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By 1814 there were so many many convicts had escaped in Tasmania, thatLachlan Macquarie decided to proclaim an general amnesty.
When the deadline for amnesty came, few surrendered and the colonists were frantic.
They were sure the entire convict population (then 1,900 souls) was ready to rise up and join the bushrangers in rebellion.
So Lieutenant governor Davey reacted like the soldier he was: He hoisted the red flag of defiance in Hobart and proclaimed martial law.
He then imposed a strict curfew, revoked all tickets-of-leave, forbade the sale of kangaroo skins and ordered that all kangaroo-dogs should he shot on sight, thus hoping to destroy the bushrangers' means of support. Kangaroo meat was the only fresh meat available for the convicts.
As a court-martial could hang anyone without reference to the criminal court in Sydney, Davey strung up as many bandits as he could catch, gibbeting their corpses in chains on a little island off the Hobart docks until they stank too much even for the wheeling, scavenging birds.
Although these summary proceedings somewhat damped the progress of banditry and rebellion in Van Diemen's Land, there were bushrangers Davey's troops could not catch.
That convict rebel leader was Michael Howe. He had served in the Yorkshire Army as a soldier. After some years of training, he deserted and was then caught robbing a stage coach on the King's Highway.
Transported to Van Diemen's Land , he arrived in 1812 at the age of 24, and absconded almost at once. By 1814, he and a fellow convict named Whitehead had brought together twenty-eight bushrangers, and moulded them into a disciplined convict rebel army. Many of these convicts he had helped to escape. His growing band was under military discipline, and each member had to swear an oath of alliance on a prayer book.
Howe was a natural leader, endowed with immense vitality and a gift for organisation. His army would eventually embrace almost two percent of the convict population of the island. By comparison the 1st. AIF also represented two percent of of Australia's population in 1914, as did the 2nd AIF in 1939.
He believed that Fate had singled him out as the convicts' instrument of revenge on the hated System. He invited the "slaves" on the farms he raided to join him but would never harm them if they refused. Many compared him to Dick Turpin and Robin Hood, robbing the rich and helping the poor.
Many more believed in him, and so he soon acquired a network of informers among assigned convicts and small farmers, and was thus able to hear about troop movements almost as soon as they began.
His favourite targets were those landowners with a reputation for treating convicts badly. One of these, was an especially hated "flogging magistrate" named Adolarius William Howe struck when he was away; burning his corn, running off hundreds of his Saxon merino sheep, and then trashing the house. Many convicts felt justified by this, and thus his reputation grew.
His army was so well regimented, it successfully waged war against the Colonial authorities and the 41st Regiment of Foot, staging rids on military garrisons and settlements on the outskirts of Hobart, gathering recruits as he went.
This continued for some years. It appeared he could not be stopped.
When his comrade, Whitehead, was captured near Launceston, Howe became sole leader. He continued recruiting new members and ranged across an area of some five hundred square miles, from Launceston in the north to Hobart in the south.
His position was so strong that he then declared himself "The Governor of the Ranges" and sent a letter to the Governor of Hobart stating he now controlled the bush outside the settlement.
Please Note: This is the first recorded Native Australian Land Claim. This declaration clearly stands in contradiction of the Imperial claim made at Port Jackson in 1788.
In 1816 he sent Governor Davey another letter, this time invited him to negotiate a pardon for him and his men, if they would "come in."
Governor Davey recognised that Howe’s "gang" had now grown into a full guerrilla army; and during these negotiations Howe taunted him about his growing strength - "I have not the least doubt but you are glad that those new hands are joining us, We are glad also." And again "We are as much inclined to take life as you are in your hearts; we could destroy all the parties you can send out."
Davey played it tough. "The Power of pardoning capital offences, rests solely with the Governor in Chief, but no application for favour can avail those who are in the daily Commission of the greatest outrages."
Thus the war went on, with the rebels generally winning, through to the end of Davey's administration and the arrival of the next lieutenant-governor, Colonel William Sorell, in 1817.
In that year, Michael Howe's luck began to run out. He had acquired a devoted aboriginal wife, Black Mary. One day, soldiers ambushed the couple. Howe managed to escape, but Black Mary, who was many months pregnant, could not keep up with him. In an exchange of shots, Black Mary was shot. The soldiers, anxious to cultivate Howe's image as a monster, claimed afterward that he had shot her in cold blood to stop her from talking. Howe insisted it was an accident.
But the jilted Black Mary, left painfully wounded on the ground by her lover wanted revenge, and she sought it, after she had recovered from the bullet and given birth, by volunteering to track him down. Even with her superb skills to guide them, the soldiers still could not catch up with him.
Howe now attempted to resume his negotiations with the new governor, Sorell. In an apparent effort to stop the war, the new lieutenant-governor offered him a conditional pardon for all of his crimes except murder and a strong-recommendation for clemency on the murder charge itself, if he would surrender himself and his force.
Howe returned to Hobart and began to plan a normal life but the Imperial Authorities failed to honour their side of the bargain. Howe realised that it was a trap and in September 1817 he fled back into the bush. The governor then formally revoked the idea of a pardon, declared him an outlaw again and put a price on his head.
Howe fled back into the bush to resume his war of liberation but now, without his army he was little more than an outlaw on the run.
Two "ticket of leave" men tried to capture him while he was asleep, but he outfought them, killing both.
In September 1818 he barely escaped from an ex-convict bounty hunter named John McGill, who had found him with the help of muskitoo, an aboriginal blacktracker imported from Sydney.
Then on 21 October 1818, three men surprised him while he was resting under a tree and beat him to death on the spot with their rifle butts. They cut off the head and carried it back to Hobart Town, where Sorell put it on public view, spiked to a base.
It seems clear that Howe could not possibly have stayed at large for almost five years without the sympathy, and active collaboration, of assigned slaves, ex-convicts and even free settlers in the area.
Michael Howe contributed an important step in the growth of our native born identity and culture. The earlier stirrings at Lord Howe and Tenerife were purely about escape, but at Castle Hill in 1804 and now here in Tasmania we were fighting back. We lost on the first couple of occasions that we fought back; but here in Tasmania we won.
Michael Howe also made our first Land Claim by declaring himself "The Governor of the Ranges"; but this term also suggests that he had very little awareness of Tasmania as an island or a defensible land mass.
What is missing here is a Sense of Place. Howe did not love Van Daemons Land, that just where they Transported him to. Therefore we were still very entirely English or Irish etc at this stage in our growth. That required level of identification with this place would not evolve within the growing national foetus until the recognition of the Currency Lads and Lasses in the 1820's and 30's.
