No 38 Kangaroo Island Early Days

The previous article on Kangaroo Island dealt chiefly with the days before civilisation came and before South Australia was founded. The present article tells the story of the coming of the first emigrant ships, the kind of lives the pioneers led, and interesting episodes of the early days of settlement, prior to the removal of the emigrants to the mainland

Meet the Governor, Mr. Wallen!

You have never heard of his Excellency, you say. Well, for that matter, neither had Samuel Stephens, first manager of the South Australian Company, when he stepped ashore at Nepean Bay on July 27, 1836, from the deck of the Duke of York.

I want you to note that date, for it really marks the birth of South Australia. You will observe that this ship, the first to arrive from England with emigrants, cast anchor in South Australian waters almost exactly five months before the Buffalo brought Governor Hindmarsh. Not that the Buffalo went to Kangaroo Island. It was the first of the emigrant vessels to miss that cradle of the State.

In searching the earliest records of Kangaroo Island you are liable to come across five names— Walker, Warland, Worley, Wallen, and Whalley. But in variably they refer to the same man. He was most generally known as “Governor Walker,” but there is reason to believe his proper name was Robert Wallen. In this article I will hence forth call him Wallen. He was a strange figure, who regarded himself as 'lord of the island,' and his right to the title was openly acknowledged by the other white residents of the place — the lawless community of whom I wrote last week.

I am unable to give you a description of this man, about whom fantastic legends will doubtless arise as the years go by. But he was undoubtedly one of the oldest, probably the oldest, of the pre-colonisation residents. Even in 1836 he was the subject of many contradictory stories, and, as it is impossible for me to pick out the true from the false, I will give you both, and let you choose for yourself.

For instance: — One early record de scribes him as an escaped criminal from Van Diemen's Land. The legend is that he stole an open boat in Tasmania, and in it, with a female companion, crossed to Kangaroo Island. There, by the axiom, “Might is right,” he established dominion aver the gangs of cutthroats who were then the terror of the southern seas. That doesn't suggest he was the gentle sort of creature depicted in the next para graph.

The other view is that of one of the early settlers who met him when he came to the coast to see what the emigrant ships meant by invading his domains. This writer refers to him as "an hospitable, companionable man, averse to strong drink," with a distinct preference for native tea.

For my own part, I cannot imagine a man who cowed murderers, pirates, and wreckers as being even an ordinary, everyday saint like you and me. Perhaps Wallen presented one side of his character to the emigrants, and another to the sealers.

The Two "Governors"

So far as I have been able to estimate the character of Samuel Stephens, he was a pompous, self-important little man with a very great opinion of himself, who ruled the company's minor employes with something more than a rod of iron. On the voyage from England he married Miss Beare, daughter of the second in command of the S.A. Company, and ancestor of the Australian scientist. Sir Thomas Hudson Beare Stephens did not long survive his arrival in South Australia, a fall from his horse a few months later terminating his life.

This man was the first adult emigrant to land on South Australian soil. When he did so he imagined he was the first white man on the island. He and his companions proceeded to erect the first house. This was a mud hut. They surrounded it with a battery, and hoisted the British ensign over the top.

It was at this stage that Wallen came along to see what these unusual proceedings meant. The meeting of the two provided an excellent piece of comedy.

"Who are you?" demanded Stephens, surveying the big figure in kangaroo skins with something of contempt.

"I'm the Governor?" answered Wallen.

"You're no such thing," Stephens retorted indignantly, "I'm the Governor here."

"I tell you I am," reiterated Wallen, staring defiantly at the little man. "Who made you Governor?" he added. "Why, you're not even one of King John's men— and you don't stand 4 feet in your stockings."

With a gesture of contempt he wheeled on his heel and returned to "Government House'"— a hut in a clearing in the bush about nine miles from Kingscote.

But "Governor" Wallen knew that his absolute monarchy was at an end. The fluttering emblem of Britain's might told him that. The incident was the birth of law and order.

Gang Attack Settlers

The advent of the colonists was not the peaceful kind of thing the immigrants had believed it would be. The sealing gangs had too long been used to their own way of conducting affairs to welcome the interference of “strangers.” They stood the new conditions for several months, and then made one last desperate attempt to get rid of their unwelcome companions. Dr. Leigh records in his diary: —

"June 6— A great disturbance took place last night. Some of the wretches who have resided on the island, gaining for years a precarious existence, hurried down upon our tents at mid night with firebrands, with a view to burning us all out. The villains had set fire to the country, in many places of a circumference of three miles, and the conflagration at such an hour, the uproar caused by the capture of some of the ringleaders, the shouts of men, and the screams of women and children, formed a scene which I never wish again to witness."

Dr. Leigh does not state why the "wretches" chose the middle of winter to set fire to the country when they could have done it much more effectively the previous summer.

More About Wallen

So far as I know, Wallen had nothing whatever to do with this piece of savagery. But if he had. I think my sympathies would still have been with him. He was badly treated by the men who represented the South Australian Company in those days, and was entitled to kick back at the people who ruined him.

I told you he had a farm where, with the aid of his native wives, he lived a life of ease and luxury— fowls, pigs, vegetables, corn, and game sup plying all his needs. Well, one of the first acts of the company was to order him to give up all this land— which was rightfully his. They took his land and sold his stock, paying him such a ridiculous sum for the animals as morally to constitute a theft. We have Dr. Leigh's word for it that "when he received the money he went to a wine shop, and from a happy, industrious king of the Island, became a ruined outcast, a wandering drunkard, obliged to labor on a spot of land— his own by every law of possession."

Wallen died suddenly in Adelaide in 1858. His body was sent back to Kangaroo Island to be buried amongst the wilds over which he exercised sway from his arrival there about 1819 until colonisation put an end to his primitive rule.

First Eight Ships

It is a never-ending source of fascination to me to consider the kind of ships in which our ancestors made their perilous voyages over 12,000 miles of stormy ocean to these Austral lands. Imagine, the John Pirie, 105 tons, and the Rapid (Colonel Light's ship), 161 tons, and the Emma, 164 tons. Why, we wouldn't use them as lifeboats today!

It required nerve and something more to venture one's life in such cockle shells for six months or so, and at the end of that exhausting period not to know the wild, untamed country for which they were destined. Presently, I will give you a picture of the conditions under which the early settlers lived on Kangaroo Island. But I cannot convey the heartaches, desperation almost, and despair which seized the pioneers— the tears of the women, and the curses of the men — on finding themselves often foodless, rain-soaked, and almost abandoned by those who had induced them with rosy promises to come to these far-off shores. It's an aspect rarely touched on, forgotten now by we who followed — yet bitterly poignant in the days of '36. But if there was tragedy, there was comedy, too.

Eight ships came to Kangaroo Is land before the Buffalo cast anchor, in Holdfast Bay. Some of them were three months before Adelaide was proclaimed. Their names, their tonnage, and the dates of their arrival were:—

• 1836— July 27— Duke of York (200 tons).

• July 30— Lady Mary Pelham (206 tons).

• August 16— John Pirie (105 tons).

• August 20 — Rapid (161 tons).

• September 11 — Cygnet (239 tons).

• October 5 — Emma (164 tons).

• November 6— Africaine (316 tons).

• November 26— Tam o' Shanter (360 tons).

• The Buffalo was a veritable leviathan of 850 tons.

Early Kingscote

Here is Kingscote in March, 1837 — eight months after the first emigrant ship got there.

The town was being built on the slope of the hills, which were covered by an impenetrable jungle. There was a solitary white cottage on one slope, the residence of "S. Stephen, Esq.," manager of the South Australian Company. On the brow of a hill, looking down a steep precipice in to the sea, were half a dozen wooden huts, which housed the "farmer emigrants." On the beach, the skeleton of a storehouse being erected by the company, and four or five huts built of bushes. Being Sunday morning, divine service was to be held in one of these bush houses. Settlers in their Sunday best were gathering, summoned by a bell hung in a neighboring tree.

Now let us visit the typical home of a settler of the better class— Thomas Beare, father-in-law of Stephens. Imagine, please, a large tent like the eating booth of a country fair, set in the centre of five or six gum trees. Outside it a fireplace roughly made of stones, over which was suspended an iron pot. All cooking done in the open air. A bench running almost the entire length of the front of the tent, littered with boxes containing pigeons, native parrots, cooking and agricultural implements, and all around you poultry scratching and eating, and apparently the only living thing enjoying this new-found free dom. Women and children "pigging it" like natives amid the flies, and the scorpions, and the unavoidable fleas which swarmed in the sand by mil lions. A few yards away from you "a melancholy jungle, where the bushes grow so thick that I am afraid to go 20 paces, lest I should never find my way out again."

Yet that was heaven compared with the lot of the humbler people, brought to the province by extravagant pictures of easily-gained wealth to be had in the new land for the taking. Many men had thrown up good positions in England and crossed the tempestuous seas in tiny ships, risking lives and fortunes, to find themselves at the end of the voyage abandoned to a life of hardship in the strangest surroundings.

Tears And Desperation

Let us wander amongst the poorer people, living in tents, or in bush huts, furnishing little shade in summer and less shelter in winter.

Here is a man who threw up his secure job in the old country to seek riches in the new. He lives in a tent with his wife and four children. Another child is expected soon. It is the wet season, and the rain pours down incessantly. The delicate woman drags herself wearily about her house hold duties, her peevish and' unhappy children clinging to her wet skirts— for the floor is nothing but liquid mud, and water oozes steadily through the roof of the tent.

Is it any wonder that she falls ill? There is no doctor available, no skilled advice. The poor husband must nurse his wife the best way he can look after the children, and "do" for himself. No invalid comforts to be had for the sick woman. Even ordinary provisions not available.

Amid these dreary surroundings another little human mite is added to the community, and one is taken away — for the mother dies.

That is not the fanciful picture of a vivid imagination. it is fact— hard, cruel, implacable, but absolutely true.

See this small group of men shivering around a common fire. They are discussing island politics. And they have something to discuss—the indecision of the authorities, who never seem to know their own minds. They had been provided with axes and saws earlier in the day, and told to clear the bush for the erection of huts. They cleared a large space, and in the course of doing so, some of them were injured through their neighbors' trees falling on them. Then, when the hard job was finished, and they had seated themselves to eat a well-earned meal, word arrived that the "big wigs" had changed their minds, and the settlement was to be somewhere else.

Do you wonder that the air almost turned pink, so saturated was it by the profanity of the men, or that it is recorded—"By the end of the week everyone heartily repented of having migrated"?

The Heavy Hand

So far there was no Governor in South Australia. The Company was supreme. There was no questioning its "Do this" and "Do that." The most impossible demands were made on the settlers. They had to be obeyed, for there was no court of appeal.

Here is an instance of the kind of petty tyranny practiced on the unfortunate employes. One man, a cooper by trade, was ordered to join a whaler as a member of the crew, and to take his wife with him as a stewardess. This meant leaving their children behind to be cared for by strangers. The man represented truth fully enough that he had had no experience of the sea. that he was a bad sailor, and that confinement on a ship was certain to affect his health. "Mr. S.," we are told, "informed him he was a scoundrel, and should have no more employment from the Company until he did go."

The man didn't go. The case aroused such indignation among the settlers that they combined together, scant as provisions were, to keep the man and his family until he was in a position to help himself. Eventually he made good.

Tame Rats

If the things I have told you have not damped your ardor to go pioneering—provided you ever had any— I will give you another case. Half a dozen men were endeavoring to sleep in the open because it was too hot in the tents. So they sat round the fire—not so much to keep themselves warm as to keep away the mosquitoes, the fleas, and the other affectionate vermin so attached to them that It couldn't leave them.

But the worst trouble of the lot was rats— not the slinking, self-effacing creatures at which one absentmindedly aims the milk jug as one glimpses them scurrying across the kitchen floor, but big friendly fellows which sat on their haunches eyeing the men benevolently the while the latter wondered drowsily whether the doch and doris before retiring could produce such astonishing results.

The fact of the matter was these rats were quite tame. They watched you like a faithful dog while you were awake, and the moment you closed your eyes they playfully climbed over you, and ate the lining out of your cap.

So between the rats, the scorpions, the tarantulas, the fleas, and the buzzers you got about as much sleep as a suspect undergoing the third degree. The only remedy was to take turns at watching while the others slept. That would probably have been successful except that too often the watchman forgot his job, and slept at his post.

Herr Menge

I want you to make the acquaintance of Herr Menge, South Australia's first geologist. We have come across him once or twice in previous articles, but we have never stopped to make introductions. This time it is not I who will make him known, but a pioneer who met him on the island in '36 (Mrs. Alfred Watts). She has given an interesting if not flattering glimpse of the curious old German of whom Angas had such a high opinion.

"Among the first inhabitants the "A's" became acquainted with," she wrote of the meeting of nearly a hundred years ago, “was a strange old Teuton geologist from the Hartz Mountains, who had been engaged by the Company to explore the country for minerals, find water (which he never could, though it was close beside his cottage door), and for various scientific purposes. In his outward appearance he more resembled one of that hook-nosed fraternity, the old clothes man, minus the three hats, than a respectable Christian gentleman; and his manners and habits were no more prepossessing than was his personal appearance. Cold water, soap, tooth brushes, and clean linen were evidently regarded by him as unnecessary luxuries for a new colonist to indulge in."

Despite this unpleasant picture, Menge was a clever fellow, eccentric enough, but interesting. He spoke twenty langauges. When his period of service with the Company came to an end he took up his abode in a hollow tree near Mount Crawford, and lived like a wild man of the woods. He had a childish, misplaced faith in human nature, and this led him one day to entrust his specimens to a wandering stranger, with instructions to deliver them to an Adelaide jeweller. This collection was worth £200. The jeweller never received them, nor did Menge ever again hear of them. It was not long after this incident that Menge died.

Comedy Of A Banquet

This is the story of the first visit of Governor Hindmarsh to the island, not a great time after the proclamation of the province. I call it a comedy. Probably my women readers, placing themselves in the shoes of the hostess who is the heroine of the piece, would be more inclined to term it a tragedy.

In 1837 communication between the Island and the mainland was not so easy as it is today— not that I regard the arrangements of 1932 as equal to modern requirements, but I will have something to say on that score later. There was no telegraphic service; in fact, the telegraph as we know it was not invented. It was a period when provisions were scarce on the island — almost a chronic condition those days.

The manager of the South Australian Company when this incident happened was William Giles. He, of course, was the big-wig of the island, and to him fell the duty of entertaining distinguished visitors.

One day he received advice that the Governor would pay an official visit to the birthplace of the State the following day. Now, as I said, provisions oh the island were short, the Giles's had just moved into new quarters, the house was littered with cases of furniture, unhung curtains, kitchen utensils, and all the paraphernalia of a complicated moving job, and if the place resembled anything at all it was chaos in a hurry. On top of this came the notification that in less than twenty-four hours his Excellency would arrive with his staff. Giles made a hasty calculation, and found he would have to give a banquet for twenty-four persons.

Then began an unforgettable domestic struggle to bring order out of confusion. The banquet was the bug bear. Up to the morning of the Governor's arrival, provisions could not be procured for love nor money. A man dispatched to 'the farm' returned with a loin of mutton and four eggs, and the information that that was all the island could provide — for a banquet for twenty-four. Mrs. Giles was in despair. The cook was nearly crazy. Messenger after messenger, dispatched as a sort of forlorn hope, returned empty-handed from a quest in every part of the diminutive province. It looked as if that banquet would be as lean as a Treasury credit balance.

Governor's Glass Eye

But, like most other impromptu efforts, the dinner was an unqualified success. Lying in the harbor was a small vessel, the Goshawk. In her extremity, Mrs. Giles appealed to the captain to help her. And he did— right royally. He dispatched to the house a boatload of provisions— English hams, cheese, tins of soup, roast veal, preserved fruits, and wines. And, when the question of payment arose, he refused to accept a penny piece.

One incident during that meal is worth recording before I pass on. The daughter of the hostess kept staring at his Excellency. His eyes fascinated her. There was something so cold and strange about his orbs that finally she could constrain her curiosity no longer. Throwing etiquette out of the window, she turned to her neighbor, a young naval officer.

"What is wrong with the Governor's eye?" she enquired.

“Glass,” was the laconic reply.

Images

• Birthplace of the State. This is probably one of the most historic pictures ever published in South Australia. It shows the actual site of the landing of the first settlers at Nepean Bay, Kangaroo Island, on July 27, 1836 — five months before the province was proclaimed. The uprights are all that remain of the jetty built by the South Australian Company to land the stores.

• Remains of the house of Samuel Stephens, first manager of the South Australian Compay, and the first adult settler to set foot in the province. Incidentally, it is on section 1, the first section surveyed.

NEXT WEEK— Kangaroo Island (concluded).