…Once it was realized that Tasmania was an island, it acquired a peculiar usefulness to the Europeans- more specifically, to the British, the pacemakers of European progress then and the most irrepressible expansionists the world has known. When the war of American independence lost this vigorous people their possessions in the west, they turned to Australia as a usefully remote destination for their castoffs and ne’er-do-wells, and since 1788 they had maintained a penal colony at Port Jackson in New South Wales, the site of Sydney. For this sad settlement, it seemed to the British, Tasmania would be a convenient outstation.
Tasmania had been discovered in 1642 by the Dutchman Abel Tasman, who called it Van Dieman’s Land- a name it was to keep until 1855- and three French expeditions had visited the island; but in September, 1803, a small party of Englishmen, convicts under military guard, sailed from New South Wales to the southeastern coast of the island, and planted a settlement on the east bank of the Derwent River, hoisted the Union Jack and claimed the area for their own.
Risdon Cove, where Lieutenant John Bowen, his soldiers, and his criminals pitched their tents, remains much as it was then, and its character is relevant to our narrative. Across the river the city of Hobart, approached today by a high-humped concrete bridge, cheerfully surrounds its harbor. There are yachts here and attractive white suburbs. Incongruously amid this cheerful scene stands Risdon Cove. Once the city tried to make a memorial park of it, but now it has been abandoned and the muddy water of a creek, oozing through the grassy bottom, makes it all dank.
It is not a scene that speaks of enterprise or adventure; it is a low-spirited place, enervated still, one fancies, by the miseries and squalors of its origins. ( to be continued)…