His legacy would include chain gangs, the horrors of the Port Arthur prison settlement, and hundreds of hangings. Though at one point, Boyce reveals, he considered partitioning the island, he would also oversee the wiping out of the indigenous tribes.

The fate of the island's Aborigines has been fiercely debated. Historian Keith Windschuttle claimed in 2002 that violence toward them had been greatly exaggerated. But based on contemporary accounts and his research on the hunting skills of convicts, Boyce argues that the mass killing of Aborigines was probably more common than previously thought. He throws new light on a particularly dark chapter, detailing the rounding up in the 1830s of the last Aborigines, those living in the island's west on land the settlers didn't want. Men, women and children were held at the infamous Macquarie Harbour jail before being exiled for life to a small island. That this was done to British subjects was, says Boyce, "one of the great crimes of the British Empire." Yet a visiting Charles Darwin echoed a common view when he mused in 1836 that Tasmania "enjoys the great advantage of being free from a native population."

Boyce's account of the Aborigines' doom in an appendix deserves a separate book. His chief focus remains a vivid recreation of the lives of the convicts who adapted so creatively to the Australian landscape. Though they, and not the free settlers who arrived later, were the founders of Tasmania, history has depicted them as merely savage. Yet their success as "bush entrepreneurs," living on and using the land they were let loose upon, was unmatched in the Australian colonies. Yes, they did harm — introducing pests, wiping out species — but they were also changed by the land, and many loved it. In exploring Australia's past, "we need a richer loam of memory to draw on," says Boyce. "These were an extraordinary group of people who came to a remarkable land." This impressive account illuminates an intriguing chapter of Australia's history that has, until now, been overlooked.