Charles Darwin in Tasmania and the depiction of eucalyptus: a response to Peter Grant’s recent piece in Forty South Tasmania.

Peter Grant writes beautifully about eucalypts and Charles Darwin’s disparaging comments about them. I agree with his sentiments completely, but I have something to add about early European perceptions of these (sometimes) magnificent trees.

Peter Grant quotes Darwin as seeing the eucalypts as “the never-failing eucalyptus family”, and not meaning this in a good way. He found the eucalyptus woodlands dreary.

Darwin arrived in Hobart on HMS Beagle’s scientific world tour in February 1836 and spent 10 days here, having just spent rather more time in NSW. That was where he formed his opinion of eucalypts and wrote, “The bark of some the Eucalypti falls annually or hangs dead in long shreds which swing about with the wind and give to the woods a desolate and untidy appearance.”

This may not quite be an example of a European not being able to see the Australian landscape, but it is surely an example of someone not able to appreciate an alien landscape. It was just too foreign to Darwin.

However, a little later, and a bit further south, after climbing kunanyi/Mt Wellington, Darwin reported, “In many parts the Eucalypti grew to a great size, and composed a noble forest.”

So he was not all negative about Eucalyptus. In the wet gullies of the mountain, this “noble forest” would have comprised majestic species such as blue gum (E globulus), gum-topped stringybark (E delegatensis) and swamp gum (E regnans), the tallest flowering plant in the world.

The more delicate Victorian name, mountain ash, seems to be taking over as the name for regnans, and although swamp gum is a misnomer – they don’t grow in swamps – I rather like the old, rough, Tasmanian term.

The fact is that eucalypts, because of their extraordinarily wide range across Australian ecosystems, can vary from not much more than large shrubs to huge trees, and even the same species can vary enormously depending on its habitat. Eucalyptus pauciflora, the famed, but stunted snow gums of the high country of the Australian Alps, are actually quite large and well-formed trees when they grow below the escarpment.

Charles Darwin was a follower of the geologist, Charles Lyell, who was really the progenitor of the theory of evolution in that his hugely magnified age of the earth allowed evolution to be theoretically possible. The idea of evolution was around long before the mechanism for how it could happen had been theorised. So, most of Darwin’s time in Hobart was spent in geological research – he had not yet got anywhere near Origin of Species, although his observations on the recently visited Galapagos Islands reveal, perhaps, a gleam of the theory in his eye.

Observing the geologically recent emergence of the volcanic islands from the sea, and the abundance of species, each with their own limited range, Darwin remarked, “Hence, both in space and time, we seem to be brought near to that great fact – that mystery of mysteries – the first appearance of new beings on this earth.”

The variation of the beaks of the finches between the islands of the Galapagos Archipelago brought forth this thought, “Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.”

Something was stirring, and the finches of the Galapagos are seen as central to the development of Darwin’s thought on evolution. But, equally important – in the opinion of many historians of science, and Darwin – was his later correspondence with pigeon-breeders with whom he maintained a voluminous correspondence across a vast social gap (he was posh, they were not – which makes the correspondence even more intriguing).

It was obviously important to him, and to the genesis of the theory of evolution by natural selection. That artificial, selective breeding could elucidate and illuminate such a radical idea shows how huge Darwin’s intellect was, which makes my next remarks so strange – to me anyway.

Apart from its geology and vegetation, Darwin found one particular aspect of Tasmania fascinating. Fully one-third of the words he wrote in his journal (published as The Voyage of the Beagle) about his visit here are about the Aboriginal people: the destruction of their way of life, and the removal of the remnant population. He starts his remarks with this confronting statement. “All the aborigines [he doesn’t use a capital] have been removed to an island in Bass’s Straits, so that Van Diemen’s Land enjoys the great advantage of being free from a native population.”

He then goes on to, more or less, blame the victims. “This most cruel step seems to have been quite unavoidable, as the only means of stopping a fearful succession of robberies, burnings, and murders committed by the blacks: and which sooner or later would have led to their utter destruction.”

And he further blames the convicts, “I fear that there is no doubt, that this train of evil and its consequences, originated in the infamous conduct of some of our countrymen.”

Some readers may feel that I am drawing a long bow here, but, trust me, this is a pointed reference to convicts.

Darwin’s position on the indigenous people of Tasmania, and the convicts, is the standard position of the more liberal-minded of the British settlers at the time. One assumes that these were the people that Darwin dined with in his time in Hobart. To them, the great tragedy had nothing to do with the rich settlers. To them, it was all because of the actions of the convicts which had brought on the Aboriginal aggression. This, somehow, made their destruction inevitable but also, somehow, regrettable. And Darwin agreed.

Yet we are, here, getting the opinion of a reasonably free-thinker and, obviously, a man of huge intellect. So it is fascinating to see how blinkered a product of Empire he can be. In Sydney, he had felt proud to be an Englishman, noting how fast the colony had been established and how prosperous the “city” (his word) of Sydney was; far in advance of many Spanish colonial settlements in South America he had visited, despite their much longer settler occupation.

So, that’s Darwin in Tasmania. He thought Hobart’s climate wetter than Sydney – which it can be at times, but not usually in February and certainly not overall. He came around to eucalypts to a certain extent, he geologised a bit, climbed kunanyi and sailed away thinking we were well off rid of our native inhabitants, despite a nod to the regrettable nature of the occurrence.

He was, for all his intellect, a product and servant of the colonialist project called the British Empire and its supremacist racial views. His brilliant theory of how evolution could happen, the idea of natural selection, did not protect his own brain from such ideas. Darwin thought peoples such as the Tierra del Fuegians and the Tasmanians were somehow on a lower level of evolution. In a way, he didn’t quite understand his own theory.

James Parker is a Tasmanian historian (but with deep connections to Sydney), who writes and talks on mainly colonial subjects – especially convicts, women and the Tasmanian Aboriginal people.