Page:Some account of the wars, extirpation, habits.djvu/120

112 But let us push forward, and soon a bend in the ever-winding road places the traveller in full view of the establishment at which the few remaining descendants of the first inhabitants of Tasmania are located. At this point, though the road has been gradually falling off for a mile or more, the traveller still finds himself at an elevation much above the level of the glen assigned them for their abiding place for the last few years of their still unexpired existence. Occupying now comparatively low ground, the landscape, though still eminently beautiful, is greatly reduced in extent, and most of the scene faintly described above is now shut out by nearer hills that we before stood above and looked over. But if the view were a hundred times more prepossessing than it is, its attractions would be scarcely observed at an instant that places before us an object, which, though mean and unimposing, is, on account of its inmates, the only thing the stranger traveller can look at.

Standing in view of this dreary edifice, rude though it is, and in vile contrast with the landscape around, both the eye and mind seem actually to refuse to rest on any other object. How, indeed, should it be otherwise, when we know that within the walls of that desolate-looking shealing are all who now remain of a once formidable people, whom a "thirty years war" with our own countrymen have swept into captivity, and their relatives to the grave; a war which, notwithstanding our ultimate success, we derived little credit from.

The glen in which they vegetate, rather than live, derives its name from the little inlet in front of it. Oyster Cove, a small arm of D'Entrecasteaux Channel, so abounding in mud-flats that a row-boat cannot reach the shore, except at high-tide. Between the beach and the building they occupy is a small salt marsh, but as the ground rises a little it improves in character, changing into a fertile alluvium, but of very limited extent, five or six acres only, all behind it being more barren, if possible, than the sand of the sea shore, producing nothing but useless herbage and forest trees dwarfed into mere bushes by the exceeding infertility of the land.

The building they inhabit a part of, is a long low narrow range formed of rough slabs, formerly occupied by a large body of convicts, nominally employed in cultivation, but in reality doing next to nothing, and the results of their labours are, therefore not very perceptible. The barrack is an irregular quadrangle, enclosing a space of about half an acre, the walls of which appear to me not more than seven feet high, pierced with dimunitivediminutive [sic] windows that afford little light and less ventilation, and you seem to feel their unwholesomeness the moment you enter them,