Reynolds and Clements have used French exploration, missionary, settler, and official colonial records to reconstruct the life of Tongerlongeter of the Oyster Bay nation, whose Country extended from Bicheno along the coastline to the eastern bank of the Derwent. Reynolds and Clement deduce that Tongerlongeter was born sometime around 1790 and thus had a traditional childhood imbibing the warrior skills and physical culture of Australia’s First Nations. Much of his life was beyond the purview of British and European chroniclers, but the parameters of his experience on Country can be reconstructed from the historical evidence.

By 1823, thirty-eight settlers and their convicts had settled on Tongerlongeter’s Country. Some of his people had gone to live with white people in Hobart, while another of his remarkable compatriots, Kickertopoller, moved unhappily between two cultures. Young Kickertopoller, a contrasting personality to his elder, provides insight into the complex cultural frontier and growing threat from colonial expansion to Oyster Bay Country.

Tongerlongeter could have wiped out the European intruders in 1821, but Reynolds and Clements argue that, being aware of the Europeans’ propensity for violence, he showed restraint. The colonists were overwhelmingly men, and these men brought increasing numbers of convicts. In the 1820s, the male-to-female ratio was sixteen to one, a factor in sexual violence on a horrific scale. Oyster Bay women had endured abuse from sealers and mariners but now they suffered abduction, rape, and murder deep on their own Country. Men such as Tongerlongeter retaliated.

The horror of having your hearth violated in the middle of the night – men, women, and children snatched from their beds – was extreme. Oyster Bay men killed and wounded hundreds of white men, but they too suffered a high death toll. In 1828, Tongerlongeter entered into an alliance with Montpelliatta, chief of the Big River nation, whose Country stretched north-west of his. Their war parties operated in regions now all too familiar to tourists, roughly from Deloraine and Lake St Clair in the west with Ross, Oatlands, and Jericho in the geographical centre. The names Oyster Bay and Big River induced terror among settlers as attacks by their alliance increased threefold and they deployed new tactics.

In November 1828, Governor Arthur legitimised the established settler practice of shooting Aboriginal people on sight by declaring martial law. Tongerlongeter and Montpelliatta, as well as their families and fighting men, could no longer camp safely anywhere on Country; they sought refuge on Tasmania’s central plateau, while sporadically travelling south to attack settlers and plunder their huts. Anyone who has visited this region knows that the weather is unreliable, even in summer, but now the Oyster Bay–Big River people, their seasonal sojourns blocked by military sorties, were forced to remain in high country through winter. There was no time to stop and make furs; even fires were risky. They had witnessed death and brutality, needed to move constantly, and did not even have fires on sub-zero nights: this was war like no other in colonial history. Only the warmth of their hunting dogs saved Tongerlongeter’s people from hypothermia.

By the end of 1830, Tongerlongeter’s band numbered only forty or fifty people, but his greatest feats of endurance were yet to come. One October night his party was ambushed, two men and three women including Tongerlongeter’s wife (whose name was never recorded), were killed, and Tongerlongeter’s lower arm was smashed by musket shot. The group fled but somehow regrouped. Someone headed back to check what had happened to their kin, retrieved a knife from the camp, and successfully amputated and cauterised Tongerlongeter’s arm. Still they did not surrender.

Tongerlongeter remarried and in October 1831 his new wife gave birth to a son, but not before they were forced to slip through yet another military cordon on the Freycinet Peninsula. The pain of living like fugitives on their own Country had taken its toll: Tongerlongeter was ready to meet the missionary George Augustus Robinson. In December 1831, he agreed to Robinson’s Armistice, which included a vague promise that they would be allowed to return to Country. After an official meeting with Governor Arthur on 7 January 1832, Tongerlongeter and his remaining people were shipped to Robinson’s mission on Flinders Island. Tongerlongeter died there on 20 June 1837. He never saw his Country again.

More than 250 Europeans and probably two thousand First Nations peoples lost their lives, a per capita death toll greater than in any of Australia’s wars, but this extraordinary history is about more than just the Anzac tradition. Tongerlongeter’s story overlaps with other remarkable biographies that splinter the veneer of all-conquering Empire. There is Sarah Birch, who repeatedly intervened to save Kickertopoller from the gallows; the Black settler Gilbert Robertson, son of a West Indian slave and her Scottish master; and George Arthur, who towards the end of his term of office (1824–36) decried the bloodshed of his military aggression and lobbied the Colonial Office and other colonial governors to sign treaties with Indigenous peoples.

In this way, Tongerlongeter and the Oyster Bay–Big River nations helped to change the course of Empire. They waged war from the extremes of Tasmania’s high country, led by the indomitable Tongerlongeter, whose strength and valour make this history even more remarkable.