George Augustus Robinson had the aborigines of Tasmania transferred to Flinders Island, where doomed and dispirited they met their demise…
…Robinson also inculcated in his wards, dependent for the past few millenniums entirely on hunting and scavenging, a more suitable sense of property. He put English copper coins into circulation, stamped on one side “F.I.” for Flinders Island, and he made the aborigines pay for their European clothes and comforts, to teach them the meaning of money. He started a weekly market, every Tuesday at eleven, at which they could sell the game they had caught or the few poor artifacts they had made in and return buy pipes, tea caddies, crockery, fishing rods, or straw hats, becoming part of Western consumer culture.
—Glover painted in the picturesque style advocated by Claude Lorraine, taking the Grand Tour of Europe and wandering the moors and mountains of Britain in search of inspiration.
At the age of 63, and after a successful career, Glover immigrated to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) to join his children, arriving on 18 February 1831, coincidently his 64th birthday.
Glover obtained one of the last large grants of land on the island, settling at Patterdale at Mills Plains, Deddington, 20 kilometres from Evandale in 1832. Here he farmed and painted commissioned works for the landowners of the colony and landscapes for sale in London.
The quality of his painting changed in response to the strange landscape of this far-flung colony. He managed to capture its light and form with a freshness that preempted the Australian Impressionists.—Read More:http://www.johnglover.com.au/john_glover.html—-click image for source…
But despite it all, they wasted away, ceased to have babies, and grew thinner and more morose and more helplessly melancholic. The Tasmanians were literally losing heart. Even Robinson, “The Conciliator” now complained of their feckless indolence, and and his sidekick, the catechist Robert Clark, sometimes found it necessary to flog the girls, “in religious anger at their moral offenses.” By 1847 there were only forty-four aborigines left, and the government, decoding they were no longer a danger to the European community, abandoned Wybalenna and shipped the hangdog survivors back across the strait to die in Tasmania.
Mt. Robinson, having thus arranged all things to the divine satisfaction, took his family home to Bath, where he himself died in gentlemanly circumstances in a hilltop villa overlooking the city. He was seventy-eight, and his death certificate, in the column headed “Occupation,” describes him simply as “Late Protector of the Aborigines, Tasmania.” ( to be continued)…
COMMENTS