Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this article mentions people now passed.
It is 250 years since the clash of Marion Dufresne’s men with Aboriginal people and, in all likelihood, the first killing of an Australian Aboriginal person by a European. I don’t assert that this was the first ever such event, but it is certainly the first documented.
I feel moved to comment.
Marc-Joseph Marion Dufresne had already led an adventurous life as a naval warrior when he mounted a largely self-funded expedition from Mauritius in 1772 to return the Tahitian man, Aotourou, to his native island and to explore the southern seas. Aotourou had gone to France with the earlier French explorer, Bougainville. He didn’t get home – he died of smallpox in Madagascar before Marion’s voyage had crossed the Indian Ocean. The expedition, however, went on.
Marion Dufresne had knowledge of Abel Tasman’s charts, so when he arrived in Van Diemonian waters, he anchored where Tasman had 130 years before – in what we call North Bay, off what was later named the Forestier Peninsula by another Frenchman, Nicolas Baudin. This has all been documented years ago by the great historian of the early European explorers, Ed Duyker.
Two boats went ashore at “a very beautiful sandy cove” on March7, the men looking for water, when a band of the native people, estimated to be about 40 strong, was encountered. At first, all went well, especially when Marion got two of his sailors to undress, to the delight of the Aboriginal people, but when a third ship’s boat approached, the Aboriginal men became fearful of attack, and they attacked the sailors with stones and spears. (This account is all from the French side, of course.) When a further landing attempt met resistance and some Frenchmen were wounded, Marion Dufresne ordered his men to fire, and to give chase. Several Aborigines were reported killed “and many wounded”, but only one body was secured.
It was that of a “young man of about twenty: five feet three or four inches tall, his hair was black, woolly and very hard, and in the front was powdered with a red dust. He had very little beard, his face and his body were blackened; on his chest he had several little scars or black marks in a crescent shape.”
After this debacle, Dufresne, still following Tasman’s track, sailed east to New Zealand where he and 24 of his crew met their deaths in a clash with Māori people. I don’t know if you could call this a pattern of violence, but certainly a serial failure of diplomacy.
Thus, the first time any Europeans met the native people on Tasmanian shores at least one Aboriginal person was killed – and almost certainly more. This is also, probably, the first time an indigenous Australian was killed by a European. Cook’s 1770 expedition had no fatal clashes with indigenous people – in Australia at least. And the earlier visits of the Englishman, William Dampier, and the voyage of the Dutch yacht Duyfken to northern Australia, similarly had no fatal results. Such an event may have occurred earlier in western Australia, as Dutch ships were wrecked there in the 17th and 18th centuries and shipwreck survivors may well have clashed with the local inhabitants, but this is unknowable. What is known, is that fatal clash at North Bay 250 years ago was a harbinger of what was to come.
. . .
About 25 years ago I was listing all the heritage sites of the Tasman and Forestier Peninsulas for the Heritage Council. I included the site of the killing, at the northern end of North Bay on the Forestier Peninsula, in my list. The site where Tasman’s carpenter swam ashore in 1642 and raised the Dutch flag is about ten minutes’ walk away. Both are sites of great significance to all Tasmanians – indigenous and non-indigenous – if for different reasons. I don’t know if either recommendation actually made it on to the Heritage Register. Registrations seemed to take a great deal of time back then and successful registrations tended to be of colonial buildings, not places of such abstract concepts and fuzzy boundaries.
A man I greatly respect, Rod Dillon, thinks we should change the name of Marion Bay to the name of the man killed at North Bay. But I don’t see how anyone can know the name of that young man who was killed 250 years ago, and he wasn’t killed in what we call Marion Bay; he was killed in North Bay, a pretty neutral term. Nor do we know the name of the sailor who fired the fatal shot.
By all means change the name of Marion Bay, but please, please, honour the place where that young man was actually killed. It is well known, but completely un-marked, unlike Tasman’s landing site, which has a stone obelisk, erected in 1923. That memorial, by the way, doesn’t have the name on it of the bloke who actually swam ashore there with the Dutch flag at a little stony bay now called Tasman’s Bay. So I am going to give at least one of the minor characters in these early dramas and tragedies the dignity of his own name – the flag planter was called Pieter Jacobsz.
I can’t do that for the young Aboriginal man killed on March 7, 1772. I can only honour his memory as an “unknown soldier” – mort pour la patrie. He died for his Country. We could at least put up a monument.
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.
