Tasmanian Aboriginal People Research Articles

Tasmanian Aboriginal Material Culture, Compensation, Belonging

Abstract The Tasmanian Aboriginal people have historically been defined by their visible lack of stereotypical “Aboriginal” characteristics and their supposed nonexistence. This article examines how Tasmanian Aboriginal individuals are bridging such gaps through material cultural production. In thinking about how communities mobilize the past to produce themselves in the present, I argue that canoes, kelp water carriers, and shell necklaces are vehicles through which alterity and distinction are rendered concrete. As such, these processes are best understood in relation to Bell and Geismar’s “materialization” and Ingold’s “meshworks.” Despite internal debates amongst practitioners over proper methodologies and styles, revitalized culture can be productively imagined as compensation for outward shortcomings and deficiencies. Efforts at revitalizing culture are willed connections to a deep ancestral past and represent the discursive enactment of a continuity that is often otherwise conspicuous by its absence. [material culture, cultural revitalization, Indigeneity, Tasmania, Australia]

Apology to Tasmanian Aboriginal people 2021

On Monday, 15 February 2021, the Royal Society of Tasmania (RST) and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) delivered paired Apologies to the Aboriginal people of Tasmania. The event was held in the Courtyard of TMAG, Hobart, and attended in person by about one hundred invited guests including members of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community, members of the Council of the RST and members of the Board of Trustees of TMAG. A large number of invited guests also witnessed the event by livestream. It was also the first time the Aboriginal flag had been flown at Customs House to commemorate the significance of this event.

‘A truly sublime appearance’: using GIS to find the traces of pre-colonial landscapes and land use

When the British landed on the island of Van Diemen’s Land in 1803, they found lands seemingly prepared for them. Abundant open plains drew the newcomers further inland, attracted by the prospects of further pastoral and agricultural success. What they neither understood nor acknowledged was the thousands of years of cultivation prior to their arrival. As the custodians of the island, the Tasmanian Aboriginal people used fire to manage and maintain a landscape that nourished them. This article proposes that analysis of land-use continuities can reveal new understandings of pre-colonial landscapes. This article uses two case studies to demonstrate two complementary approaches for uncovering this story. The first study follows a traditional approach that relies on historic sources such as maps, artwork and journals. The second methodology incorporates modern resources to build a Geographic Information System (GIS) from environmental and historic spatial data. The GIS compensates for an absence of traditional sources, thus enabling researchers to investigate areas of colonial expansion that have previously been undervalued. Using GIS to understand this continuity of land use gives historians another tool for researching landscapes that have been obscured by subsequent occupiers.

Mapping Tasmania's cultural landscapes: Using habitat suitability modelling of archaeological sites as a landscape history tool

AbstractAimUnderstanding past distributions of people across the landscape is key to understanding how people used, affected and related to the natural environment. Here, we use habitat suitability modelling to represent the landscape distribution of Tasmanian Aboriginal archaeological sites and assess the implications for patterns of past human activity.LocationTasmania, Australia.MethodsWe developed a RandomForest ‘habitat suitability' model of site records in the Tasmanian Aboriginal Heritage Register. We applied a best‐effort bias correction, considered 31 predictor variables relating to climate, topography and resource proximity, and used a variable selection procedure to optimize the final model. Model uncertainty was assessed via bootstrapping and we ran an analogous MaxEnt model as a cross‐validation exercise.ResultsThe results from the RandomForest and MaxEnt models are highly congruent. The strongest environmental predictors of site occurrence include distance to coast, elevation, soil clay content, topographic roughness and distance to inland water. The highest habitat suitability scores are distributed across a wide range of environments in central, northern and eastern Tasmania, including coastal areas, inland water body margins and forests and savannas in the drier parts of Tasmania. With the exception of coastal areas much of western Tasmania has low habitat suitability scores, consistent with theories of low‐density Holocene Tasmanian Aboriginal settlement in this region.Main conclusionsOur modelling suggests Tasmanian Aboriginal people occupied a heterogeneity of habitats but targeted coastal areas around the whole island, and drier, less steep and/or open forest and savanna environments in the central lowlands. The western interior was identified as being rarely used by Aboriginal people in the Holocene, with the exception of isolated pockets of habitat; yet whether this is a true reflection of Aboriginal‐resourceuse demands increased archaeological surveys, particularly in the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area.

Palawa Kaniand the Value of Language in Aboriginal Tasmania

Over the past forty years the Tasmanian Aboriginal people, long marked as an iconic case of extinction, have revitalized many elements of their ‘lost’ culture. Palawa kani, the constructed Tasmanian Aboriginal language, is an example of such efforts. The construction and utilization of palawa kani is one element of a broader Tasmanian Aboriginal cultural politics working to strengthen the Indigenous status, authenticity, and presence in Tasmania specifically and Australia more generally. In this article I recount the historical documentation of Tasmanian Aboriginal languages and analyze the process through which multiple historical languages were utilized in the construction and consecration of a single ‘official’ Tasmanian Aboriginal language. Rather than existing strictly as a tool for communication, I argue palawa kani is a cultural artifact that, like an emblem, works to distinguish the Tasmanian Aboriginal community, one that lacks many of the stereotypical components of Australian Aboriginality, within Tasmanian society. As such, it is best understood in relation to Clifford's ‘indigenous articulations’ (2001) and Cowlishaw's mythopoeia of Aboriginality in Australia (2010, 2011). I examine what palawa kani does for, and what it represents to, the larger Tasmanian Aboriginal community.

The First Stone and the Last Tasmanian: The Colonial Correspondence of Edward Burnett Tylor and Henry Ling Roth

Between 1890 and 1905, Edward Burnett Tylor and Henry Ling Roth extended and formalised two ideas that were intricately connected and deeply influential to the development of nineteenth century anthropology: that the Tasmanian Aboriginal people represented the earliest phase of cultural evolution and that they were extinct. This paper offers a detailed archival exploration of the correspondence between 1891–1905 that informed those ideas. It finds that Tylor and Roth not only received abstracted facts and artefacts from their colonial contacts; they were directed and inspired by an emergent Australian scholarship that sought to propose and urge new disciplinary directions. This paper reveals not only the importance of Tasmanian Aboriginal people to the history of science, but the role that scientific ideas have shaped Australian social memory and national identity.

This Exhibition is about now: Tasmanian Aboriginality at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery

This article focuses on the design and execution of two exhibits about Tasmanian Aboriginality at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. The first is a Tasmanian Aboriginal group exhibit from 1931, which was heavily informed by ideologies of Tasmanian primitivity and extinction. The second is 2008's tayenebe, a celebration of the resurgence of fiber work among Tasmanian Aboriginal women. In each instance, the Tasmanian Aboriginal people are on display, but the level of community control and subtext is notably different. This article builds on discussions of cultural revitalization and reclamation by showing the process and how it is depicted for public consumption. [cultural revitalization, representation, indigeneity, Tasmania, Australia]

Raw material movement and past Tasmanian Aboriginal interaction: implications for understanding isolated human population dynamics

AbstractThe study of stone artefact raw material distribution from point sources to archaeological sites has been important in understanding patterns of long‐term human interaction. Proximity to raw material sources has been emphasised in many studies, particularly the distance over which items travel and the nature of the social interactions reflected in such patterns. Tasmania provides an example where the ethnohistorical documents have played an important role in characterising Aboriginal society and tribal relationships. Although glimpses of societal structure and interaction have been gained through the works of Brian Plomley, Rhys Jones and Lyndall Ryan, the archaeology of such organisation has been elusive. The aim of this paper is to discuss the evidence for raw material movement as a proxy for the patterns of past interaction between Tasmanian Aboriginal people.

Genocide, Extinction and Aboriginal Self‐determination in Tasmanian Historiography

AbstractThe principal aim of this article is to survey the long and complex relationship between the ideas of genocide and extinction as they apply to Tasmanian historiography from the colonial period to the present moment. In so, doing this essay brings up to date Ann Curthoys' 2008 essay on genocide in Tasmania and extends Curthoys' principal inquiry: how there emerged ‘a paradox’ between international representations of Tasmania as a ‘clear‐cut’ case of genocide and the fact ‘such a characterization is rarely adopted within Australia’. This essay finds Curthoys' ‘paradox’ less relevant to popular Australian representations of Tasmanian history where, from the 1970s, the idea of genocide did not merely replace the older idea of extinction, but promulgated it. Such representations directly undermined an emergent movement for Tasmanian Aboriginal self‐determination. The political protest of Tasmanian Aboriginal people influenced historical scholarship, lead foremost by Lyndall Ryan from the early 1980s: to characterize Tasmania as a case of genocide at that time may have potentially jeopardized an important message of Aboriginal survival in the face of colonialism.

A Journey of 13,033 Stones

The Westlake Collection in the Pitt Rivers Museum includes 13,033 Tasmanian Aboriginal stone artefacts; it is the largest collection of its kind. Formed by amateur English scientist Ernest Westlake from 1908–1910, this paper tells the story of Westlake's life; why, and how, he chose to travel to Tasmania to collect stone artefacts; and what happened to that collection after his death in 1922. It also explores Westlake's collection as an enactment of nineteenth and early twentieth-century scientific ideas about Tasmanian Aboriginal people, and examines his accompanying paper archive, in particular his interviews with Aboriginal people. Possibly the richest source of Tasmanian Aboriginal language and culture dating from early twentieth century, these long-overlooked notes demonstrate the enduring traditions of a people once presumed extinct. An epilogue explains how these papers are being published in an innovative online archive guide and history.

‘I hope you will be my frend’: Tasmanian Aborigines in the Furneaux group in the nineteenth century—population and land tenure

This paper traces the history of settlement of the islands of the Furneaux Group in Bass Strait and the effects of government regulation on the long term settlements of Tasmanian Aboriginal people from the 1850s to the early 1900s. Throughout the nineteenth century the Aboriginal population grew slowly, eventually constituting approximately 40 percent of the total population of the Furneaux Group. From the 1860s outsiders used the existing land title system to obtain possession of the islands. Aborigines tried to establish tenure through the same system, but could not compete because they lacked capital, and were disadvantaged by isolation in their communication with government. Further, the islands' use for grazing excluded Aborigines who rarely had large herds of stock and were generally not agriculturalists. The majority of Aborigines were forced to settle on Cape Barren Island, where they built homes on a reserve set aside for them. European expansion of settlement on Flinders Island finally completed the disenfranchisement of Aboriginal people by making the Cape Barren Island enclave dependent on the government.

The polemics of eating fish in Tasmania: the historical evidence revisited

This paper examines two persistent assertions made by Westlake's interviewees: in this first part, that the traditional Tasmanian Aboriginal people did eat fish with scales and, in the second part, that they could make fire. Both these assertions have been strongly and repeatedly contested by scholars since the late 19th century.

The changing politics of miscegenation

In Tasmania’s Mercury newspaper Henry Reynolds raised the contentious issue of identity in respect to Tasmanian Aboriginal people of mixed heritage. Such people, Reynolds stated, might better be described as Creole. This paper firstly canvasses why it is that notions of hybridity are anathema to many Aborigines, then proceeds to discuss how the elision of white heritage and identity invoke some of the same contested ideologies underpinning the assimilation policy. The paper continues by examining the issue of identity in the context of the language used to describe the British usurpation of Australia and subsequent black-white relations. Finally, the paper examines the impact that the Aboriginal presence has had and is having on the psyche of settler-Australians, and suggests a reason why it is that many settler-Australians in mixed Aboriginal-non-Aboriginal partnerships appear comfortable with, or at least do not resist, having their offspring elide one heritage and identity (white) for the sake of another (Aboriginal).

Getting a Head: Dismembering and Remembering in Robert Drewe’s *The Savage Crows*

The article examines the use of bodily metaphors of dismemberment and beheading in Drewe’s novel about the fate of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people, The Savage Crows, in light of the Western historic notion of the ‘social body’ and the body of the state. It concludes that ‘In a critique of the ways in which contemporary Australian society rests on but denies the fragmentation and dismemberment of Aboriginal communities in the past, this novel dismembers and fragments a contemporary Aboriginal community, and in the process, repeats the theft of William Lanney’s head for white purposes, in order to produce a coherent (white social) body … at the close of the narrative’ (65).

Tasmanian Aborigines and DNA

The hyper-variable control region (HVI and HVII) of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from Tasmanians with an unbroken, direct Tasmanian Aboriginal maternal lineage were DNA sequenced. The lineage dates back to the early 1800s, as evidenced by published family genealogies (Mollison 1978, Ryan 1981, Plomley 1966, 1971, 1987, 1990). Of the five distinct mtDNA haplotypes discovered, VI was found in living Tasmanian descendants traced back to a Port Phillip Aboriginal woman who lived with European sealers in Bass Strait. Haplotype T2 is two nucleotide transitions removed from 1/WD 2 of van Holst Pellekaan et al. 1998 and therefore related to this Australian mainland Aboriginal mtDNA haplotype. Vestiges of Tasmanian maternal mtDNA haplotypes from before white settlement, passing down through up to eight generations, still survive in Tasmania. The Tasmanian Aboriginal people are related and relatable to mainland Aboriginal people.

The childhood of William Lanne: contact archaeology and Aboriginality in Tasmania

Excavation of a site not just of the ‘contact period’ but of contact itself gives a new view of those darkest years around 1840 when the remaining free Tasmanian Aboriginal people were tracked down and transported to death in exile.