The Cape Grim massacre was an attack on 10 February 1828 in which a group of Aboriginal Tasmanians gathering food at a beach in the north-west of Tasmania is said to have been ambushed and shot by four Van Diemen's Land Company (VDLC) workers, with bodies of some of the victims then thrown from a 60-metre (200 ft) cliff. About 30 men are thought to have been killed in the attack, which was a reprisal action for an earlier Aboriginal raid on a flock of Van Diemen's Land Company sheep, but part of an escalating spiral of violence probably triggered by the abduction and rape of Aboriginal women in the area. The massacre was part of the "Black War", the period of violent conflict between British colonists and Aboriginal Australians in Tasmania from the mid-1820s to 1832.
News of the Cape Grim killings did not reach Governor George Arthur for almost two years. Arthur sent George Augustus Robinson, who held an unofficial government role as an Aboriginal conciliator, to investigate the incident, and later statements from company workers, a diary entry by the wife of a ship's captain and the testimony of an Aboriginal woman provided some further information. Despite the witness statements however, details of what took place are ambiguous. Some Australian authors such as Keith Windschuttle have subsequently disputed the magnitude of the massacre or denied it occurred at all.
The site of the massacre has been identified as the present-day Taneneryouer, formerly known as Suicide Bay, facing the island outcrops known as The Doughboys. Because a number of tribes were in the area at the time, it is uncertain which one was involved in the clash, although historian Lyndall Ryan states that those killed were members of the Peerapper clan.
Background
Clans of the North West nation had experienced violent conflict with European settlers since 1810 when sealing parties abducted women. In 1820 a group of sealers sprang from hiding in a cave at The Doughboys near Cape Grim/Kennaook and ambushed a group of Pennemukeer women collecting muttonbirds and shellfish, capturing and binding them and carrying them off to Kangaroo Island. Pennemukeer men responded with a reprisal attack, clubbing three sealers to death.
Further conflict developed after the arrival of the VDLC in late 1826. The company had been formed in London in 1824 as a joint stock company whose purpose would be to breed and farm Merino and Saxon sheep on a large scale to meet the high demand for wool in England. The company was given a grant to 100 thousand hectares (250 thousand acres) in the northwest tip of the colony then known as Van Diemen's Land, an area that was home to about 400 or 500 Aboriginals who had cleared the grassy plains of trees through generations of fire-stick farming. Ships then began arriving to offload livestock and labourers – mostly indentured "servants" or convicts who would work as shepherds and ploughmen on sheep stations at Cape Grim/Kennaook and Circular Head, occupying key Aboriginal kangaroo hunting grounds.
Businessman Edward Curr was appointed as VDLC's Chief Agent, answering to a court of directors in London, but his position in the remote part of the colony also gave him the powers and authority of a magistrate. Curr quickly developed a reputation as a cruel and ruthless despot. Within a year of the company establishing a presence in the North West, employees under his direct control had gained a reputation for brutal treatment of the local Aboriginal population. Curr, rather than inquiring into or intervening in such cases, sometimes actively encouraged violence. Rosalie Hare, the wife of a ship's captain who arrived in January 1828 on board the Caroline and remained in the Curr household until March, noted in her journal the frequency of Aboriginal attacks on shepherds, but added: "We are not to suppose the Europeans in their turn take no revenge. We have to lament that our own countrymen consider the massacre of these people an honour. While we remained at Circular Head there were several accounts of considerable numbers of natives having been shot by them, they wishing to extirpate them entirely if possible."
According to historian Nicholas Clements, the primary cause of conflict was sex: very few white women were in the colony generally, and the shortage was particularly acute in the North West, where only Curr's wife and one other woman lived. The Governor was warned by one worker in 1827 that Curr's shepherds "had designs of violating the (native) women" and examples were later given to Robinson of female Aboriginals being kept by stock keepers and shepherds, some of them "chained up like a wild beast" and abused. Another woman was said to have been kept by a stock keeper for about a month, "after which she was taken out and shot."
Massacre
The immediate catalyst of the February killings was an incident about the beginning of December 1827 during a visit to the area by the Peerapper clan from West Point in search of muttonbird eggs and seals. Convicts who were working as assigned servants for the VDLC were tending to a large flock of sheep and managed to lure some Peerapper women into a hut for sex. When the Peerapper men objected, a skirmish developed during which one of the shepherds, Thomas John, was speared in the leg and several Peerapper men including a chief were shot dead. John was taken back to Circular Head a fortnight later and Curr reported the injury to VDLC directors in London, stating that his shepherd had been speared in an extended conflict that had begun when "a very strong party of Natives" attacked the men.
A party of Peerapper, probably led by Wymurrick, returned to Cape Grim/Kennaook on 31 December, a month after the clash, to seek retribution. They destroyed 118 ewes from the company's stock, spearing some, beating others with waddies and driving the rest over a cliff and into the sea. The company vessel Fanny, with its master, Richard Frederick, was then sent to Cape Grim/Kennaook, ostensibly to collect sheep to be transported to Emu Bay (modern-day Burnie). While he was there, Frederick, who was "very well acquainted with that part of the country and with the habits of the Natives" – helped the shepherds search for the Peerapper clan and located their camp as part of a punitive expedition. Then, according to a journal account by Rosalie Hare, wife of the captain of the Caroline who was staying with Curr and his wife, they killed 12 men in a surprise night time raid.
Several days later, on 10 February – about six weeks after the destruction of the ewes – the same four shepherds are believed to have surprised and trapped a party of Aboriginal men, women and children in what is now known as Taneneryouer, as they feasted on mutton-birds the women had caught at the nearby Doughboy Islands. Although there is no single definitive narrative, it is thought that the Aboriginal people, confronted by the armed Europeans, panicked and fled in different directions, with some rushing into the sea, others scrambling around the cliff and some fatally shot by the shepherds. One group – thought to be all men – were killed near the edge of a 60-metre (200 ft) cliff and their bodies then thrown to the rocks below. Two individuals, one of the convicts involved and an Aboriginal woman, stated that the death toll was 30, a senior VDLC employee described the fatalities as "a good number" and "a great many", while Curr initially reported six dead "besides several severely wounded". Those wounded by shot fired from muskets would have had poor prospects of survival.
Investigation
In a dispatch to VDLC directors on 14 January Curr reported the voyage of the Fanny and the subsequent night time encounter with Peerapper at their camp by Frederick and the shepherds who had "gone in quest" of those who had slaughtered the sheep. In Curr's account there were about 70 Peerapper in the encampment, but the shepherds watched and waited until dawn before retreating without a shot being fired, because "not a musket would go off" as a result of heavy rain during the night. Historian Ian McFarlane has described Curr's account as problematic and less plausible than that of Rosalie Hare: he said the men would have known the Peerapper were reluctant to move during the night, being timid in the dark, and it was improbable that men armed with that knowledge would sit in the cold and rain all night watching the targets silhouetted by campfires, only to await the light of the morning and lose their strategic advantage.
Two weeks later, on 28 February, Curr provided the directors with his first, brief reference to the events of 10 February. He reported that he had heard information from the men on the Fanny that shepherds had encountered "a strong party of natives" and that after a long fight six Aboriginals were left "dead on the field including their chief besides several severely wounded." He added: "I have no doubt that this will have the effect of intimidating them, and oblige them to keep aloof."
Curr reported nothing more on the incident or what had become of those who had been severely wounded, prompting the directors to write back to express extreme "regret" over the deaths and point out: "It does not appear from the account who were the aggressors." Despite his role as magistrate Curr did not further investigate the clash or notify Governor Arthur of the deaths and outside knowledge of the massacre would have remained negligible had it not been for the decision of embittered VDLC agricultural superintendent Alexander Goldie to write a lengthy letter to Arthur in November 1829 mentioning the encounter. Goldie's letter to Arthur was one of confession of his own involvements in the killing of Aboriginals – notably the shooting and butchering with an axe a woman on a north-west beach two months earlier – and revealed:
There have been a great many Natives shot by the Company's Servants, and several engagements between them while their stock was in that district. On one occasion a good many were shot (I never heard exactly the number) and although Mr Curr knew it, yet he never that I am aware, took any notice of it although in the Commission of the Peace and at that time there was no proclamation against the Natives, nor were they (the Natives) at the time they were attacked at all disturbing the Company's flocks ..."
In a separate, scathing, 110-page letter to VDLC directors Goldie said Curr had personally encouraged the killing of other Aboriginals, offering rum on one occasion to any man who could bring him an Aboriginal head. Arthur responded to Goldie's accusations by asking Robinson to discover what he could about the incident when he ventured to the north-west region as part of his "friendly mission" to Aboriginal Tasmanians. It took until June the following year before Robinson arrived in the area, where on 16 June he interviewed Charles Chamberlain, one of the four convict shepherds involved. He recounted the conversation about events that were by then almost 21⁄2 years in the past:
Robinson: How many natives do you suppose there was killed?
Chamberlain: Thirty.
Robinson: There appears to be some difference respecting the numbers.
Chamberlain: Yes, it was so. We was afraid and thought at the time the Governor would hear of it and we should get into trouble, but thirty was about the number.
Robinson: What did you do with the bodies?
Chamberlain: We threw them down the rocks where they had thrown the sheep.
Robinson: Was there any more females shot?
Chamberlain: No, the women all laid down, they were most of them men.
Robinson: How many was there in your party?
Chamberlain: There was four of us.
Robinson: What had they done to you?
Chamberlain: They had some time before that attacked us in a hut and had speared one man in the thigh. Several blacks was shot on that occasion. Subsequently thirty sheep had been driven over the rocks.
Four days later Robinson questioned a group of Aboriginal women at a sealer's camp adjacent to Robbins Passage, east of Cape Grim/Kennaook. Some related the details of the spearing of Thomas John, the subsequent shooting of an Aboriginal chief and the return of tribe members a few days later to drive sheep off the cliff. They also described the massacre of 10 February, recounting how VDLC shepherds had taken by "surprise a whole tribe which had come for a supply of muttonbirds at the Doughboys, massacred thirty of them and threw them off a cliff two hundred feet in altitude".
On 10 August Robinson encountered convict William Gunchannon, another of the four who had been present at the massacre. Gunchannan admitted his involvement, estimating it had happened about six weeks after the destruction of the sheep, but was reluctant to provide detail. He told Robinson that the Aboriginal group attacked on 10 February had included men and women, but denied knowing whether any had been killed. Robinson later wrote that when he informed him that Chamberlain had already admitted a death toll of about 30, Gunchannan "seemed to glory in the act and said he would shoot them whenever he met them". Robinson did not interview the other two involved in the massacre: Richard Nicholson had previously drowned and John Weavis had since moved to Hobart.