“The Goldie incident was in fact a criminal act of abduction and murder, carried out by bonded servants of a capitalist firm, acting under the instructions of a gentleman official of the company.” So writes DR DAVID FABER in this penetrating and disturbing account of an early colonial “incident” that history, for a very long time, tried to remember differently. This essay was a finalist in the 2020 Van Diemen History prize, and will be published with full academic end notes in the short-list anthology of the 2020 prize. The anthology will be published by Forty South in October 2021.

The Tasmanians…were [largely] swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants. HG Wells, The War of the Worlds

Cooee, Van Diemen’s Land, August 21, 1829

Today, the Burnie Regional Museum commemorates the establishment in 1828 of the port-city by the Van Diemen’s Land Company, the last British chartered joint stock land company. As a teenager during the Whitlam years, attending Burnie High School under the adoptive surname of Clements and passionate about history, I never heard from a single teacher of the pioneering company. The pedagogical principle of an early focus on local affairs in teaching history appears to have been overlooked in my day. History seemed to have happened elsewhere, perhaps in our Gallipoli Iliad, in which, I had known from infancy, a few locals had participated. But epic feet have trodden our home soil too, for example during the invasion and conquest of Van Diemen’s Land.

This oversight is surprising, as the history of the Tasmanian north-west is arrestingly interesting. The VDL Company was as armed in its way as the East India Company. It conquered the north-west by ambushes, dealing out death through its servants to the indigenous inhabitants, shattering their nations in the space of a few years. European settlement on the coast began more darkly and dramatically than many imagine, even to this day.

This can be seen in the details of the “important” event, known to Tasmanian historians as “the Goldie incident”. The general public, however, has yet to be fully seized of it. It regards an unprovoked murder (recognized as such even by Keith Windschuttle, although he downplays its significance) during a “gin raid”, an illegal attempt at abduction of non-combatant women by VDL Co servants under the effectively para-military command of its Agricultural Superintendent, Alexander Goldie. It occurred while the island was under racially targeted martial law, declared by Lieutenant Governor Arthur in November 1828, on Cooee Beach, between Cooee Point and present-day site of Burnie High School. It ought to be common knowledge for every inhabitant of the coast, not to say the state and the nation.

To understand the past is to better understand ourselves and be nearer to command of our own destiny. This is especially the case in the coast’s contemporary post-industrial era, when historically informed cultural tourism will play an increasingly important role. And the importance of the matter to reconciliation on the coast goes without saying.

The Goldie incident is best described in Goldie’s own well-spun words. On September 16, 1829, nearly four weeks after the incident, Goldie reported particulars to his superior, Company Chief Agent Edward Curr Senior. He carefully threw the responsibility for the killing on the party of convict servants under his authority: “The day the Fanny last sailed from this (21 August) I was putting up a shed for rams at [in fact towards] the Cam, and when looking at the feed, I came upon a mob of Natives. Seeing them on the Point [at Cooee] I returned to the men and determined to endeavour to take some of them. For this purpose, I took my horse and the men, one gun and a couple of axes. On getting within 200 yards of them we were observed and they began to make off. I ordered the men to keep outside while I took the scrub. This had the desired effect and the natives kept along the sands. Russell fired at one just as she was taking the scrub and shot her. She was very badly hit about the bottom and belly, and she must have died. I rode down another woman in the scrub and before I returned with her the men had killed the other. The woman that was shot had a child about 6 years old (a girl) which we also got. I saw another three, but whether there were any more, or any men among them I cannot say…”

The rest of the letter confidentially detailed how the other Aboriginal woman had been illegally enslaved in the company’s service and put to work experimentally, a point relevant to the company economically and to the colonial administration politically. Subsequently, the character clash between Goldie and Curr came to a head over the incident and the Cape Grim Massacre, with Curr provokingly accusing Goldie of having aggressively exceeded established company policy and practice near the Emu Bay settlement in committing “so flagrant a prima facie case of murder”. Goldie was dismayed, for Curr was the director of the lethal, not to say barbarous, “native” policy of the company in the north-west. It was also dangerous language, given that Curr had been charged by Arthur with investigating the matter. Goldie retaliated by undermining Curr with the company’s servants. He advised these employees that they would be exposed to capital criminal prosecution for implementing company policy towards Aboriginal people in practice. This was effectively legislated with extreme prejudice on the ground by Curr as company Chief Agent, in violation of the paternalistic, civilising, assimilationist intent of the London directors, conscience-stricken at the forbearance due to the indigenous landowners for their expropriation, preferably by “civilizing” and exploiting them as labourers. Curr showed much more alacrity in safeguarding his authority than in investigating as Resident Magistrate the Cooee killing, dragging his heels for months. This he did only at the behest of Arthur, whom Goldie had dragged into the dispute by informing His Excellency of the company policy on which he (Goldie) had consistently acted.

In struggling with each other, both men appear as duplicitous as they could be brutal, arguably typically of the managerial gentlefolk of the day, contemptuous of their racial and class “inferiors”. If so, this class-driven behaviour would tend to bear out the 1977 thesis of Bronwyn Dessailly, criticised by Geoff Lennox in 1990, that Curr was in reality an exponent of the colonial “exterminationist” party, although it may reasonably be doubted if this evasive, diffident and calculating man was openly so. These observations correspond also with the class and ethnic nature of British imperialism in the era 1688-1914 as analysed by Cain & Hopkin in their seminal magnum opus on British imperialism, which Windschuttle attempts to recruit to argue that genocide and ethnic cleansing did not occur in Van Diemen’s Land, because the British as opposed to the notorious Spanish practiced a kinder, gentler form of conquest, informed by humanitarian imperialist values and practices.

This is a tendentious misinterpretation of Cain & Hopkin’s thesis of the “gentlemanly capitalism” of British global expansionism. This indeed got underway as a private, civil society, aristocratically managed and financed project in England’s first colony, Ireland, in 1170, by the infamous “Strongbow”, Richard de Clare, during the reign but in advance of the royal endorsement of Henry II, which came later in that decade with his confirmation as Earl of Pembroke. Given the Irish experience of English rule, it can readily be seen that the record of English expansionism was hardly benign, howsoever rapacious were other imperialists. The innovative capitalist role of the English aristocracy and gentry from the 17th century on cannot be doubted, as exemplified by such enterprising lords as the modernising Whig revolutionary Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, (the patron of the proto-liberal ideologue John Locke, an advocate for both slavery and colonisation). English imperialism never baulked at genocide and ethnic cleansing or discrimination on racial and class grounds in the cause of empire. Even those who fought the slave trade and afterwards asserted the human rights of indigenous peoples tended not to question imperialism as such, which involved these historical abuses. After all, Liberal Imperialism was a feature of Westminster politics right into the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Indeed, one superannuated exponent, Sir Ronald Munro-Ferguson [later Viscount Novar] served as the proconsular supervisor of the Australian Great War effort.

That said, it was not strange that colonial Solicitor General Alfred Stephen determined, in respect of the Goldie incident, against a prosecution on the convenient technicality that the woman had been fatally shot under martial law as an enemy rather than slain as a prisoner with an axe. This had been done as a coup de grace by a 17-year-old company servant in the squad of shepherds, Richard Sweetling. The Colonial Office was relieved that Arthur had abstained from intervening in what it saw as a dispute between company officers. The colonial press meanwhile resented the company’s privileged access to land, and Curr was known as “the Potentate of the North”, because of his dual commercial and legal authority.

Death was thus dealt out to an Aboriginal woman, probably of the Table Cape-based Tommeginer nation, in Curr’s state within a colony within an empire. The manner in which the matter was swept under the carpet was perfectly in keeping with Curr’s stated view that Aboriginal “aggression” obliged the government to authorise a war of extermination to guarantee clear land title to settlers, devoid of obligations to prior inhabitants, a policy of genocide which Curr implemented and sustained on company land until his services were terminated due to his irascible clashes with the colonial government in 1842.

The politics of dispossession has evolved over time, from notions of colonial right to concepts of historical responsibility. For example, in 1937, a prominent British imperialist gave evidence to the Peel Commission, which was investigating the morass that the 1917 Balfour Declaration had created in Palestine. He ventured the opinion that: “I do not agree that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”

In his day, Winston Churchill was the voice of conventional opinion. Few would be so blatantly racist as to dare to be so frank now. The Goldie incident was in fact a criminal act of abduction and murder, carried out by bonded servants of a capitalist firm, acting under the instructions of a gentleman official of the company. It was implementing in its own commercial interest a policy of de facto dispossession, shrouded in a rhetoric of reluctant displacement and civilising intent. The British Empire and its colonial administration wilfully looked the other way. Forgoing the colonial enterprise which entailed ethnic cleansing in north-west Van Diemen’s Land was never contemplated. The invasion, conquest and settlement of the Coast arose in a global context during the 19th century heyday of British imperial capitalism. A Royal Charter, £1,000,000 of London capital, three parliamentary members and an Act of the Westminster Parliament were involved.

In the 20th century, local historians tended to apologise for the Curr’s conduct during the pioneering of the region, a tendency corrected by 21st century scholarship. The company of course continues to operate in the region. It would be churlish to suggest that its present Chinese owners are responsible for the crimes of Goldie and Curr. Indeed, if only out of enlightened self-interest in tourist revenue from its property, the VDL Co exercises good corporate citizenship. These considerations dictate facilitation of community awareness and historical understanding. The company now positively engages with the Aboriginal community, employing indigenous workers who, amongst other employments, guide tourists. It is possible to tour, for example, the massacre site at Cape Grim, its reality attested after much controversy by colonial documents, indigenous oral tradition and historical investigation. Some may feel that it would be better to avert our eyes from such things. But reality is a sounder, firmer foundation for self-understanding than romanticised notions of the pioneering spirit and its latter-day work ethic legacy. Recognising the trauma inflicted on the Coast’s indigenous population during VDL Co settlement is an important step towards settling our fundamental account with the historical past and achieving a measure of social justice and maturity. At Wynyard the main street is named after Goldie as a pioneer, despite the criminal acts he commissioned, of which the bulk of the townsfolk remain unaware; unaware indeed that the traditional name of the street refers to him at all.

Historical enquiry enfranchises the future through engaging with the reality of the past. In that sense, history is an ongoing discursive debate, and the history wars are always with us, more or less, as interest wrestles culturally with interest, hopefully without the unscrupulous, white-blindfold, denialist rhetoric of certain commentators of the Quadrant stable. Having a principled ethical and critical, logical point of view is no impediment to historical objectivity. On the contrary, it is necessary to historical evaluation. As Oxford historiographer Robin George Collingwood rightly stated, in that ongoing discussion, we aim, not at finality but at an ever-increasing depth of objective insight, both ethical and pragmatic.