Aboriginal resistance came to dominate the attention of Governor Arthur's administration. His response to this challenge has had more influence on the way history has judged his administration than anything else he did during an industrious 12 years in Tasmania. Arthur himself regretted the way it had all turned out and wrote remorseful reflections about the experience. In an 1833 letter to the Colonial Office he declared that he found it distressing to recall the ‘injuries that the Government [was] unwillingly and unavoidably made the instrument of inflicting’ and of ‘driving a simple but warlike, and, it now appears, noble-minded race, from their hunting grounds’. In a similar official letter he declared that when he first arrived in the colony he was influenced by popular opinion and as a result, ‘fell into some very wrong notions…from which very injurious consequences followed’. It may have been genuine regret on Arthur's part or a clever appeal to superiors in Britain who were increasingly influenced by humanitarian zeal. It could have been both. Of greater consequence was Arthur's reflection on the need for treaties when dealing with Indigenous peoples. ‘It was,’ he wrote in 1832, ‘a fatal error in the first settlement of Van Diemen's Land that a treaty was not entered into with the natives, of which the savages well comprehend the nature…’ Had they received compensation and been adequately protected the colonisation could have been effected ‘without the injurious consequences which have followed our occupation, and which would forever remain a stain upon the settlement of the island’. He returned to the subject three years later in another letter to the Colonial Office in which he wrote: