Writing South of South: Extinction Discourse in Novelizations of Tasmanian Colonial Pasts

Abstract

As though history and the written word were friends, rather than adversaries!-Richard Flanagan1Tasmania has recently produced and/or inspired a stockpile of white literary postcolonial novels, including realist, Gothic and mythopoetic treatments of cannibalism, stories of violent miscegenation, genocide, and natural-species extinction narratives. These histories are variously embodied in novels as stylistically diverse as The Sooterkin, Drift, Gould's Book of Fish, Cape Grimm, The Roving Party, The Hunter, Wanting, Death of a River Guide, Doctor Wooreddy's Prescriptionfor the End ofthe World, and Jane, Lady Franklin.The term 'genocide' as the definition of a modern crime remains fiercely contested in its application to recent Tasmanian and mainlander histories and must be thought about carefully in relation to general cultural notions of extinctionism and racist notions of hybridity. Discussions of genocide were at the epicentre of the recent 'history wars' debated by historians, Aboriginal communities, politicians, and genocide-studies scholars alike. These important debates, as I show in the following analysis, cannot help but influence how postcolonial novels, particularly those dealing with Tasmanian colonial contexts, are approached and written. A considered reading of terms such as 'genocide', 'hybridity', and 'extinctionism' is crucial to general and particular understandings of how the novels discussed in this chapter have brought to bear imaginative moral critiques of tropes of extinctionism and hybridity. It is the responsibility of the writer of historical fiction to find his or her way through the thicket of definitions around fthese terms in order to understand how they might begin to evoke a truly postcolonial reading of colonial experience.In the Tasmanian setting, extraordinary suffering has occurred in relation to the ongoing dispossession of Palawa peoples. Yet Tasmania was, after decades of resistance by successive Liberal Government premiers in the late-twentieth century, the first Australian state to belatedly rectify these injustices. This move came after decades of organized lobbying by the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (or TAC, set up in the early 1970 s and headed by the activist Michael Mansell) in conjunction with the Tasmanian Regional Aboriginal Council (TRAC), which was part of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC ).2The story of Tasmanian cultural expression across the genres for Palawa people cannot be separated from the great activist struggles occurring across the country in the pre-millennial decades. In Tasmania, the controversial, fierily eloquent (some might say highly novelistic) figure of Mansell was central to these struggles. The government had failed to introduce national land-rights legislation, and in 1985 had dismissed the nations' main Aboriginal body, the National Aboriginal Conference. As Lyndall Ryan observes, Mansell filled this void, arguing that the only way the federal government could restore confidence among the Aboriginal community in the Bicentenary year would be toget rid of massive white bureaucracy in Aboriginal Affairs, introduce uniform land rights legislation, place top priority on Aboriginal health and commence serious negotiations with Aboriginal leaders about Aboriginal sovereignty.3The Melbourne Age was intrigued that, at a time when most Australians believed the Tasmanian Aborigines were extinct (the idee fixe of white cultural extinction discourse), a person like Michael Mansell could become the unofficial leader of the Aboriginal community in Australia. Ryan observes how the TAC's legal advisor, Pierre Slicer, sharply asserted Tasmania's centrality:It is not surprising that Australia's most extreme Aboriginal activist should have emerged irom Tasmania, it is history on the rebound. Nowhere in Australia have people who feel themselves to be Aborigines been taken closer to the physical fact of extinction nor to the edge of the ultimate cultural abyss: being told that they do not exist. …