George Augustus Robinson

George Augustus Robinson

George Augustus Robinson , also called Black Robinson , (born March 22, 1791, probably in London, † October 18, 1866 in Bath , England) was an Englishman who emigrated from England to Tasmania . By profession he was a builder and a preacher.

Robinson carried out the so-called Friendly Mission in Tasmania . It was supposed to be a rescue attempt for the last 300 Aborigines in Tasmania, which failed because they should be Christianized and because they were cut off from their cultural and social livelihoods in their new living environment. Robinson deported the Aborigines to the Wybalenna settlement on Flinders Island . He was Chief Protector of Aborigines ("Chief of Protection of the Aborigines") in the Port Phillip District from 1839 to 1849.

Life

Robinson had been married to Amelia Evans since 1814 and had five children with her. When he decided to emigrate to Hobart in Tasmania, he settled there in January 1824 as a builder and his wife and five children followed in April 1826. Amelia, his wife, died in 1848 and when he returned to England in 1853 he married Rose Pyne.

Friendly Mission

After the English established their first settlement on Tasmania in September 1803 with Risdon Cove , the first massacre occurred in May 1804 when the Royal Marines killed around forty Tasmanian Aborigines near Risdon. The ongoing conflicts between European settlers and Tasmania's Aborigines went down in history as the Black War, and it escalated in the 1830s.

Robinson was hired by the British in 1830 to investigate the Cape Grim massacre of 1828, and he found that 30 Aborigines had been massacred by whites. Robinson was supposed to act as an intermediary between the settlers and the Aborigines on behalf of the British and deport all Tasmanian Aborigines to Wybalenna on Flinders Island as part of the so-called Friendly Mission .

To deport the Aborigines, a human chain called the Black Line , which consisted of 500 soldiers, 700 settlers and 800 convicts and stretched from north to south of Tasmania , was set up. With the help of this warlike chain, during the implementation of which two Aborigines were killed, the British settlers succeeded in driving the Aborigines out of their ancestral tribal areas.

Robinson managed to win several Aborigines for his friendly mission. With their help it was possible for him to make the Aboriginal groups of the remote, unexplored areas submissive and to follow him into the reservation. Without ever using a firearm, he stayed in the midst of the chaos of war for more than five years, apart from short breaks, in the forests of the hinterland. With the help of the Aborigines who accompanied him on his travels, he learned their language.

He was friends with Truganini , one of the last purebred Tasmanian Aborigines. He protected them and provided them with shelter and food. With their help, he succeeded in pacifying the Big River Peoples and Oyster Bay Peoples at the end of 1835 and moving them to Wybalenna .

However, the friendly mission did not take place entirely without combat resistance. Walyer , an Aboriginal woman, gathered a group of women and men around her who taught her how to use guns. Walyer evaded Robinson's "capture attempts" and Robinson himself barely escaped an attack by the Tasmanian rebel group in 1830.

Robinson was in contact with all three hundred survivors during his mission. Less than four years after the Black Line, in April 1834 he had succeeded in deporting all the Aborigines from Tasmania to Wybalenna. However, eighty of the three hundred Aborigines died before they even reached Flinders. His plan to build the Wybalenna settlement on an island on Bass Strait was implemented. They were protected from the murderous settlers on the island. But Wybalenna on Flinders Island did not develop into a new home and living space, but rather a prison for the Aborigines, in which they perished and died away from their hunting grounds due to illness and homesickness. Of the 300 Aborigines who were resettled, only about 40 were still alive in the mid-1840s. The settlement was dissolved on December 31, 1849.

Robinson was named Chief Protector of Aborigines in March 1839 in 1839, who oversaw the Port Phillip Protectorate with five assistants. There he built the small settlement called Point Civilization , to which Aborigines were resettled under false prerequisites and promises. Above all, they should be Christianized.

In 1841 and 1842, Robinson traveled to Victoria , where he investigated the Convincing Ground Massacre that occurred in 1833 or 1834.

He returned to Europe in 1852, where he stayed temporarily in Paris and Rome and died in England in Bath in 1866.

Robinson services

Robinson's achievements must be viewed ambiguously, on the one hand he saved the Aborigines from the violent settlers for a short time, on the other hand his settlement concept was responsible for the wasting away and death of the Aborigines. His services to science and as a contemporary witness of the time are of great historical importance, if not undisputed, because at the time he documented the culture, there were no intact Aboriginal peoples left.

His ten-year commitment made him the greatest expert on Tasmanian culture and by far the most important contemporary witness for science. After a total of six trips with a total duration of four years through unpopulated areas, he won her trust, which he then gradually lost in the reservation, which he managed for three years.

It is thanks to his perseverance, his language skills and his extensive written records that a large number of ethnographic facts have survived. Their evaluation has not yet been finally completed. Scientists are mostly divided over both his person and the interpretation of his often contradicting notes. It must be remembered that traditional culture was largely destroyed by Robinson's Friendly Mission. In the chaos of war there were no longer any intact local Aboriginal groups.

Robinson in literature

Robinson's life was also reflected in literature. In 1983 the novel Doctor Wooreddy's Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World by the "aboriginal" writer Mudrooroo was published , which describes the point of view of the Aborigine Wooreddy, who even as a child had the vision that the end of the world was approaching and that he wanted to survive it. He therefore connects with Robinson by accompanying him on his friendly mission. He adapts to the Europeans and he and his wife Trugernanna ( Truganini ) can survive the deaths of all full-blooded natives of Tasmania. In this novel, Mudrooroo shows that the colonizers are unable to see the value of the culture they are destroying.

Robinson's notes were also used by Robert Drewe in his debut novel "The Savage Crows" as the basis for the historical narrative thread of the book, which deals with the extermination of the Tasmanian indigenous people.

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