AustLit

Contemporary Aboriginal writing in Tasmania is achingly aware of the loss of its ancient heritage. Yet retrieval and revival are strongly evident, even in the face of persistent denial of the realities of the Indigenous past. This tension is expressed movingly in Errol West's poem ‘The Moon Birds of Big Dog Island’:

Like dust blown across the plain are the people of the Moon Bird.

And yet there is no one to teach me the songs

That bring the Moon Bird, the fish

Or any other thing that makes me what I am.

West laments what little he knows about his own 40,000 year ancestry, its kinship and languages. Yet his instinct is that the shearwater (yolla, Ardenna tenuirostris, mutton-bird) belongs to his country in the same way he does, he is one of the people of the Moon Bird. The bird is a totemic sign of the deep time of Trowenna Aboriginal life and country, a creature above and beyond the settler categories of history and pre-history. In her ‘Devils and Horses: Religious and Creative Life in Tasmanian Aboriginal Society,’ Julia Clarke collates various sources of Palawa creation myths and ancestral beings (Michael Roe, ed. The Flow of Culture : Tasmanian Studies, Canberra: Australian Academy of the Humanities, 1987, 50-72). Drawing on Clarke, Roslynn Haynes prefaces her Tasmanian Visions with the Tasmanian Indigenous narrative ‘Creating Trowenna’ (xiv).

When Bruni d’Entrecasteaux’s scientific expedition returned to Van Diemen’s Land in February 1793, after their first landing a year previously, they encountered the Lyluequonny people of Recherche Bay, in one of the few non-violent encounters between Europeans and Tasmanian Aboriginal people. Jacques-Julian Labillardière, a botanist with D’Entrecasteaux’s expedition, collected a vocabulary of the native language and described in his narrative how some of the Lyluequonny people sang for the French visitors in tones that modulated like tunes of ‘Asia Minor’: ‘Several times two of them sang the same tune at once, but one was always a third above the other, striking this concord with the greatest precision’ (Plomley 27).

In Weep in Silence his edited version of George Augustus Robinson’s Flinders Island journals and in the ‘Songs’ chapter of A Word-list of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Languages (1976), N. J. B. Plomley gathers together surviving fragments of Tasmanian Aboriginal verses and songs that were recorded in the journals of 19th-century visitors to Tasmania like James Backhouse, R.H. Davies, Jorgen Jorgensen, A.L. Meston, Joseph Milligan, George Augustus Robinson (from the Friendly Mission) journals) and George Washington Walker. Plomley also has a chapter on the ‘speech of the Tasmanians’ as recorded in early French and English maritime journals. Some of the songs and verses have English translations. Plomley notes mention of Aboriginal songs being sung by members of the Oyster Bay tribe while in Hobart with George Augustus Robinson (The Hobart Town Gazette, 7 December, 1832). In his journal for 22 October 1836, Robinson mentions visiting the Hobart residence of Charles and Maria Logan, early cultural leaders of Hobart. Maria Logan, a concert performer and piano teacher set a ‘Song of the Aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land,’ probably supplied by Robinson, to music. Robinson noted: ‘Spent the evening at Logan’s in Macquarie Street. Mr Logan set to music song of the aborigines, POPELLER etc, the first ever attempted’ (Weep in Silence 391).

Tasmanian history – and historiography – was a crucial site of the ‘history wars’ of the early 2000s, not ‘wars’ according to Richard Flanagan but rather ‘a perverted attempt to politicise the past to justify the renascent bigotries’ of the present ('A terrible, beautiful history'). Lyndall Ryan’s The Aboriginal Tasmanians (1996) was frequently at the centre of those contentions but remains the most comprehensive and authoritative history of Indigenous Tasmania. Keith Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Vol. 1, Van Dieman's Land 1803-1847 (2002) was critical of Ryan’s perspective and offered a ‘counter-history of race relations’ in Australia. It is designed, quite explicitly, to defend the ‘character of the nation and, ultimately, the calibre of the civilization Britain brought to these shores in 1788’ (2-3). Like Louisa Anne Meredith ('see Place'), Windschuttle emphasizes what he accepts as the Hooper killings of 1830, reported on in the Colonial Times for 27 August of that year and their direct connection to the decision by Lt. Governor Arthur and his Executive Council, to institute the Black Line in October (see also Boyce 271).

The other important historian of the birth and early years of the Tasmanian colony is James Boyce, whose Van Diemen’s Land (2008) includes a long ‘appendix,’ ‘Towards Genocide: Government Policy on the Aborigines, 1827-38.’ Here Boyce is very clear in his reading of Tasmanian Indigenous history: ‘The black hole of Tasmanian history is not the violence between white settlers and the Aborigines – a well-recorded and much-discussed aspect of the British conquest – but the government-sponsored ethnic clearances which followed it’ (296). There is also an important prehistory to the historiography of Indigenous Tasmania in James Bonwick’s The Last of the Tasmanians, or, The Black War of Van Diemen's Land(1870) and his simpler form of ‘that sad tale of a Colonial Past,’ The Lost Tasmanian Race (1884). In some ways Bonwick’s 1870 history seems very contemporary in its focus and values: it ends, for example, with a serious discussion of Aboriginal land rights and with an outraged account of the desecration of William Lanney’s body by medical and museum authorities in 1869 – a scene that begins Robert Drewe’s novel The Savage Crows, and which is also alluded to in Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide, where the narrator’s father Harry, himself part aboriginal, sings:

King Billy’s dead, Crowther has his head,

Stokell his hands and feet. (255)

Given their historical proximity it is worth considering Bonwick’s history alongside H.G. Wells’ famous mention of the Tasmanian Aborigines in the first chapter of his The War of the Worlds (1898). There, Wells speculates on the idea of a superior race of beings, like the Martians who attempt to invade Earth:

Before we judge them too harshly, we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit? (55)

This is, of course, Wells’ narrator rather than Wells but the embedded assumptions about the superiority of the English to both Tasmanians and Martians are hard to miss, the word ‘inferior’ is the key one. The irrepressible sense of racial superiority, which Wells seems barely conscious of, is also apparent in his contradictory narrative. The Martians, far from exterminating the ‘inferior’ British, are in fact defeated by home-counties microbes.

Noel Pearson begins his 2014 Quarterly Essay A Rightful Place, about ‘race, recognition and a more complete commonwealth,’ with an account of his personal response to the history of Tasmanian aboriginals, including Wells’ novel. He is right to recognise that Wells ‘subscribed to the scientific racism of his era’ (9). In the epilogue to the novel, for example, there is an unmistakable sign of Wells’ symptomatic linking of extinct animals, Tasmanian Aboriginals – palaeolithic in his view – and Martians in a description of ‘the magnificent and almost complete specimen [of a Martian] in spirits at the Natural History Museum, and the countless drawings that have been made from it; and beyond that the interest of the physiology and structure is purely scientific’ (251). Citing Tom Lawson’s The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania (2014) Pearson understands Wells’s views as a latter-day summation of imperial Indigenous policy in Van Deimen’s Land: ‘This was a British genocide, carried out on the other side of the world by British men, articulating British ideas, discussed in British newspapers and ultimately embedded in British history and remembered in British museums’ (22).

Bonwick’s history is also founded on what now feels like uncomfortable assumptions about a dangerously lawless society made up, predominantly, of individuals with a propensity for violence and an ineffectual government unable to provide any real protection for a native population. This last aspect of Bonwick’s history is also relevant to contemporary understandings of the term ‘genocide.’ The international jurist Raphaël Lemkin, who coined the word ‘genocide,’ made a special study of Tasmania in his research into race killing. His principal source for this work, now retrieved from his papers in the New York Public Library and edited and published by the Australian historian Ann Curthoys, was Bonwick’s history (see Lemkin). See also the important article by Jesse Shipway, ‘Modern by Analogy: Modernity, Shoah and the Tasmanian Genocide,’ Journal of Genocide Research 7.2 (2005): 205-19.

Lloyd Robson, Michael Roe, and Henry Reynolds have all written synoptic histories of Tasmania that include narratives of the Aboriginal people. Kylie Tennant’s Australia, Her Story : Notes on a Nation (1964) has a chapter on ‘Vandemania’ in her popular, rather sensationalist style. See also the methodologically innovative The Black War : Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania by Nicholas Clements (2014), the recent important study by Murray Johnson and Ian McFarlane, Van Diemen's Land: an Aboriginal History (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2015) which begins with the historiographical questions and issues generated by the ‘History Wars’ of the 1990s and draws on recent discoveries of the Adolphus Schayer papers (Berlin) and Robert Lawrence’s journal (14), and the entries in The Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia : Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander History, Society and Culture (Gen. Ed. David Horton, AITSIS, 1994) under headings ‘Tasmanian History,’ ‘Tasmania Region,’ ‘Lairmairrener,’ Nuenonne,’ ‘Paredarerme,’ ‘Peerapper,’ ‘Pyemmairrener,’ ‘Tommeginne,’ ‘Toogee,’ Tyerrernotepanner,’ and ‘Wooraddy.’