Land enjoys the great advantage of being free from a native population. This most cruel step
seems to have been quite unavoidable, as the only means of stopping a fearful succession
of robberies, burnings, and murders committed by the blacks; and which sooner or later
must have ended in their utter destruction. I fear there is no doubt, that this train of evil and
its consequences, originated in the infamous conduct of some of our countrymen. Thirty
years is a short period in which to have banished the last aboriginal from his native island,
and that island nearly as large as Ireland ... I do not know a more striking instance of the
comparative rate of increase of a civilized over a savage people ... They were then removed
to Gun Carriage Island, where food and clothes were provided them. I fear from what I
heard at Hobart Town, that they are very far from being contented: some even think the race
will soon become extinct.This thought was correct as by 1840 the last surviving Tasmanian Aborigines living
in exile numbered only a hundred and Darwin’s sad prediction came to pass almost
forty years later when the ‘official history’ tells us that last remaining full-blooded
member of the Tasmanian Aborigines, a woman called Truganini, died at Oyster Cove
outside Hobart.
Darwin felt he had achieved very little in Australia because he was no longer able to
spend enough time ashore to make ‘connected and therefore interesting’ observations.
He was anxious to get back to England, not only to reunite with his family after such
a long absence but also to commence work on the study of all the natural history
collections he had sent home, and the journal and books that he intended to write.
From Hobart he wrote a letter to his cousin William Fox complaining that since the
Beagle completed its surveys of South America, its only remaining task has been to
complete its chain of longitude determinations around the world:
Now that the object of our voyage is reduced simply to Chronometrical Measurements a
large portion of time is spent making passages. – This is to me so much existence obliterated
from the page of life. - I hate every wave of the ocean with a fervour, which you, who have
only seen the green waters of the shore, can never understand.From Hobart the Beagle sailed to the settlement at King Georges Sound in Western
Australia, now Albany, to take their final chronological measurement in Australia and
then towards home. Darwin is more than happy to say goodbye to Australia as he
wrote:
Farewell Australia, you are a rising infant and doubtless some day will reign a great princess
in the South. But you are too great and ambitious for affection, yet not great enough for90 Where Australia Collides with Asia
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