Tasmanian Aborigines Research Articles

‘I am frightened out of my life’: Black War, white fear

ABSTRACTBritish colonists treated Tasmanian Aborigines abominably during the early decades of the nineteenth century. Indeed, colonization resulted in the near annihilation of this ancient and unique people. Their fate, which understandably provokes feelings of sympathy and anger, has strongly influenced the literature on the ‘Black War'. The Aborigines are usually portrayed as the helpless victims of ruthless, even genocidal colonists. This dichotomy, however, is a gross over-simplification. By dehumanizing colonists as heartless murderers we enter an explanatory cul-de-sac. It is only by dispassionately interrogating colonists’ experiences of Aboriginal violence that we can begin to understand what precipitated this tragedy. Hence the purpose of this article, which focuses above all on the fear generated by Aboriginal violence, and the ways colonists responded to it. The essay will argue that fear – economic fear, fear for the safety of others, and fear for one's own safety – dominated the wartime experiences of frontier colonists. It will also demonstrate the influence of fear on colonists’ attitudes and behaviour, as well as on the built landscape. In doing so, it covers new ground, revealing the potent anxieties of the colonizers, and the psychological impact of Aboriginal resistance.

Quaker Dreaming: The “Lost” Cotton Archive and the Aborigines of Van Diemen's Land

This article explores interactions between Tasmanian Aborigines and residents of a Quaker settler property in documented actuality and familial, regional, and scholarly memory. Debunking a recent suggestion that authentic Tasmanian Aboriginal religious rituals and mythologies were kept secret by these settlers for a century and a half, I argue that such “mythologies,” and stories of their transmission, are post‐colonial inventions that attempt to render this part of the narrative of Quaker colonialism in Van Diemen's Land as principally humanitarian, with Quakers acting as a benignly aberrant exception to the wider phenomenon of settlers dispossessing Indigenous peoples. Demonstrating that these settlers colluded in wider colonial practices and policies, and were active participants in networks of scientific study of the Tasmanian Aborigines, this article serves as a case study of the multi‐layered nature of colonial action and post‐colonial historicism, and also points to a self‐referential tendency in historiographies of colonial Tasmania. I suggest that the stories presented as an authentic body of Tasmanian mythology in Land of the Sleeping Gods (2013) unconvincingly attempts to reinscribe Quaker colonialism as pacifist and humanitarian, and I argue that in fact Quakers demonstrably contributed to the dispossessing of Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples from their traditional lands.

Economic utility and nutritional value of the Common wombat (Vombatus ursinus): Evaluating Australian Aboriginal hunting and butchery patterns

The Common wombat (Vombatus ursinus) is Australia's largest extant quadruped herbivorous marsupial, yet little is known about its potential economic and dietary value in the archaeological record. In the rich late Pleistocene archaeological faunal assemblages in southwest Tasmania dated to between 35,000 to 13,000BP, the wombat is the second most common prey species after the medium-sized macropod, the Bennett's wallaby (Macropus rufogriseus). Detailed analysis of one of these sites, Kutikina Cave, indicates that the head, pectoral region (including anterior axial elements) and forelimbs of the wombat were frequently selected by people, whilst the ‘meaty’ pelvic girdle and hindlimbs were largely underrepresented. This differs to the patterns observed for the Bennett's wallaby where the large hind region dominates, and the anterior part of the animal is rare in the archaeological assemblage. To investigate this discrepancy in the distribution of wombat body parts, an economic utility and nutritional analysis was conducted and the results compared to the range of wombat skeletal elements from the late Pleistocene faunal assemblage from Kutikina Cave, southwest Tasmania. The results suggest that Tasmanian Aboriginals predominately bought back the meat closer to the brain to the cave and either ignored or consumed the rest of the animal away from the site. Furthermore, a high fat content surrounding the pectoral girdle and vertebral column was identified, which may also have influenced the selection of this region. While evidence of marrow extraction from wombat long bones has been recorded in the faunal assemblage at Kutikina Cave, it was found that these elements do not provide the same quantity or quality available from the Bennett's wallaby. These results have implications for understanding prey selection and butchery strategies of these late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers, especially during the height of the Last Glacial Maximum.

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]

Assessing Magnitude: Tasmanian Aboriginal Population, Resistance and the Significance of Musquito in the Black War

AbstractIn August 1824, there was a fierce attack by 200 Tasmanian Aboriginal men on James Hobbs's property at Eastern Marshes, near Oatlands in Van Diemen's Land. Hobbs's stockmen fired to deter the approaching Aborigines, but having discharged their weapons, they were overwhelmed before they could reload, and one man, James Doyle, was beaten to a pulp. The rest fled in terror to Hobart, refusing to return.The influence of Musquito, the renegade Sydney Aborigine was suspected. His campaign of terror that began about 1824 alarmed the colony, but what was more frightening was the fact “that no Natives [were]…observed on any part of the coast” having moved into the interior and “lately formed themselves into one formidable body.” It appeared the coastal Oyster Bay tribe had formed an alliance with the interior Big River mob.There was strong suspicion that “Musquito and other blacks” brought up among Europeans were behind these new attacks, but it was difficult to pin responsibility on Musquito. Aborigines came from a considerable “distance to place themselves under [his] command”, but he tended to manipulate forces obliquely. Musquito “kept the tethers”: “He would lurk about, gain information, lay his plans in a skilful manner and then from his retreat, dispatch his band to carry on the warfare.”He was by all accounts a formidable, charismatic figure who “had high notions of his own worth.” He would “stalk into the cottages of the settlers” and “seat himself with great dignity,” while his followers, upwards of several hundreds, would patiently await “his signal to approach.” According to John West, as his influence “enlarged, it became more pernicious” and influenced not only his immediate followers “but propagated his spirit” and deeds “of great enormity were committed at his direction; several by his own hand.”

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.

Islands of the dead? Prehistoric occupation of Kangaroo Island and other southern offshore islands and watercraft use by Aboriginal Australians

Kangaroo Island has long been a source of creation mythology for Indigenous Australians. Over the last century, it has also been a source of creation mythology for Australian archaeology. The theme of the archaeological mythology has been the notion, based on culture-historical interpretations of stone artefact typologies, that the Island was occupied by people belonging to successive large-tool (“Kartan”) and small-tool “Cultures”. A fundamental tenet of the “Kartan Mystery” has been the notion that the Island was abandoned for several thousand years prior to the European colonisation of South Australia, and following the attainment of modern sea-levels, the Indigenous people of southern Australia lacked either the watercraft or the will to continue to inhabit Kangaroo Island and other offshore islands along the southern coastline. From at least as far east as Tasmania to as far west as Rottnest Island off Fremantle (Western Australia), there are islands which have a prehistoric archaeological record and/or an ethnographic status as uninhabited “Islands of the Dead” for adjacent, mainland or Tasmanian Aboriginal societies. This paper explores these notions and refers to evidence that Aboriginal Australians of the southern Australian coastal regions both used watercraft and visited offshore islands such as Kangaroo Island throughout the pre-colonial Holocene period.

Extinction Discourse in <em>Wanting</em> and <em>Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World</em>

This Poem, written by a Poet known only as auster, is a lucid examPle oF way in which Aboriginal population was imagined by some nineteenth-century observers be in a state of irreversible decline. We are fast decaying (Auster 4), Aboriginal narrator tells us, displaced and dispossessed by colonization. connection between Aboriginal and British colonization is made explicit when narrator observes that white men mak'st a home in every and that far and wide number of white heirs increases (4). Crucially, potential for occurs because of arrival of white settlers. it is, for narrator, a simple matter of one replacing another. it should be noted, however, that poem is not condemning this process, as a modern reader might expect. narrator is not pleading for social justice land rights but is pleading merely be allowed where his forefathers died (4). of Aboriginal people seems be a lamentable, but nevertheless unavoidable, outcome of same natural processes that keep white races dominant. What this poem demonstrates most strongly is correspondence discourse of Aboriginal has with both colonizing process in tasmania and representation of Aboriginality in tasmanian literature.Patrick Brantlinger examined origins of discourse in his book Dark Vanishings: Discourse on Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800-1930. He described discourse as a branch of dual ideologies of imperialism and racism that existed wherever and whenever europeans and white Americans encountered indigenous peoples (1). this set of ideas is anchored on one apparently self-evident truth: that savagery would not survive when confronted with european civilization. starting from this basic assumption, genocide and were conceived of as natural processes as unavoidable outcomes of settlement. Brantlinger argues that in colonized countries during nineteenth century work of cultural and national mourning occurs not because aboriginals are already but because they will sooner later become extinct (4).In tasmania in nineteenth century, concept of an Aboriginal found expression in all areas of imaginative production. As early as 1827, a journalist for The Colonial Times noted that if settlers wished spare lives of sable race then they must remove them from island, or it is quite evident, as we have frequently before observed, they will be all exterminated in a few years (For some time 3). By 1866, it was common for sympathetic observers draw a causal link between colonization and impending of Aboriginal tasmanians, as an extract from Magazine of Anthropology demonstrates. [Modern experience, it states, has taught us that native tribes begin disappear almost simultaneously with arrival of settlers, and that in Australia evidence suggests that to colonise and extirpate are synonymous terms (Wilful extinction 4). these ideas gained further credence with deaths of William Lanne and truganini, prominent last man and last woman of Aboriginal tribes, in 1869 and 1876 respectively. idea that their deaths represented a final continues prove seductive in twenty-first century.Brantlinger, in exploring these connections, identifies one interpretive device that is useful for charting out impact of discourse on literature: doomed-race proleptic elegy. As name suggests, proleptic elegy was prominent as a form device in literature even before Aboriginal tasmanians were supposedly lost. Along with Auster's the tasmanian Aborigine's Lament, evidence for this can be seen in poems such as 1834 song of Aborigines by the-presumably white-poet Frances, where Aboriginal speaker mourns that while our flow'rs are brightly smiling, / they but bloom awhile, and die (Melville 324), in Richard Howitt's 1845 Impressions of Australia Felix, when he notes of tasmania that naboth had been killed, and here was his vineyard. …

Malimup: A Tasmanian Aboriginal Hoabinhian site in the southwest of Western Australia?

The Hoabinhian technocomplex of Southeast Asia is characterised by distinctive pebble edge tools which are also found in Australia, but only in the southeast, including Tasmania. Charlie Dortch in the early 1970s reported a unique site with Hoabinhian tools in southwest Australia at Malimup, Western Australia (WA), dated to the recent past. An analysis of the pebble edge tools from Malimup showed they were similar to those from eastern Australia, which in turn were similar to the Southeast Asian ones. While it is possible that local Aboriginal people may have made these tools, it seems unlikely, given that no other such site has been found anywhere in WA. In considering the possibility that the site represents the presence of Aboriginal people from elsewhere in Australia during the early historical period, the most likely candidates are suggested to be Aboriginal women from Tasmania. Such women are documented as having lived with European sealers along the south coast of WA, and the site at Malimup is in a location suitable for a sealing camp, and near where sealers are reputed to have been active. It is further speculated that these tools may have been used for processing ochre, an activity of traditional significance to Tasmanian Aboriginal women, perhaps helping them come to terms with an unfamiliar environment. Such a suggestion may help shed light on the role of pebble tools elsewhere in Australia and indeed Southeast Asia.

The Bass Strait Islands revisited

Bass Strait divides mainland Australia from Tasmania (Fig. 1). During much of the Pleistocene, lowered sea levels meant there was a land bridge joining these land masses. It is now generally accepted that the formation of the Strait by post-glacial sea rise effectively separated the human populations of Tasmania from those of mainland Australia, leading to one of the most extreme cases of isolation known on the global scale. The Tasmanian Aborigines were separated for some 12,000 years from their nearest neighbours in Southeast Australia. None of the larger islands of Bass Strait appears to have been occupied at the time of European contact, and the archaeological record sees this lack of occupation stretching back centuries, and millennia in some cases. Some 35 years ago, Rhys Jones (1977) presented a complex model relating to the past human occupation of the Bass Strait Islands. Using biogeographical concepts and principles he concluded that there were critical points of size and distance that led to the abandonment of these islands, with the exception of the Hunter group in northwest Tasmania. Archaeological research carried out since 1977 does not militate against the broad strokes of this model – there is still no evidence for more recent contact between Australia and Tasmania, or for any recent occupation of most of the abandoned islands. There is however scope for a more nuanced consideration of their occupation and abandonment, in the light of more recent research which this paper will attempt. In general, archaeologists have not considered in this framework the latest phase of Aboriginal occupation in the Bass Strait Islands; there has been an ongoing Aboriginal population since the early 19th century, continuing many of the traditions of Tasmanian Aboriginal society. This paper attempts a continuous narrative from archaeology and history of the Tasmanian Aborigines and the Bass Strait Islands.

Archaeology and Aboriginal Protest: The Influence of Rhys Jones's Tasmanian Work on Australian Historiography

In 1977 archaeologist Rhys Jones asked a question that sparked a controversy: if Europeans had never reached Tasmania, had the Aborigines been nonetheless ‘doomed to a slow strangulation of the mind’? Some contemporaries accused Jones of reiterating nineteenth-century ‘Social Darwinism’, a charge Lyndall Ryan has recently renewed as ‘scientific racism’. In contrast, this article argues that Jones, a left-wing Welshman, intended to make a poetic comparison between the possible effects of isolation and a history of genocide. The assumption that genocide had ended in Tasmanian Aboriginal extinction potentially undermined Australia's earliest and most radical emergent indigenous movement. The controversy that followed was pivotal to Australian Aboriginal and academic relations, and has shaped fundamentally how Tasmanian, and Australian, history is written.

Tasmanian Aborigines step up to health: evaluation of a cardiopulmonary rehabilitation and secondary prevention program.

BackgroundAlthough the burden of cardiopulmonary diseases in the Aboriginal community is high, utilisation of rehabilitation services has been poor. We evaluated the uptake and effectiveness of a cardiovascular and pulmonary rehabilitation program specifically designed and provided for the Aboriginal community, by the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, for people with diagnosed chronic heart or respiratory disease and those at high risk of developing such conditions.MethodsParticipants had established chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, ischaemic heart disease or chronic heart failure or were at high risk of developing such diseases because of multiple risk factors. Rehabilitation programs (n = 13) comprised two exercise and one education session per week over eight weeks. Data, collected at baseline and on completion, included health status, risk factors, attendance, anthropometric measurements, physical capacity and quality of life. Data from participants who attended at least one program session were analysed. Qualitative written feedback from participants and staff was analysed thematically.ResultsOf 92 participants (39% with an established disease diagnosis), 72 provided follow-up data. Participants lost weight, and waist circumference decreased (mean -3.6 cm, 95% confidence interval (CI)-2.5 to -4.7). There were clinically significant improvements in six-minute walk distance (mean 55.7 m, 95% CI 37.8 to 73.7) and incremental shuttle walk (mean 106.2 m, 95% CI 79.1 to 133.2). There were clinically significant improvements in generic quality of life domains, dyspnoea and fatigue. Generally, the improvements in participants with established cardiac or respiratory diseases did not differ from that in people with risk factors. Analysis of qualitative data identified three factors that facilitated participation: support from peers and health workers, provision of transport and the program structure. Participants’ awareness of improvements in their health contributed to ongoing participation and positive health outcomes, and participants would recommend the program to family and friends.ConclusionA cardiopulmonary program, which included exercise and education and met national guidelines, was designed and delivered specifically for the Aboriginal community. It increased participation in rehabilitation by Aborigines with, or at high risk of, established disease and led to positive changes in health behaviours, functional exercise capacity and health related quality of life.

Protecting Tasmanian Aborigines: American and Queensland Influences on the Cape Barren Island Reserve Act, 1912

Early twentieth-century Tasmanian discourses about racial difference reflected trans-imperial connections between England, its colonies, and the United States. This globalised discourse and ideological interconnectedness in turn produced recognisably and intentionally similar policies, although historians bounded by the interests of later nation-states have tended to overlook this. Tasmania's Cape Barren Island Reserve Act 1912 exemplifies how a particular colony's ideology and policy, while attuned to local conditions and particularities, was nonetheless a product of an international framework for regulating the colonised. This legislation was demonstrably modelled on Aboriginal protection legislation passed in the Australian state of Queensland in 1897 and has significant commonalities with the Dawes Act passed in the United States in 1887 to provide for the subdivision of Indian reservations. In Australian historiography, the fact that Tasmania had an Aboriginal reserve and enacted Aboriginal protection legislation has been under-appreciated and even denied. This article redresses these omissions. It also contributes towards redressing the myopic focus on nation and/or colony that has, until recent years, left Australian historiography devoid of a full appreciation of colonial dependence on, and contributions to, a global discourse of race.

No Reprieve for Tasmanian Rock Art

The Australian State of Tasmania, at latitude 42 degrees south, became an island about 8,000 years ago when the sea rose to its present level, following the melting of polar and glacial ice that covered much of the land mass. After that time, the Tasmanian Aboriginal rock art developed independently of mainland Australia, with its form being basically linear with some naturalistic figures and a predominance of cupules. The petroglyphs with one lithophone site occur on various rock substrates varying in hardness from granite to sandstone. Many sites exist along the western coastline that borders the Southern Ocean where the landscape in some places has changed little since the arrival of Europeans in 1803. The significance of this Tasmanian Aboriginal cultural heritage along what is now known as the Tarkine Coast, named after an Aboriginal band that once inhabited this area, was recognised by the Australian Government in February 2013 when a 21,000 ha strip, 2 km wide, was inscribed on its National Heritage Register, being one of 98 special places listed in the country. However, politics and racism hamper its management. This paper is based on the results of 40 years of field recording of the Tasmanian Aboriginal rock art sites, many of which remain unpublished.

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.

The Black Line in Van Diemen's Land: success or failure?

The Black Line in Tasmania in 1830 was the largest force ever assembled against Aborigines anywhere in Australia. Tasmanian historians have dismissed the Line as an aberration by Governor George Arthur and a complete fiasco by virtue of the fact that only two Tasmanian Aborigines were recorded captured and two others killed. This article contests this view by locating the Line within British imperial policy at the time, and it makes three important new findings. Far from being an aberration, the Line was a common strategy employed across the British Empire to forcibly remove indigenous peoples from their homelands. Further, there was not just one but three Lines in force over the fifteen-month period of the entire operation, and they played a decisive role in ending the Black War. The article concludes that in making George Arthur the scapegoat, historians have overlooked the Line's significance as an important instrument of British imperial power in the early nineteenth century.

Post-Authenticity: Dilemmas of Identity in the 20th and 21st Centuries

This article draws upon some recent repatriation claims for Tasmanian human remains in British and European museums to examine debates concerning the authenticity of identity in the 21st century, and to reflect on the construction and representation of Indian identities in the colonial period. I discuss how authenticity can be seen as a process, used instrumentally, rather than a static quality, focusing on how authenticity is asserted, negotiated, performed, or rejected through social and political interaction. The negotiations of the Tasmanian Aboriginal groups for recognition of their status as authentic Aborigines provides a kind of prism or lens through which we can take a fresh view of the competing claims to authorship of India's filmic heritage.

Necklace making and placedness in Tasmania

This paper has been written against the backdrop of John B. Hawkins’ paper, A Suggested History of Tasmanian Aboriginal Kangaroo Skin or Sinew, Human Bone, Shell, Feather, Apple Seed & Wombat Necklaces, published in Australiana, November 2008, and the research it sparked. Hawkins proffered some contentious propositions concerning unlikely and speculative connections between Tasmanian Aboriginal shell necklace making and the making of so-called “Tasmanian Appleseed necklaces”. Within the acknowledgements section of his paper Hawkins said that he “[looked] forward to a response to [his] article by the museum authorities, for it is only by the cut and thrust of debate that knowledge can be further enhanced”. This paper takes up that challenge albeit from outside the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and totally independent of any institutional sponsorship.

‘Islands of possibility’: Film-making, cultural practice, political action and the decolonization of Tasmanian history

ABSTRACTThis article considers the potential of a decolonizing poetics, evident across Tasmanian Aboriginal arts and cultural works, to contribute to a distinctively Aboriginal film-making practice in Tasmania. The potency of this body of work, alongside the Aboriginal community's vigorous political campaigns for cultural rights and land rights, has not translated into a distinctively Tasmanian Aboriginal film culture. Apart from several significant documentary films and photographic works that indicate the emergence of a powerful decolonizing poetics there are no fictional feature films by Tasmanian Aboriginal film-makers. Moreover recent feature films produced by non-Indigenous film-makers about Tasmania invoke the ‘Tasmanian Gothic’ trope, imagining an island without any Aboriginal presence. This article considers processes that contribute to decolonizing through the contemporary work of Tasmanian Aboriginal writers and artists, including Jim Everett, Julie Gough, Greg Lehman and photographer Ricky Maynard. I suggest their poetics are more than textual. They are grounded in country and community—linked. to another realm beyond the ‘shallow’ time of colonization. Their decolonizing poetics are shared with Maori film-maker Barry Barclay's ‘Fourth Cinema’, where the camera is firmly in Indigenous hands, based in community and cultural practices.

Island landscapes: Some preliminary questions

The ESLAND Project (http://www.eslandproject.eu) seeks to investigate ‘European culture as expressed in island landscapes’. All the world’s islands, except perhaps those of the high Arctic and high Antarctic, are cultural landscapes: the product of interactions between the environment, plants and animals, and human cultures. Any cultural landscape, whether of an island or otherwise, accumulates the results of such interactions, which typically go back at least for centuries and often involve more than one culture. For example, in the eastern half of the island of Tasmania, English settlers tried, with varying success, to replicate the hedges and fields of their distant homeland, to the extent of importing hawthorn and elm trees as well as wheat and sheep. This expression of European culture, dating from the early to mid nineteenth century, is superimposed on a pre-existing savanna of scattered giant eucalyptus trees, another cultural landscape resulting from thousands of years of land management by Tasmanian Aborigines.