Van Diemen's Land
In 1823 he was appointed lieutenant governor of Van Diemen's Land (later known as Tasmania). He arrived on the ship Adrian with his wife and family on 12 May 1824 and took office on 14 May. At the time Van Diemen's Land was the main British penal colony and it was separated from New South Wales in 1825. It was during Arthur's time in office that Van Diemen's Land gained much of its notorious reputation as a harsh penal colony. He selected Port Arthur as the ideal location for a prison settlement, on a peninsula connected by a narrow, easily guarded isthmus, surrounded by shark-infested seas. Arthur's predecessors had executed no one in Tasmania as capital punishment was carried out in Sydney. George Arthur executed 260 people in his term of office (some bodies were left hanging for months).
As lieutenant governor, George Arthur is responsible for the repression and persecution of the Aboriginal population in the conflict known as the Black War. Throughout the 1820s Arthur had instituted various measures to protect settlers from Aboriginal attacks, including the stationing of garrison troops in remote farmhouses and the dispatch of combined military and police teams into the wilderness to track Indigenous bands. These proved ineffective, and by 1830 the conflict between Aborigines and settlers had increased.
Arthur's initial brief had stated, "when such disturbances cannot be prevented or allayed by less vigorous measures, to oppose force by force, and to repel such Aggressions in the same manner, as if they proceeded from subjects of any accredited State." However, on 17 April 1828 in an official dispatch, Arthur described Aboriginal combatants as "Savages", a nomenclature that placed them outside the conventions of European warfare.
In February 1830 Arthur sought public input on alternative measures to end the fighting; suggestions included a system of rewards for captured Aborigines, and the importation of packs of hunting dogs to "set [on] the natives as they would a quail." Arthur himself expressed regret that a treaty was not signed with Aborigines when the colony was established. In its absence, and given the increasing attacks on both sides, on 27 August 1830 Arthur obtained Executive Council approval for a declaration of martial law.
The centrepiece of Arthur's military efforts would be the Black Line fiasco, which was intended to drive the Aborigines from the colony's grazing land onto isolated peninsulas where they could be controlled. At the beginning of the Black War in 1826 Arthur issued an official statement setting out those situations that would justify settlers using violence: 'If it should be apparent that there is a determination on the part of one or more of the native tribes to attack, rob, or murder the white inhabitants generally, any person may arm, and joining themselves to the military, drive them by force to a safe distance, treating them as open enemies.
In 1833, Arthur wrote to his line superior, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies Viscount Goderich, "I am willing to make almost any prudent sacrifice that may tend to compensate for the injuries that the government is unwillingly and unavoidably made the instrument of inflicting." However, Arthur was a fastidious administrator who once wrote to his son "As to chance and good luck I know of nothing more absurd". "All happens under the direction of providence of the Almighty who works by human agency". To the first Aboriginal Establishment (internment camp) on Bruny Island, Arthur initially sent used blankets without any instruction to laund them and a syphilitic assistant overseer. When mortality there skyrocketed, Arthur became concerned. However, his concern appears to have been for the perception of his Abolitionist patrons and the home government regarding deaths of women and children in custody rather than for the tragedy of the Aboriginal Tasmanians' lives lost. Arthur obfuscated the mortality and distanced himself by setting up a committee. At the Aboriginal Establishment's subsequent locations, the litany of pernicious mortality-driving failings continued while Arthur, the Committee and the overseers ignore the everyday prophylactic protocols implemented on convict transports, in prisons and barracks. The failings are in every aspect remarkably reminiscent of the contagion-driving factors documented in an 1811 Parliamentary Paper on the 1809 Walcheren Debacle that Arthur most probably read. A split command hobbled the expeditionary force which became figuratively and literally bogged down. Lacking necessary supplies, accommodation and medical care, mortality due to contagion rose to 10%. Arthur served and fell ill at Walcheren. After the evacuation, he become Aide-de-camp and close friend to General George Don who had initially reconnoitered Walcheren and was then brought in to organize the evacuation. The Parliamentary Paper cited around 50 of Don's dispatches. At its various subsequent locations, the Aboriginal Establishment's mortality rate averaged just over 10%, while every other institution under Arthur was a paragon of well-managed efficiency with mortality rates below England's average of 1.9%.
A Sydney Monitor editorial on his recall stated, "[Arthur] gave plausible replies, while he smiled in secret, knowing that those smiles would be communicated to his satraps and underlings, and that they would increase rather than mitigate this undercurrent of tyranny against the opposers of his government." The improbable level of failures and this description of his character point to Arthur obfuscating an orchestrated diminution which is consistent with a caution Arthur had received from Goderich's predecessor, Sir George Murray, in 1830. Murray – an expert in military intelligence analysis who had served as a lieutenant-governor – wrote, "the adoption of any line of conduct, having for its avowed, or for its secret object, the extinction of the Native race, could not fail to leave an indelible stain upon the character of the British Government."
Arthur failed in his attempts to reform the colony and the system of penal transportation with Arthur's autocratic and authoritarian rule leading to his recall in January 1836. By this time he was one of the wealthiest men in the colony, having totaled £50,000 (in 1839 value) by selling nearly all his landed property. He departed Hobart for England on 30 October 1836, boarding the Elphinstone in tears, acclaimed by hundreds of cheering colonists.
