…Now the end was near for the Tasmanian race. The forty-four survivors- twelve men, twenty-two women, ten young people – were taken to an unused penal settlement at Oyster Cove, twenty five miles from Hobart and only fifteen miles from the spot where, two centuries before, Abel Tasman’s sailors had first heard those “certain human sounds.” There, the Tasmanians lingered for a last decade, no longer posing even a perceived threat to anyone, nor even hopeful material for the evangelicals, for they were generally drunk and shamelessly immoral.
John Glover—The bath of Diana, Van Diemen’s Land
Date 1837—source: Google Art Project…
Sometimes people went to look at them and anthropologists, recognizing in them the ultimate specimens of an entire race, measured their skulls and estimated their brain capacities. By 1855 only sixteen Tasmanians were still alive, and all attempts to redeem them had been abandoned. By 1859 Oyster Cove was a slum, the handful of survivors camping in verminous filth among the decaying buildings and sharing their food with their dogs.
A few were adopted by settlers and kept as pets, or curiosities. One pretty girl, almost the last of the young aborigines, was adopted by Lady Franklin, whose husband, Sir John, after great adventures in the Arctic, had come to Hobart as governor. Gaily dressed in European clothes, Mathinna went everywhere with her patroness- high spirited in her carriage on afternoon drives, cossetted by ambitious aides at Government House balls. When the time came for the Franklins to go home to England, Lady Franklin was advised that a sudden change in climate might kill the girl, so Mathinna was placed in an institution called the Queen’s Asylum.
At the Asylum, Mathinna was teased and taunted. Since she seemed to be wasting away, she was returned to her inebriate and syphilitic relatives at Oyster Cove where she soon picked up the local habits, drank heavily, prostituted herself with the timber workers of the surrounding woods, and was eventually found drowned in a creek. ( to be continued)…
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