In Tasmania

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Tasman wrote that he left his flag and pole as ‘as a memorial for those who shall come after us, and for the natives of this country, who did not show themselves.’ In a conscious echo, the Royal Society’s inscription informed the rare visitor that their monument was put up ‘as a memorial to posterity and to the inhabitants of this country.’ It rang hollow because in 1923 members of the Royal Society were united on one matter. There were no natives to show themselves.

  II

  THE GRANITE CAME FROM AN ISLAND OPPOSITE NORTH BAY, A combination of horseshoe beaches, fossil cliffs and forests of eucalyptus and casuarina. Tasman is thought to have named it after the wife of his patron Van Diemen. Today, Maria Island is a national park, 14 miles long and eight wide. It is almost my favourite place in Tasmania.

  Baudin visited Maria Island for nine days in February 1802. During four of those days the French had contact with the Oyster Bay tribe. Much of what little is known about Tasmania’s pre-colonial Aborigines comes from material gathered by Baudin and his scientists over the course of these four days.

  I take a small boat across to Shoal Bay where the French anchored. A school of dolphins skims alongside us, their fins slicing the water like the tips of a great rotary blade. They converge on a patch of sea where gannets are already diving, the birds mortaring the bay in a line of white explosions. ‘A ball of mackerel,’ says the captain.

  Up until 1803, Europeans landed in Van Diemen’s Land only for fresh water or to repair their ships or to explore. Baudin’s prime purpose, as described in the orders he was given, was scientific: ‘to study the inhabitants, animals and natural products of the countries in which he will land’. His expedition was one of the most extraordinary in naval history and yet European historians have neglected it. His three-year odyssey resulted in the first complete map of Australia and the discovery of 2,542 new zoological species, including the emu which came to be painted on the ceiling of the Empress Josephine’s bedroom. It also produced a 49-page report that François Péron wrote for Baudin on the behaviour of the Aborigines on Maria Island, which they called Toarra Marra Monah.

  Péron was a tailor’s son from Cérilly who had lost his right eye when defending the Republic against the Austrians. By some he is considered a manipulative and ambitious bigot, and by others as the world’s first anthropologist. He said of himself that he was ‘irresponsible, scatterbrained, argumentative, indiscreet, too absorbed in my own opinion, incapable of ever giving way for any reason of expediency’.

  The boat drops me on the beach where Péron came ashore in the dinghy from the Géographe. It was here on February 19, 1802, that he encountered the Tyreddeme people of the Oyster Bay tribe. They had crossed from the mainland, five miles away, on canoes made from bundles of reeds.

  To begin with, relations were friendly. Péron noticed the regular pattern of sun-and moon-shaped scars that decorated the men’s shoulders, arms and buttocks. The scars were raised from the skin, filled in with powdered charcoal, and designed possibly as a badge to signify membership of a particular tribe. The women also had scars and Péron speculated on whether these marks were the result of domestic violence. He noted that the Aborigines bound their sore feet with seaweed and that they wanted bottles, glass beads, and buttons, but not arak, biscuits or bread. They ate birds as soon as the feathers were burned off and were not dextrous at spear-throwing.

  The Aborigines in their turn pulled at the gold ring in Péron’s ear so hard that it came out. ‘We were so novel to one another!’ he wrote. They were fascinated by the whiteness of his skin and also ‘they showed an extreme degree of desire to examine our genital organs.’ Puzzled by his clean-shaven face, they wondered if he and his fellow sailors might be female. ‘They never failed to feel in the trousers of those of us who had no beards,’ remarked midshipman François Desiré Breton.

  As he had with previous tribes encountered on the voyage, Péron attempted to test their physical strength with his dynamometer. He invited them to squeeze this machine between their hands and to pull it up by the handle while keeping both feet planted on the base. The strongest race on earth were the English, with an average measurement of 71.4 kilos. At the opposite end of the scale, Tasmania’s Aborigines, ‘the most savage people of all … the true children of nature’, registered 50.6 kilos.

  Their feebleness was confirmed to Péron by their response to a Frenchman’s erection. Among the French sailors, Citizen Michel had a ‘slight build and lack of beard’. To prove his gender, Péron persuaded him to strip. But Michel did more than that. He ‘suddenly exhibited such striking proof of his virility that they all uttered loud cries of surprise mingled with loud roars of laughter which were repeated again and again. This condition of strength and vigour in the one among us who seemed the least likely surprised them extremely. They had the air of applauding the condition as if they were men in whom it was not very common. Several with a sort of scorn showed soft and flaccid organs and shook them briskly with an expression of regret and desire which seemed to indicate that they did not experience it as often as we did.’

  Their reaction compelled Péron to make an ‘important conjecture’. The hardships endured by these primitive people had led to a drastic weakening of their desires, ‘and to quench them promptly in the midst of winter, and sometime also in the anxiety of lean times’.

  To his critics, Péron’s anthropological observations are nowhere more questionable than in this thesis, which was interpreted by one school of thought to suggest that the Aborigines were suffering ‘a slow strangulation of the mind’ as well as of the body. Henry Reynolds, one of these critics, says: ‘The French assume that this is what they are saying: “What men are these!” They have no idea whatsoever.’

  Péron’s encounter on Maria Island caused him to throw his scientific principles to the wind and to conclude that the Tasmanian Aborigines were ‘the most feeble people’ he had ever seen. But his leader Baudin viewed their behaviour differently. In some way that they failed to understand, the French had transgressed. And Baudin foresaw what would happen if Monsieur Kemp and the British occupied a land not theirs but ‘inhabited by men who have not always deserved the title of savages or cannibals which had been given them’. He warned: ‘You will presently remain the peaceful possessors of their heritage, as the small number of those surrounding you will not exist.’

  III

  ‘THE MOST INTERESTING EVENT IN THE HISTORY OF TASMANIA, AFTER its discovery, seems to be the extinction of its ancient inhabitants.’

  In 1875, Kemp’s obituarist James Erskine Calder sat down to write The Native Tribes of Tasmania. So far as he knew, one full-blooded Aboriginal remained alive on the island. A year later Truganini was dead. With her passing, it came to be generally accepted what Darwin had written – ‘Van Diemen’s Land enjoys the great advantage of being free of a native population’ – and that the Tasmanian Aborigines had shared the fate of the Beothuks of Newfoundland: two distinct races which became extinct in the nineteenth century. But Truganini’s death was not the end of the story.

  I had been only a few weeks in Tasmania when, on a visit to her house in Hobart, I saw my new-found Kemp cousin produce a faded Edwardian case of the sort used for storing fish knives. She carried it to the table and opened it. Inside on the felt was a halo of green Mariner shells, each the size of a child’s tooth.

  I had seen shell necklaces before, but nothing like this.

  ‘To get that colour,’ she said, ‘they soaked the shells in urine and scratched the outside off.’

  ‘Where does this come from?’

  ‘It was Truganini’s,’ her face solemn. And she told how Truganini used to call at the kitchen of her grandmother’s three-storey house in Battery Point, and ask for food and grog, usually hot ale and ginger, and in return Truganini gave the daughters of the house necklaces. ‘Granny kept the necklace in the china cabinet and we would play dressings-up with it. It was so long that I would wind it two or three times around my neck.’
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  I lifted the frail circle, and imagined the hands that had polished and strung these tiny shells. James Bonwick had described Truganini as ‘exquisitely formed, with small and beautifully rounded breasts’. An American captain who entertained her on board his ship towards the end of her life was transfixed by ‘her beautiful eyes’. Margaret thought that Truganini had started coming to the house in Hampden Road after the last male Aborigine died and his head was stolen. She said that Truganini was desperate, upset, miserable.

  ‘It didn’t mean anything to us. At school, we were told Truganini was the Last Tasmanian, but no-one was very interested. I knew it wasn’t true.’

  ‘What do you mean it wasn’t true?’

  Margaret said that she had grown up with Aborigines and that now there were many on the island who called themselves Tasmanian Aborigines.

  ‘How many?’ She smiled. ‘About 15,000.’

  This was four or five times the accepted number that had been on the island when Kemp arrived.

  I was excited and pestered her with questions. How had they kept their culture? What did they look like? Where would I find them?

  Margaret warned that it would not be straightforward. The majority looked ‘like you and me’ and had white faces and blue eyes. She and her friends never made conversation about Aboriginal people in a public place. ‘Because you never know who is an Aborigine.’

  IV

  THE VIEW OF THE ‘ORTHODOX’ SCHOOL, SOMETIMES CALLED BY ITS detractors the ‘black armband’ school, is that the English colonists – in the space of 73 years – wiped out the Tasmanian Aborigines, if not as a deliberate act of genocide then as an unfortunate but inevitable concomitant of frontier warfare and disease. It was a view expressed as early as 1853 by the traveller F.J. Cockburn: ‘Here, as in most other places, it has been the old story – aggression on our part, retaliation on theirs, and then persecution on our part for safety’s sake.’

  But since 2000 there had sprung up a newer, more contentious and revisionist version of Tasmanian history: we did not kill very many, they were all dying out anyway, we do not have too much to worry about. Therefore, we do not owe the Aborigines any apology, compensation or land.

  I went to a debate in Hobart between these rival factions, hoping to learn more. The invasion of Iraq was eight days old and the news dispiriting. British soldiers had not been greeted, as expected, with ‘tea and rose petals’. A young man from Jane’s Defence Weekly talked on the radio about the tactical misinformation put about by a Ministry of Defence spokesman. The young man had trained as a journalist. ‘Where is the second source for the story of a woman in Basra hanged after she waved at British forces?’ He complained that we were only getting one side of the story: our side.

  The lecture in the Dechaineaux Theatre was billed as ‘Telling Histories’ and took place on the wharf where both Kemp’s warehouse and Hobart’s original execution site had stood. I spotted the author Keith Windschuttle in a tight green suit and open blue shirt. He glanced round, neon blazing from his sunburned pate. It was a full audience and people were standing against the walls. Like me, they had come to hear Windschuttle debate the fate of the Tasmanian Aborigines, about which he had recently self-published a book that was dividing opinion on the mainland. The historian Geoffrey Blainey had called it ‘one of the most important and devastating written on Australian history in recent decades’. In the judgment of James Boyce, ‘the book is the most ignorant and offensive publication on Van Diemen’s Land in at least a century, arguably ever.’

  The Chairman introduced the panel. It included Windschuttle, a Sydney academic, former Trotskyist, and author of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume I, Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847; Henry Reynolds, one of Tasmania’s foremost historians; and Greg Lehman, a Tasmanian Aboriginal who had successfully lobbied to have Risdon Cove, site of a notorious early ‘massacre’ by British soldiers, handed back to the Aboriginal community.

  The chairman allowed them four minutes each on the subject: ‘How do you collect information and what do you decide to leave out?’ All exceeded their brief by a wide margin.

  Windschuttle was the second speaker. The gist of what he said was this:

  Over the past 30 years, university-based historians like Reynolds had presented a widespread picture of killing of Aborigines that in the words of Lyndall Ryan was ‘a conscious policy of genocide’. Windschuttle had been a true believer of this story for most of his adult life. ‘I used to tell my students that the record of the British in Australia was worse than the Spanish in South America.’ Then, in 2000, he began work on his book, expecting to write a single chapter on Tasmania, and for three years had checked the footnotes of historians like Reynolds and Ryan, along the way discovering ‘some of the most hair-raising breaches of historical research imaginable’. After examining all the available evidence he concluded that myth had been piled on myth.

  Singling out the man beside him, he gave this example. In 1830, according to Henry Reynolds, Governor Arthur had written of his fear of the ‘eventual extirpation of the Colony [my italics]’ – hence his initiation of the Black Line, in which more than 2,000 armed convicts, settlers and soldiers fanned out across the island in a human dragnet to round up all remaining Aborigines. But Reynolds had altered a critical word. What Arthur actually wrote was his fervent hope that by careful measures he could prevent ‘the eventual extirpation of the aboriginal race itself [my italics].’ Reynolds, in other words, had radically changed the meaning of one of the most significant documents in early colonial history.

  Windschuttle’s thesis was that during the first 30 years of settlement the British had killed 120 of the original inhabitants, mostly in self-defence. This was one-tenth of Reynolds’ estimation. In fact, Tasmania was probably the site where the least indigenous blood of all was deliberately shed in the British Empire. ‘My quarrel is not with the Aboriginal people at all, my quarrel is with historians who told lies about them.’ Those historians who had perpetrated the idea of a genocide had ‘betrayed their profession and misled their country’.

  In his response, Reynolds remarked that Windschuttle had been dining out on other people’s footnotes. ‘I’m a little concerned about you, Keith,’ he said. ‘I wonder if you had a childhood problem with reading.’ The fact was that Windschuttle had misread what Reynolds had written and attributed to him ideas and attitudes that did not exist. There had been no fabrication, other than in Windschuttle’s book. In claiming, for instance, that the Aborigines had no concept of land possession, Windschuttle had profoundly misunderstood their culture. What he had produced was a pitiless vilification, ‘the most sustained attack on a native Aboriginal community for a long time, and perhaps ever’.

  After each of the speakers had had their say, Jim Everett, a Tasmanian Aborigine from Cape Barren Island, stood up at the back. In a steady and dignified voice, he complained that Aboriginality had not been understood in the discussion because it was not part of the discussion. The reason there was no word for land was because ‘we define land as something that is part of us – not separate.’ He said: ‘We continue to be researched and over-researched,’ and he looked forward to the day when his community would grow their own historian. At this everyone clapped except Windschuttle.

  The last and most devastating question was asked by a black man in a wool cap. His name was Douglas Maynard. His people, he said, came from Wilson’s Promontory. He had spent six years working in the archives. ‘I’m going to ask you historians, where’s your integrity?’ There had been a conspiracy about genealogy. ‘You know, Mr Reynolds, about it. I’m a black man, I sit here listening to you talking about my people. Mr Jim Everett doesn’t know about my people.’ Then he delivered an unexpected remark that caused the theatre to erupt in chaos: ‘I thank Mr Windschuttle for bringing out the fraud that’s going on.’

  As they filed from the hall, many who had sat through this bunfight asked themselves: What was going on?

  V

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sp; IT DID NOT TAKE LONG TO REALISE THAT ANY ATTEMPT TO UNDERSTAND what had happened to the native population in Tasmania was frustrated by the absence from the written record of the Aborigines themselves. Their descendants had to depend on a body of work produced for the most part by ‘white’ witnesses, colonisers and historians who did not in every instance agree. The debate had the effect of polarising many of the participants, who assumed fundamentalist positions and were exasperated by the others’ intransigence. ‘Something about Tasmanians,’ says the poet Andrew Sant, ‘means that they find it very difficult to hold two contradictory opinions. There is a tendency for Tasmanians as a small community to box themselves into one camp or the other and for the debate to become heated and, worse, personal.’ As with the rivalry between Launceston and Hobart, or between the factions of the Royal Society of Tasmania, there was a lot of rancour, little authentic dialogue and a tendency to take an à la carte attitude to the historical record in order to shore up a settled position. Certainty combined with dismissiveness, and the deepest hostility was generated for anyone caught searching for the middle ground. Beneath the salvoes, the complexity of what took place then, and what was taking place today, risked slipping by unnoticed.

  And so I turned back to Kemp. He was not a reliable guide, but he was a devil I knew. He also had a rare, if not unique, knowledge of both Hobart and Launceston.

  If my hunch was correct, Kemp’s formative contact with Aboriginal culture began on his first voyage to Australia when he was shipmate with Bennelong on the Reliance. Six months together in the same cramped space, perhaps learning a smattering of Eora, gave Kemp unrivalled exposure to a people whom The Times of London characterised as ‘exactly on a par’ with ‘the beasts of the field’, and could well explain his initial sympathy. Kemp reminds Henry Reynolds of Colonel C.J. Napier who rejected the idea that Aborigines were ‘a race which forms a link between men and monkeys’, and argued that these ‘poor people are as good as ourselves’. In their turn, the Aborigines who watched Kemp come ashore in November 1804 saw him as one of their own. They thought he was a dead Aborigine.