Yesterday I was at Marion Bay, Tasmania ... site of one of the most haunting (and, unusually, non-violent) first contact episodes from the colonial era:
Abel Tasman's crew came ashore here on Dec. 1, 1642, the first anchorage they'd been able to find after struggling round the storm-racked south coast of the island.
They found evidence of people and what may have been Tasmanian tigers, but didn't *see* anyone in the open forest.
They saw a fireplace in a hollowed tree and climbing notches carved into a treetrunk to raid birds' eggs.
They concluded from the 5ft distance between the notches that the people must be giants.
They saw no one, but saw smoke from distant fires and heard the sound of a gong.
They saw geese and gulls and ducks, and found a type of samphire growing. That's still the case today.
gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/06005…
They thought the land was "not cultivated, but growing naturally by the will of God", while unwittingly contradicting themselves by noting the land is "covered with trees standing so far apart that they allow a passage everywhere and a lookout to a great distance".
That open forest is the result of the fire agriculture they noticed sending billows of smoke into the air. These days, the bush is almost impenetrable.
There's nothing there to mark what happened. And ro be honest I don't know why I find this passage so haunting. There's a Marie Celeste quality to the fact that they didn't see anyone (but were, surely, seen). Even the Tasmanian tiger is present only as footprints and excrement.
There's no shortage of horrible first encounters from this era, and of course Tasmania's later history is among the most brutal of the colonial era. But there's an odd, fairy-tale quality to this passage that's stuck with me.
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