‘Pirates’ and ‘savages' among the early 19th Century hunters nearly wiping out the seals on Kangaroo Island
The early Kangaroo Islanders fitted the image (left) of wild white men in journalist George Sutherland's Sixteen Stories of Australian Settlement and their life was described in W.A. Cawthorne's 1850s novel (at right).
From the Straitsmen, with a reputation as the “banditti of Bass Strait” who joined the whaling and sealing hunt along Australia’s southern coast in the early 19th Century, came the Islanders of Kangaroo Island.
The Islanders were described in a 1819 report as “complete savages, living in bark huts, clothed in kangaroo skins and smelling like foxes”. Major Edmund Lockyer in 1827 reported on sealers from Tasmania and Bass Strait who had worked their way right along Australia’s southern coast as “a complete set of pirates” with their chief “den” at Kangaroo Island.
The “pirates” and “savages” were Kangaroo Island’s sealers, ship deserters and runaway convicts from Sydney and Van Diemen’s Land. Apart from the kangaroos that they killed and ate, Kangaroo Island sealers were attracted by the island’s supply of salt that preserved the seal skins and made them much more valuable.
Joseph Murrell and his gang of six sealers were among the first to land on Kangaroo Island in 1806, in the wake of American captain Isaac Pendleton’s stay at American River on Kangaroo Island in 1803. Their time there was longer than they had anticipated; they had to exist almost entirely on wild animal meat until the men were found three years later. In 1809, Murrell arrived in Sydney from three years on Kangaroo Island on the vessel Eliza with 500 seal skins and 1,000 kangaroo skins. Murrell and his crew are believed to have been killed by Aboriginal people when their boat was wrecked on the coast of New South Wales in 1816.
Another early resident of Kangaroo Island was Robert Newman from about 1814. Peter Dillon, who collected salt from 1815 to 1816, had a crew member named Thompson, reportedly a Portuguese man who had previously been on Kangaroo Island and nearby islands for seven years. In 1817, 13 Europeans were reported as living on Kangaroo Island, subsisting on wild birds. Kangaroo Island's first permanent European residents arrived in 1819, among them George Bates and the self-styled “governor" Henry Wallen.
During captain George Sutherland's short stay on the island in 1819, more than 4,500 seals and 1,500 kangaroos were killed for their skins or meat . Captain John Hart, who frequently traded with the Islanders, took away 7,000 seal skins in 1832. Hart went on to become a successful merchant and politician in the colony of South Australia, becoming its premier three times.
The Islanders lived chiefly in northeastern Kangaroo Island as a refuge from the fierce southern seas that lashed the south coast. From these bases, the men in their whale boats were able to set up sealing colonies at places such as Thistle Island in St Vincent Gulf. The Islander community that developed comprised men who had shunned mainstream society, particularly sailors who’d jumped ship.
Kangaroo Island was effectively an unofficial outstation of Van Diemen's Land (settled in 1803). The island became useful for replenishing supplies of fish and kangaroo meat, fresh water for drink and wood for burning. Trade from passing ships was based on island products such as animal oil, whale bone, animal skins and fresh vegetables.
The island’s seals and kangaroos (that the sealers lived on) were hunted almost to extinction, and its dwarf emus wiped out by the 1830s. The sealing industry had peaked in the 1820s and the sealers hastened their own end by ignoring the valuable oil that could be extracted from the seals in favour of just slaughtering more for their skins.
In the early 1830s, hunters switched to southern right whales that passed close to Encounter Bay and Kangaroo Island on their annual migration west. A whaling station operated at Point Tinline for a few years. Whaling ships arrived from America, France, Van Diemens Land (Tasmania) and Sydney. By the 1830s, the whalers Socrates, Henry and Elizabeth were regular visitors from Hobart.
