Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [129]
As his ship was drawing toward Van Diemen's Land, Harris wrote that there was talk of a large predator living on the island:
We know kangaroos to be in great abundance, and if accounts from Port Jackson [Sydney] and some persons who have been here can be credited, a quadruped not quite so pleasant to live in the neighborhood of, is also an inhabitant of Van Diemen's Land. Traces of a carnivorous beast have been found in many parts, like a leopard or panther, but I do not hear that any person belonging to the settlement has seen the animal itself.
When the Collins party landed, it sought out an existing military encampment. A ragtag group of marines and settlers had been sent to Van Diemen's Land the year before to prevent the French, who had also been exploring the region, from establishing their own colony there. The marines had set up their small garrison in Risdon about fifteen miles from the mouth of the Derwent River. But when the Collins party arrived, it was apparent how unpromising the Risdon site was. It had poor soil, brackish water, and little game. Collins asked Harris to investigate possible spots further downriver for relocating. In his explorations, Harris and another officer hit upon the site of what is now Hobart. As they prepared to set up the foundations of the town, Harris wrote to his brother in England that the location of Hobart was “the most beautiful & romantic Country I ever beheld.”
Such enthusiasm was one of the things that set Harris apart. Most settlers looked outward to the sea—for ships from home, for supplies from Sydney, for whaling vessels. Harris had not forgotten England, but he was also eager to look inward, to embrace Van Diemen's Land. For someone bred an English gentleman and who had lived his life in large towns, he was remarkably at ease in wild country, perhaps more at ease than anywhere else. Confronted with a new land, he was inherently alive to the natural abundance around him. Others were not so inspired. In fact, many found the antipodean landscape perverse.
As one early explorer wrote, “This land is cursed …the animals hop, not run, the birds run, not fly, and the swans are black, not white.”
Some settlers just couldn't get over the black swans. The European swan's whiteness supposedly represented purity and elegance. By contrast, Australia's black swans were perceived as devilish, suspicious, and unnatural. But Harris didn't see it that way. In a letter (his first written from Van Diemen's Land), he described “Black Swans in such astonishing numbers.… Mr. Mountgarret (the Surgeon) assured me that towards the head of the River, he had seen fifty thousand Swans in a flock—It is a great thing for us to have such a Supply of fresh meat, for they are excellent food, as white & good as any I ever eat in England.”
He had a similar reaction to Tasmania's trees. While other settlers were bemoaning the uselessness of eucalyptuses (their timber wasn't good for building ships), Harris was enthralled by them:
The hills and sides of Table Mountain [Mount Wellington] are covered with immense trees which all the year round are in verdure—some of the trees are of an incredible size. In an excursion I made a few weeks since towards the Mountains, I saw one tree the bottom of which was hollow & on the inside measured from side to side 14 feet 8 inches—& on the outside 44 feet round. It grew perfectly strait for full 160 feet before a single branch grew from it & was altogether the most stately tree I ever beheld.
The tree he described was a Eucalyptus regnans, the botanical marvel of the Southern Hemisphere.
Something more of Harris's happy nature can be gleaned from his detailing the members of his “domestic establishment” in an early letter to his mother.