Australian Dictionary of Biography

Kikatapula (Kickerterpoller), 1832, by Thomas Bock

British Museum

Kikatapula (?–1832) (historically Kickerterpoller, alternatively Kikatamana), Palawa resistance leader, known to colonists as Black Tom, Black Tom Birch, and Birch’s Tom, was born into the Paytirami (Poredareme) band of the Oyster Bay people, the largest Palawa nation. Their country encompassed some of the best Lutruwita (Tasmanian) grassland, including the Midland Plain. He is likely to have been born around 1800. His parents’ names are unknown and any siblings he might have had are not recorded as such. His cicatrices suggest he had gone through Ceremony at a young age, and he was noted for his hunting prowess and knowledge of several Palawa languages or dialects.

Kikatapula first appeared in historical records on 17 February 1819, when he was about seventeen years of age. Sick or injured, he was baptised in Hobart Town that day with the name Thomas. He then convalesced with the wealthy physician, merchant, and landowner Thomas Birch and his wife Sarah. For most of the next four years he worked for the family, mostly as a farmhand, and learned to read, write and speak English. But when Birch died in December 1821, management of all his lands was entrusted to Edmund Hodgson, who subsequently married the widowed Sarah. Kikatapula was subjected to Hodgson’s ‘abusive and mercurial governance’(Cox 2021, 33), to the point that in late 1822 he quit to join the group colonists called ‘the tame mob’ (Bonwick 1870, 93)—a homogeneous band of Palawa who gathered near colonisers’ settlements and occasionally received subsistence—which was led by Musquito, probably an Eora (Gai-Mariagal) man, exiled from New South Wales.

Of fluctuating size, Musquito’s mob remained mobile and peaceable until November 1823, when they camped at an isolated sheep-run at Grindstone Bay, on the Country of the Oyster Bay people. After stockkeepers sexually assaulted one of Musquito’s wives and shot a Palawa woman in the back, Kikatapula incited a reprisal in which two of the stockkeepers were killed. Although wounded, another escaped. While Musquito remained on the east coast, leading retaliations for settlers’ reprisal attacks, Kikatapula returned to Hobart in December. He was soon seized and sentenced to Macquarie Harbour penal settlement for inciting the Grindstone Bay killings. But Sarah Birch, now Mrs Edmund Hodgson, interceded, and he was released.

After rejoining Musquito in January 1824, Kikatapula participated in several deadly attacks on settlers, and led one on a farm near Jericho, on the Country of the Muwinina people. In June he besieged Lovely Banks, a Hodgson property near Melton Mowbray, seeking revenge against Hodgson’s past mistreatment. Hodgson was away, but Kikatapula was placated by Sarah, who was present, and persuaded to cease hostilities and work for her as a farmhand. Two months later Kikatapula, while driving a team of bullocks to Hobart, discovered that Musquito had been captured and was in gaol, charged with abetting murder. He briefly returned to Lovely Banks, then rejoined Musquito’s mob, leading them into Hobart in November to plead for their leader’s life. But when Musquito was sentenced to death in December, they angrily decamped, and in March 1825 killed two stockkeepers in reprisal.

For the next two years Kikatapula waged unrelenting war on settlers, gaining such notoriety that a Hobart newspaper called for him to be lynched immediately on capture. His hostility intensified when two fellow Paytirami were executed in September 1826 for revenge-killing a stockkeeper. He prosecuted a campaign of reprisal that ranged beyond the Country of the Oyster Bay people, from the Clyde/Shannon region of the central highlands to sixty miles (about 100 km) away in the central north, then back to the south in Derwent valley and the central highlands. But on 9 December 1826 he was captured by a small party of police and soldiers at Pitt Water after a surprise dawn attack on his camp led to the massacre of fourteen of his followers. He and nine other survivors were held in the Sorell gaol for a month, during which Palawa resistance in Tasmania virtually ceased. However, he was freed because the authorities feared that if he was tried, his sworn testimony (only admissible because he had been baptised) would have allowed him to report the massacre. This might have incriminated Chief District Constable Alexander Laing and Police Magistrate James Gordon, and potentially led to charges of murder.

Over the following ten months Kikatapula led assaults on white settlers over a vast area, leading hit-and-run attacks around the central highlands, the midlands, and the northern Midlands, followed by a series of lethal raids around Quamby Bluff on the central plateau, forty-five miles (70 km) north-west of Campbell Town, then veering south again to strike in the central highlands and in the Derwent Valley. There, near New Norfolk, he was captured on 13 November 1828. Charged with murder, he was held in Hobart gaol for eight months, before being released in July 1828, on condition that he not re-offend, to guide a roving party led by Gilbert Robertson (soon to be appointed a chief district constable) as part of Arthur’s campaign to remove Palawa from what he decreed were the island’s settled districts. While waiting for Robertson to start out, Kikatapula worked as a clerk at the gaol, and on Sundays assisted with services in the Floating Chapel in Sullivans Cove, Hobart.

In November 1828 Robertson’s party made its first sortie to eject Palawa from the Richmond police district. Kikatapula guided the party to its only success: the capture of Umarrah (or Eumarrah, also known as Multiyalakina or Kahnneherlargenner), chief of the Tayarinutipana or Stoney Creek band of the north midlands nation, and four of his followers. Umarrah was a resistance leader and a traditional enemy of Kikatapula, whose part in the capture was praised by Robertson and the Hobart press. But during two subsequent wide-ranging sorties—the second from 12 January to 27 February 1829, the third from March sporadically to December—Kikatapula constantly led Robertson’s party away from places where it was likely to find Palawa, and encouraged other Palawa roving-party guides to emulate him. Although Palawa raids were frequent in the area Robertson was patrolling, there were no further captures.

That December the government ordered Kikatapula to leave Robertson to join George Augustus Robinson’s ‘friendly mission’ as guide, hunter, interpreter, and negotiator. Aiming to ‘conciliate’ Palawa in the south-west, west, and north-west, Robinson set out from Hobart on 27 January 1830 and did not return until 17 January the following year. Although Robinson praised his loyalty, he came to recognise that Kikatapula had sabotaged whenever possible the mission’s objective of persuading Palawa to allow Europeans to occupy the land without further hindrance.

In March 1831 Robinson attempted to settle Kikatapula and other Palawa on Gun Carriage (Vansittart) Island in Bass Strait, but in June took them on a mission into the north-east to locate the absconded Umarrah. Kikatapula then became part of Robinson’s endeavour to locate the remnant Oyster Bay and Big River peoples. After an arduous trek through the north-east and east, they turned west into the central highlands, where they located the few remaining hostile Palawa, and persuaded them to cease their resistance on 31 December 1831. This group ceremonially marched into Hobart on 7 January 1832, thereby ending the so-called ‘Black War.’ Kikatapula was briefly sent to Flinders Island, to which the Vansittart Island establishment had been moved, before rejoining Robinson’s expedition into the north-west on 9 March 1832. He died of dysentery at Emu Bay (now Burnie) on about 14 May 1832. Since he had been baptised, he received the first Christian burial in that settlement.

Kikatapula was said to have been notably tall with a remarkable scar on his forehead. He is known to have had had at least two relationships with women, including with another of Robinson’s guides, Pagerly (also known as Tuereringher), a Nununi widow from Bruny Island, and possibly with a woman recorded only as Black Kit (d. 12 July 1827). There is no record of children. Being involved in both the Palawa defence of their lands, and Robinson’s ‘friendly mission’ which contributed to their dispossession, he was one of the most important people in a turbulent and formative period of Tasmania’s colonial history. A watercolour portrait by Thomas Bock is in the British Museum.