I will not engage in a history of the human settlement of Van Diemen’s Land. The documentary evidence which exists is too heav-ily weighted by the post-European story to result in anything but a European history of colonisation, and detracts from the real focus of this study: the under-examined Wybalenna exile. Likewise, I will not attempt a detailed examination of pre-contact First Nations soci-eties. Due to the complexities, and the contested nature of the record, even a cursory attempt becomes saddled with the multitude of issues arising from problematic historiography. It is outside the scope of this study to condense the histories and responses of a number of distinct cultures: this I leave to more detailed studies of the individual na-tions or periods.1 This study is intended to be read in tandem with those works, and informed by more general histories.2 What follows is but a brief summary of key events.
1 See especially Patsy Cameron, Grease and Ochre; the early chapters of Shayne Breen, Contested Places; Graeme Calder, Levee, Line and Martial Law: A History of the Dispossession of the Mairremmener People of Van Diemens Land 1803–1832, Launceston, Fuller’s Bookshop, 2010; Ian MacFarlane, Beyond Awakening: The Aboriginal Tribes of North West Tasmania – A History, Launceston, Fuller’s Bookshop, 2008.
2 See especially Henry Reynolds, History of Tasmania, Cambridge and Melbourne, Cambridge University Press, 2012; Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines; for the purely European story, James Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land.
On Positioning
It’s only an island when you look at it from the water.
Chief Brody, Jaws3
The idea that First Nations peoples have always lived in Australia is a passionately held and defended one. It runs through many origin stories, contending that the ancestors of the first peoples have been there since time began. From the beginning – always. This powerful and widespread historical narrative links land, people and time in a holistic concept called Dreaming.4 A discipline like history, with its burden of evidence and reliance on archaeology where no written
3 Chief Brody, Jaws [Motion picture], Steven Speilberg (Dir.), USA, Universal Pictures, 1975.
4 ‘Dreaming’ is used as opposed to ‘Dreamtime’, which locks concepts in a temporal space and is more suited to explain creation stories. For a useful conceptualisation of Dreaming, see Deborah Bird Rose’s description of Dreaming as synchrony in ‘Ned Kelly Died for Our Sins’, Oceania, 65:2, 1994, 179-181.
record exists, can be forgiven for being uneasy about concepts like forever. It is usually deftly avoided.
This study, however, is committed to privileging First Nations accounts and systems of knowledge where possible and appropri-ate. And to properly contextualise the writings of VDL people during their exile at Wybalenna, we must go back. Way back – past historiographical debates, shipping records and the wild cartographic imaginings of the Age of Exploration.5 Anthropological categories and ideas about social evolution must be set aside, to venture to a place where European ideas of progress – and evidence – do not exist.
At the beginning of this story, the moon and the planets are still, roughly, in the same locations, but the observable transit of stars is different. The land is modified, with vastly altered shores and land masses. Volcanic and tectonic incursions write and rewrite the land-scape. Alternately arid, moist and smothered by glacier, this is a world in flux. Mountains, deserts and river courses are different, as are the animals, fish and plants that populate them. The one striking thing which is thoroughly modern is the people.6
The first human cultures in Australia flourished in a temporal pe-riod before the continent – as we know it – physically existed. The lands, seas, plants, animals and climate were all different, and the first peoples literally witnessed the formation of what is now the Australian landscape. In this sense, First Nations people have been living on the Australian continent since time began – always.
5 Pierre Desceliers’s 1550 ‘Chart of Australia’ as one example. According to George Collingridge, an amalgam of Portuguese and Spanish maps, Marco Polo’s descriptions of Java, and a great deal of imagination. See George Collingridge, Discovery of Australia, [1895 Hayes Brothers Sydney], facsimile edition, Silverwater, Golden Press, 192-193.
6 Modern humans as defined by Linnaean taxonomy.
The academy, from which this study originates, tells a similar nar-rative, which is no less fantastical-sounding in parts to many First Nations creation stories. The dramatic, currently-dominant narrative holds that human beings had been in Australia for at the very least 45,000 years. This assessment, which importantly posits the First Nations of Australia as the world’s oldest continuous culture, is a conservative one, based on sound scientific data.7 It is therefore the very minimum which is proven. 45,000 years is a very good first step on the way to always. But always, of course, is a very difficult quan-tity to measure.
Within a few millennia of arriving on the continent which en-compassed the current-day Australian mainland as well as New Guinea and Tasmania, the first human colonists spread far and wide.
By 45,000 years ago, people were well established, as the research into Lake Mungo proves, at the Willandra Lakes system in western New South Wales. By 30,000 years ago, there is abundant evi-dence of people living across the metaphoric four corners of the continent – from today’s Pilbara to far north Queensland; from the Great Australian Bight to the contemporary Melbourne suburb of Keilor. People lived in caves, rock shelters, and built dwellings. They populated mountains, forests, lakes and deserts, and crossed vast dis-tances in difficult circumsdis-tances.
When people first lived in Trowunna or Van Diemen’s Land it was a peninsula of sorts. To gain access, people had to cross the Bassian Plain or desert, which according to research by John Taylor was part of an extensive and extremely arid valley that stretched from Shark Bay in Western Australia to the current Tasmanian land
7 The upper end of this current estimated date range for human occupation of Australia is 60,000 years.
mass.8 From around 42,000 years ago, people were successfully inhabiting much of the modern Tasmanian land mass.9 It was a resource-rich environment, sustaining human life right through a number of major climate shifts. Although much evidence has been lost, due to the rising of sea levels submerging many sites of human occupation, inland evidence shows multiple locations with continu-ous occupation from at least 34,000 years ago, such as Parmerpar Meethaner.10 Some sites were used at the height of the last Ice Age, then abandoned, such as the famous Kutikina Cave.11 Other locations were used mainly in more temperate periods. Some areas, however, are thought to have been rarely used, due to a range of climatologi-cal and geographiclimatologi-cal features such as permanent rain shadow.
Around 12,000 years ago, a cycle of global warming began. People in what was soon to be VDL emerged from ice age cave-living and shed their clothing, preferring the use of seal and other animal fat mixed with ochre as insulation.12 Other people began arriving, via
8 John Taylor, Cultural Evolution in Palawa (Tasmanian Aboriginal) Societies 40,000 BCE to 1803 AD, PhD Thesis, University of Tasmania, incomplete, 44-45.
9 A wealth of scholarship exists documenting human occupation of various regions.
See especially the work of Richard Cosgrove, Sandra Bowdler, John Mulvaney, Rhys Jones and Jim Allen.
10 Jim Allen dates Parmer Parmeethener between 33 and 39k, Warreen 36–41k. Peer Review of the Draft Final Archaeological Report on the Test Excavations of the Jordan River Levee Site, Southern Tasmania, Robert Paton Archaeological Studies, August 2010.
11 An incredibly rich archaeological assemblage was excavated in 1982, which had a major influence on stopping the damming of the Franklin River, close to which it is located. Rhys Jones, Don Ranson, Jim Allen and Kevin Kiernan, ‘The Australian National University–Tasmanian National Parks and Wildlife Service Archaeological Expedition to the Franklin River, 1982: A Summary of Results’, Australian
Archaeology, No. 16, June 1983, 57-70.
12 Ian Gilligan, Another Tasmanian Paradox: Clothing and Thermal Adaptations in Aboriginal Australia, Oxford, Archaeopress, 2007; Sagona cites Backhouse (1843) and Davies (1841) as discussing the mixing of grease and ochre into a paste for insulation; Antonio Sagona, Bruising the Red Earth: Ochre Mining and Ritual in Aboriginal Tasmania, Carlton, Melbourne University Press, 1994, 23; see also Patsy Cameron, Grease and Ochre.
the desert land bridge. However, with global warming, the Bassian Plain began to submerge. Over several thousand years, a lake ex-panded until the western side of the land bridge disappeared com-pletely. The total submerging of Bass Strait, and isolation from the north, would not have been a surprise. It did not happen overnight.
For many centuries, there would have been warning, and northeast coastal people would certainly have had a choice, of sorts, on whether to stay on the island, or go north.13
Human settlement on the large, triangular island diversified and flourished. Communities that had survived the perils of the Ice Age consolidated language, land use patterns and cultural identities.
These may have been challenged, and perhaps enriched, by contact with migrants from the north. By the time the seas rose to submerge the last link back to the main continent, the population which had been in place for tens of thousands of years was augmented by those who had ventured south in the post-glacial period. The newer ar-rivals probably settled towards the southern and eastern parts of VDL.14 By six thousand years ago, there were no new arrivals. In this post-glacial period, VDL people organised themselves into a va-riety of socially, culturally and linguistically diverse societies. Henry Reynolds asserts that they ‘were, in fact, small nations which had long traditions of complex “international” relations’.15
Diversity was a hallmark of the First Nations of Van Diemen’s Land. Some nations were allies, such as the Big River and Oyster Bay people, and were fluent in each other’s languages. Others such as
13 Patsy Cameron writes evocatively on this under-examined period in Grease and Ochre.
14 John Taylor used linguistic, archaeological and ethnographic evidence to locate the Nara speakers, who were the final migrants before separation. John Taylor, Cultural Evolution in Palawa (Tasmanian Aboriginal) Societies.
15 Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, 149.
the North West people had no contact with those to the east, though they did share reciprocal hunting arrangements with the South West people. There were long standing animosities, such as between the Ben Lomond and Big River–Oyster Bay alliance. And while there is only scant evidence from the pre-European period, it is clear, from the evidence at Wybalenna, that many of the old alliances, and ani-mosities, were retained. In many ways, it is the Wybalenna record of exile which can give many pointers to pre-war, pre-exile life.
Much has been made of the isolation in which the various First Nations of VDL presumably developed. Archaeologist Rhys Jones did much to expose the longevity of VDL occupation; he also framed VDL isolation pathologically. VDL people, he famously wrote, suf-fered a ‘squeezing of intellectuality’ and ‘slow strangulation of the mind’.16 As a backward and isolated people, so the story went, they were destined to fail. However, the only people talking about isola-tion were the Europeans.
Island life, of course, is no impediment to cultural progress, and the cultural worlds of the First Nations people of Van Diemen’s Land were full. Patsy Cameron paints a compelling picture of tra-ditional life ways of the Coastal Plains nation, with a rich cultural and spiritual life.17 The work of Shayne Breen, Ian MacFarlane and Graeme Calder likewise present windows into pre-contact worlds of the Northern, North West and Big River–Oyster Bay nations. Van Diemen’s Land might be seen in the same context as Epeli Hau’ofa’s evocative depiction of the richness and complexity of Pacific island
16 Rhys Jones, ‘The Tasmanian Paradox’, in R. V. S. Wright (ed.), Stone Tools as Cultural Markers: Change, Evolution and Complexity, Canberra, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1977, 203.
17 Cameron, Grease and Ochre, 20-33.
culture in Our Sea of Islands: ‘Their world was anything but tiny. They thought big and recounted their deeds in epic proportions’.18
The issue of isolation will be rested with one final question. Is it reasonable to assume – as the discourse currently does – that VDL was never visited by Melanesian or Polynesian people? Given the dramatic and successful Pacific maritime expansions of the past mil-lennia, it is difficult to imagine – even given the treacherous seas of Bass Strait – that Pacific mariners did not visit VDL. While there is currently no direct evidence of trade or contact with main-land Australian, Melanesian or Polynesian mariners, the possibility should not be discounted. Given the skill and tenacity of Polynesian mariners, it seems counterintuitive to hold too fast to ideas of her-metically sealed isolation. The Pacific had been a very busy waterway for hundreds of years before Europeans arrived. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Looking at What the White People Did
The European history of Van Diemen’s Land is a familiar one, and its narrative of ‘discovery’ is writ large across VDL land and seas. It holds that the remarkable VDL isolation was interrupted in the 17th century, as a steady procession of European superpowers sent investi-gators. It was always a colonial affair: when Abel Tasman named the island Van Diemen’s Land in 1642, it was in honour of his patron, then-governor of the Dutch East Indies. The coastlines, rivers, and towns of modern day Tasmania bear the names of the English and French mariners like Du Fresne (1772), who was the first European to make contact with Nuenonne/Bruny Island people; Englishman Tobias Furneaux who visited Adventure Bay in 1773, again meeting
18 Epeli Hau’ofa, ‘Our Sea of Islands’, The Contemporary Pacific, 6:1, Spring 1994, 152.
with the Nuenonne nation; and Bruni d’Entrecasteax (1792) who also met the Nuenonne people at Adventure Bay, and whose name lives on in the D’Entrecasteaux channel, and Bruny Island.19 Bass and Flinders circumnavigated VDL in 1798, lending their names to the strait they charted, and later what was initially called Great Island. Ann McGrath writes evocatively of these early encounters as, in retrospect, moments to cherish: ‘moments of promising warmth and openness, of recognition and of our common humanity … rare times of mutual trust between indigenes and foreigners’ because, importantly, the strangers would return permanently to their own lands.20
A VDL perspective of this exploration narrative is not unknown to us. VDL people watched and they waited. They spread the word and then they watched some more. We can look to the experiences of the Nuenonne/Bruny Island people, who had the most experience with investigators. The great negotiator and sage Doctor Wooreddy21 would later tell the missionary G. A. Robinson: ‘the natives went to the mountains, went and looked at what the white people did, went and told other natives and they came and looked also’.22
People watched and waited. On a mountainous island, there were many vantage points. At times, negotiations were entered into, such
19 The spelling of Bruny Island has often been varied. The same goes for the Nuenonne people who bear that name (Thomas Brune, David and Peter Bruny or, as used in this study for these individuals, Bruney).
20 Ann McGrath, ‘Tasmania 1’, in Ann McGrath (ed.), Contested Ground: Australian Aborigines Under the British Crown, St. Leonards, Allen & Unwin, 1995, 311-312.
21 Born around 1786, Bruny Island. Commonly known as Doctor, due to his status as a traditional healer and clever man. Spelling varies across the written record, e.g.
Wooreddy, Woorady, Wooradeddy, Wooraddy. This study follows the spelling used by Mudrooroo/Colin Johnson in his novel Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World, Melbourne, Hyland House, 1983. Later known at Flinders Island as Count Alpha. See Weep In Silence, 834, 837, for detailed nomenclature.
22 Doctor Wooreddy to G. A. Robinson, 11 July 1831, from Friendly Mission, 408.
as the Coastal Plains nation’s partnership with independent sealers and whalers on the Furneaux group islands. Cameron has established patterns of labour migration in the early years of the Coastal Plains nation’s links to what she calls the Straitsmen, where women – the Tyereelore, expert sealers and birders – worked seasonally on the islands with the Straitsmen.23 However, few VDL–European rela-tionships would follow this collaborative pattern.
The British arrived in the south-east of modern day Tasmania in September 1803. The first encampment was in Mairremmener Country.24 A permanent settlement was established at Risdon Cove, on the east side of what was called the Derwent River. In May 1804, this was the site of what would be known as the Risdon Cove Massacre, where it appears a large hunting party was attacked by nervous marines, with a large number reported dead.25 This set the tone for future relations. The following year, the settlement was moved across the Derwent, and grew into Hobarttown. Hundreds of kilometres to the north, the river port of Launceston was established in 1804 on the Tamar River, and pastoral expansion flourished.
There was no attempt at treaty. The resource-rich corridor between the two initial port settlements of Hobarttown and Launceston sat squarely within the traditional lands of the powerful alliance of
23 Patsy Cameron, Grease and Ochre, 79-111.
24 Mairremmener is used by Graeme Calder and others, following the work of linguist John Taylor; it denotes both the Oyster Bay peoples, plus their close associates the Big River and North Midlands nations. See Calder, Levee Line and Martial Law, 17-20, fn. 254. In later times, the infamy of the Big River peoples ensured that all three allied nations were associated as ‘Big River’ people.
25 As discussed by Henry Reynolds, this was a controversial incident at the time, and has been ever since. For the most recent discussions, see Henry Reynolds, A History of Tasmania, 20-24; James Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land, 38-40; Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, 49-51.
First major towns, Van Diemen’s Land. © L. Stevens 2017
the Big River, Oyster Bay and North Midlands peoples, and their traditional enemies, the Ben Lomond nation. This region included lakes, waterways and land strategically modified over many centuries for hunting and cultural purposes. With the arrival of men, guns, fences and sheep, the Big River and Oyster Bay alliance was effec-tively invaded on two fronts. Within a decade, VDL people found themselves not sharing use of the land, but forced from it. During the 1820s, as land grants increased and the carefully-crafted kangaroo hunting runs became covered in sheep,26 VDL people retaliated.
26 Sharon Morgan, Land Settlement in Early Tasmania: Creating an Antipodean England, first paperback edition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003, 5-23.
The events of the so-called ‘Black War’ were surprisingly well recorded at the time, and have been a focus for historians ever since.27 A number of nations – especially the Big River and Oyster Bay alliance – waged a determined, patriotic campaign in defence of Country. It was fought on a national or clan-based level, rather than
The events of the so-called ‘Black War’ were surprisingly well recorded at the time, and have been a focus for historians ever since.27 A number of nations – especially the Big River and Oyster Bay alliance – waged a determined, patriotic campaign in defence of Country. It was fought on a national or clan-based level, rather than