It was at Risdon, early in 1804, that the unfortunate event took place that ushers in the sad story of the "Black War." A little tide creek flows into the Derwent, not far from the Bisdon farm. The sandstone ranges rapidly ascend from the water's edge, while vast masses of palaeozoic limestone in the neighbourhood rest as heavy buttresses by the river. This was the site of the massacre.
The composition of history makes us acquainted with the difficulties of learning the truth of a story. It is not merely the confusion of myth and fact. We are gradually arriving at the belief that all, or nearly all, the early history of nations has no reference at all to actual events or persons, but to statements of a foreign nature, mythological or astronomical. A Niebuhr first robs us of our faith in Romulus, a Max Müller strips the Vedas of their romance and theology, and even our own Saxon heroes, Hengist and Horsa, have dissolved into thin air. But when we leave, as we fancy, the region of myth, and come to very modern times—our own living era—other difficulties arise.
Such are the conflicting accounts, such the various ways of regarding the same object or circumstance, such the influences of personal character and interests involved in the narrative, that we are often puzzled with what might have been supposed the plainest facts of modern history. Archbishop Whately's myth of Napoleon, Mr. Kinglake's "Crimea," and the floating ideas upon the first settlement of Victoria, will serve to illustrate the remark.
The story of the first conflict of races in Tasmania is similarly involved in misty obscurity. To exhibit this difficulty of writing history, we need only to refer to the diary of the first colonial chaplain, the Rev. Robert Knopwood, who was only a few miles from the scene of war, who inquired into it of the very parties concerned in it, and who was accustomed to enter each day's occurrences in his journal. And yet all he could get to enter was the following: "Had heard different opinions—that they wanted to encamp on the site of Burke's hut, half a mile from the camp, and ill-used his wife—that the hut was not burnt or plundered—that the Natives did not attack the camp—that our people went from the camp to attack the Natives, who remained at Burke's house."
All we positively know is that one day there appeared on the
