Then, the Protector was not yet the Protector. Though a handful hailed him by another moniker as the Conciliator, most whites knew him as George Augustus Robinson, a name the blacks abbreviated in their fashion to Guster. And it was while dreaming of himself as the Conciliator yet answering to the name of Guster that Robinson, in company with his band of tame blacks, now advanced up the ridgeline to parley.
Cold rain blew hard, Robinson’s party were lousy with vermin, and their low spirits were compounded by a loathsome distemper. They had for a month made their way through that astonished earth with the intent of bringing in the remotest tribes, but had captured none. They had forced passageways through cold rainforests, lost themselves in cloudgardens of hanging mosses ribboning the sky, trekked along vast beaches stunned by angry oceans that rose and fell like liquid mountains, climbed ranges aching with desolation at the endlessness all around. But only now, as they greeted the tall black man, did it seem their luck had changed.
Towterer was cautious in his reply, saying little, but he made Robinson and his party welcome. He took them into a gully, along a creek and to a forest clearing, in which was a village, typical of the western tribes, formed of a small collection of thatched cupola huts that could each house up to twenty people. Yet Towterer’s band was only thirty strong—or thirty weak, depending on how one viewed it. Perhaps, Robinson had thought, the white man’s plagues that were laying waste to the blacks in the settled districts in the east had already arrived, a hideous harbinger of his arrival.
The rain slowed, then ceased altogether, the clouds gave way to a night sky studded with stars, and a large fire began to roar. The natives felt Robinson’s limbs all over, trying to ascertain if he had bones, if he were a ghost. They made him blacken his face, as though this somehow made him acceptable. Then all the blacks, wild and tame, began dancing and singing in the forest. Finally Robinson gave in to their cajoling and, though awkward and embarrassed, joined in. An aurora swept across the southern heavens, waves of pure spirit, roiling bands of red and green light that rolled through the universe. Towterer became insistent that Robinson take off his clothes. Overcome by a logic he didn’t understand, Robinson stripped.
He was momentarily beset by the terrifying idea that this was what he truly desired in life. Naked, he found himself leaping, stamping, flying, lost in a strange abandon beneath the southern lights. Was this his true reward, rather than the money he would be given if he brought all the natives in?
Later he would recall it as ridiculous, but then, as he leapt and yowled, as the flames flared and he felt their disturbing heat on his naked thighs and groin, he did not know, he could not say. That night the universe had flowed into him, he was open to everything, he was alive to other humans and to himself in a way he had never known. That night he felt suspended between the stars and the mountains, the forests and the fire. The dance was dizzying, a thing both wicked and exhilarating. It made no sense. It was beyond understanding. For a moment— perhaps the only moment in his life—Robinson felt freed into something beyond himself.
It could not last.
When he had gone to his tent and saw Governor Arthur’s letter of commission folded at the front of his diary, Robinson was abruptly reminded of what was expected of him and who he really was. The very reason he was there would not allow any resolution of the matter other than his capture of these blacks and the bringing of them into a world in which he was only marginally more welcome than they. And all this was so he might make something of himself and his family, so he might rise and be celebrated as a man of standing and repute, welcome in the drawing rooms of polite society, a world where no one danced naked and no one opened themselves to others, and where all practised closing down themselves and everything around them.
He felt as doomed as his fellow dancers.
And as these thoughts had befuddled his brain, Robinson’s head grew heavier. His mind, ordered by religion, could only conceive of such disorder as heresy. He was filled with thoughts he knew were not just blasphemous but Satanic. He wondered if God existed only as the ultimate obstacle between a man and his soul. And then only the memory of the wild red light of the fire playing on all their bodies had remained, along with their strange chanting, and then he was asleep.
Robinson had woken suddenly before dawn, aware of an unpleasant presence. He sat up and instinctively turned to see a young native woman sitting behind him, at the head of his tent, clearly keeping watch on him. When he tried to shoo her away, she pointed with a long stick at the knapsack in which he had hidden his three pistols.
They had known all along.
How he rued carrying the pistols! They did not trust him, he realised, no matter how often he protested his good intentions, his desire not to take captives, no matter how much tea and bread he fed them, no matter that he had even shed all his clothes and joined with them in their licentious nakedness. He had never intended turning the firearms on the natives—he had seen what a disastrous failure that had been. The pistols were purely for self- defence, for use in the final extremity.
His way was otherwise—persuasion, reason—because at the back of his arguments were always the men with guns anyway. Why flourish and fire them when others would do that for you? Robinson’s was one of many roving parties out in the bush looking for natives—but was his not the only one that promised life, not death?
When morning came, the women of Towterer’s tribe were gone. Towterer said they had gone fishing. But by nightfall they were still not returned. Towterer continued listening carefully to Robinson’s arguments as though the disappearance of half his people were of no matter.
Through the interpretation of his native lieutenant, Black Ajax, Robinson told Towterer how, in this war the Aborigines could no longer win, he was offering the last and only realistic option left: sanctuary on the islands of Bass Strait in return for their country. There they would be kept in food and provided with all the good things of the whites’ world: clothing, shelter, tea, flour, God. He was so persuasive he almost believed himself. On the second night, the forest again reverberated to their singing and dancing, Robinson again went to bed, and again he awoke abruptly before dawn.
But this time there was no sentry posted at his tent. The wild blacks had all vanished into the night, without even waking Robinson’s own natives. Towterer’s people would not allow themselves to be taken captive by any amount of lies.
When Robinson returned to the southwest three years later, everything had changed. What blacks hadn’t been exterminated in the war, Robinson had caught and sent to a holding camp on Flinders Island that would become Wybalenna. Only a few natives in the remotest wilds still remained. The authorities viewed it as utterly necessary that they all be brought in, so that the threat of a resurgent black resistance be once and for all ended.
Robinson instructed his tame natives that the demonstration of force was now permissible in order to obtain their final goal. Now his small white entourage flourished guns and his blacks hardened their wooden spearheads in the fire. In the midst of a storm that seemed without cease, Black Ajax struck out south with a party of blacks, while Robinson waited, after giving his order of just one word.
‘Towterer.’
For Robinson had not forgotten the southwest chieftain, nor his careful, clever evasion. Unlike so many others, he had been neither compliant nor conned, nor so foolish as to either attack or run, but brave enough to engage with friendship, and cunning enough to leave in silence.
A week later, Black Ajax and his men returned out of the greyness of falling sleet with eight wild natives. Towterer was not amongst them. But hung around Black Ajax’s shoulder in the form of a sling was a fresh kangaroo skin. He came up to Robinson and swung the sling around to his chest. Inside its grey blood-sleeked skin was a small child, not even a toddler. It was Towterer’s daughter.
Black Ajax told of how his armed party had ambushed Towterer and the greatly reduced remnants of his band in the midst of a storm, and he claimed Towterer had abandoned the child in order that he and his wife, Wongerneep, could escape.
Robinson recorded Black Ajax’s improbable story in his diary. But he didn’t believe it. He was confident Black Ajax had abducted the child to bait the trap. He admired his cunning and respected his diplomacy in concocting the story of abandonment.
The following day the weather had cleared not long after dawn: dirty clouds scurrying away to leave the sky an intense, if chill, blue. Changed, too, were Towterer’s people, who had grown surly and restless. Fearing they would escape, Robinson ordered his men to form lines either side of them, the tame blacks with readied spears and the whites with loaded guns. Under this armed guard, Towterer’s miserable people were marched to a standing camp at Hell’s Gates.
