His most fascinating insights, however, were his contemporary observations of the Aboriginal population, and his melancholy reflections on their final home on Flinders Island’s western shore at Settlement Point, or, as it is known today, Wybalenna. I would soon visit this sad place, accompanied by his words.
23
THE SHELL LADY
First on Leedham’s list was Flinders Island’s local Aboriginal elder Bernice Condie, one of the few Aboriginal women still practising the ancient and exquisite art of making shell jewellery.
Bea is a Palawa, the name given to the direct descendants of Tasmanian Aborigines today. Her Palawa name, Moekatan, connects her, via her mother’s genes, to a millennia-old culture that was extinguished in less than a century.
‘My father’s father was English and my grandmum was Aboriginal from Cape Barren, the big island just a few miles from here. His name was West. He came out here on a ship,’ she says plainly, distilling her family history in a sentence.
‘Just been working on these,' she said, lifting the lid of a large, shallow box. The contents writhed in iridescent blues and greens before my eyes, shattering the little rays of sunlight that touched it through the kitchen window, reflecting back an electric mother-of-pearl. I gasped audibly.
Tiny snail shells, the sort you might come across occasionally in ones or twos glinting momentarily when strolling along the shoreline on a summer day, were here in their hundreds and thousands. ‘These are my blue mariners,’ said Bea proudly, ‘… and these ones here are the black crows. They live on the rocks. The mariners you find on the kelp. Not many people know just where to look. But I’ve got a few spots. Bit of a trade secret, you might say.’ She chuckled again.
As has been practised by her ancestors for centuries, the shells – the largest half the size of a child’s fingernail – are all collected then threaded to form intricate alternating patterns in necklaces and bracelets. For millennia, this jewellery adorned the necks of the local Aboriginal women. I picked out a single shell, but found it difficult to focus on. Like some optical trick, its tiny surface seemed somehow to be moving, hidden in a miasma that reflected every colour of the sea.
‘They’re quite … magical,’ I said. ‘Where did you say you find them?’ I asked, having never seen anything like them before.
‘I didn’t. Ha!’ she said. ‘You have to know where to look. You have to dig for them. Under the piles of rotting seaweed below the sand. Stinks a bit. They’re getting hard to find these days but I’ve got a few spots.
‘They don’t come out of the sea looking like this, mind,’ she said. ‘You have to rot the creature out, then wash them and prepare them. It takes about six weeks to make a single string. From the time you get them out of the sea till the stringing stage takes about three months. These ones,’ she said, rummaging again, ‘you get at Cape Barren. I used to collect them here but with the pollution that’s gone into the water, you just can’t find them anymore.’
The shells are collected, as they have always been, at very low spring tides. ‘You can only get them about six times a year,’ she said. ‘I picked up how to do it from my Aunty Louis Brown. We used to go mutton-birding on Babel Island …’
She examined them, then handed me a particularly fine example. ‘Yes, they’re getting harder to find all right. Only myself and one other lady does it these days.’
There are, of course, no longer any full-blooded Tasmanian Aborigines living on Flinders Island, or anywhere else. The last of them, the celebrated Truganini, died in 1876 after an extraordinary life filled with adventure and tragedy. Photographs show her large dark eyes, which had witnessed in her lifetime the extinction of her own people, staring eerily somewhere beyond the lens. Around her neck can clearly be seen a fine example of a shell necklace, identical to the type still being made by Bea today.
‘You know, since all this reconciliation started, things are better now. But when I was going to school here,’ she paused, shaking her head, ‘it was bloody hard. Things were bad. The white kids wouldn’t talk to you. They thought you were dirty. They played up one end of the yard, we were down the other. All that kind of crap. It was pretty bad back then.’
I hadn’t intended to push Bea too hard on what things used to be like between peoples on the island, but once she had started, it tumbled out in a cascade, like the release of a valve. It was plain to see some of the hurt remains.
‘I grew up here, but I moved away for a long time. When I came back, I found out I had all these relations I didn’t even know about. My great aunt’s daughter lived four or five houses from me as a kid and I didn’t even know we were related. They knew, but they never told me. People were ashamed, you see.’ Some of her initial exuberance had gone and she began to cough, quite hard, complaining about getting over a virus. I fetched her a glass of water and asked if she’d like me to go, but she waved the suggestion away. ‘You just have to look at me to see I’m Aboriginal,’ she said, recovering, ‘I’ve never been ashamed of it. Even today, I know people who won’t admit they’ve got Aboriginal blood. Even today.’
She paused again to ask me if I’d been out to Wybalenna. ‘Sad place,’ she said, ‘very sad place. You know, about fifteen years ago, we discovered about 260 Aboriginal graves out there. Completely unmarked, on the other side of the cemetery, absolutely nothing to show they were there. So we marked them all and put in a plaque for every one of them. A little plaque and a number for every Aboriginal person buried there. People here pulled them all up and dumped them. We’ve never found where. We planted trees, and they pulled them out too. And they painted our flag white … all sorts of awful graffiti … awful.’ She lost herself a little in the stubbornly unalterable past before regaining her sunny composure. ‘But that was years ago. Things are better now, like I said.’
I told her that it was probably about time she was shown a little respect, given the thousands of years her lot’s been around these parts. That brought back some of the laugh.
‘Oh, have these, have these,’ she said, reaching into another box as I stood at the door to go. She pulled out two exquisite nautilus shells, perfect and thin as translucent paper. ‘We get them when we get a strong westerly. They wash up on the tide. Thousands of them sometimes,’ she said, passing them into my hands, ‘all along the beach. It’s quite amazing. Take it, take it. You should always take a souvenir, I reckon.’
24
WYBALENNA
The inscription read:
It’s pretty important you know, the land. It doesn’t matter how small, it’s something … just a little sacred site … that’s Wybalenna. There was a massacre there; sad things there, but we try not to go over that. Where the bad was we can always make it good. 1995 Auntie Ida West.
It’s wasn’t your typical inscription, nor was it your typical monument, and Wybalenna is no typical place.
Much has been written on the history of this lonely little peninsula that juts out into Bass Strait halfway up Flinders Island’s west coast, and little of it makes for pleasant reading. It was to this quiet spot that, in the 1830s, the decimated remnants of Tasmania’s Aborigines were lured from their traditional hunting grounds by the colonial government of the day, betrayed, and left to literally pine away to extinction.
When people on the island talk about Wybalenna – and that I found to be as little as possible – it is with a slightly anguished expression, like being forced to acknowledge something difficult and tedious, which would rather be left forgotten.
Perhaps that’s why Wybalenna is not very easy to find. A modest sign points to a small road off the main north–south thoroughfare, but this leads to the smart and refurbished Furneaux Museum. It was only after some confusion that I realised the little dirt road continues on behind it, opening eventually onto a large grassy plain.
Not a soul was there the day I visited, even though it’s a place that’s full of souls, or so I’m told. There’s not a great deal to see – a small cemetery in a state of dis
repair at which efforts of some kind of restoration are evident; the old chapel, built as a place for the Indigenous population to worship the unfamiliar god of an unknown religion, a few established trees in need of care, approaching the end of their natural life. Wybalenna is mainly a place of bare plains and windy hills.
The Reverend Brownwrigg came this way too, visiting Wybalenna in its waning days on his journey through the islands on the Freak in 1872. Under a large tree that he could well have sat under himself, I settled and read his words. His melancholy tone seems still appropriate more than a century later.
Around this ‘Settlement’ many sad memories cluster, as being the last spot, to which were exiled, the remnant of the Tasmanian tribes. The history of their banishment is fraught with painful interest, and calls up the unhappy remembrance of many deeds of cruelty and violence by which it was preceded, and out of which it arose.
In fact, Wybalenna was not the first place of exile proposed to take the Tasmanian Aborigines. George Augustus Robinson, the builder turned lay preacher and self-proclaimed saviour of the Aboriginal people, was, in the early 1830s, given charge of the government’s new strategy of pacification of the local tribes, as opposed to the policy of violent subjugation, which had characterised relations until then. This had culminated in the Black War of 1828–32, as settlers encroached on traditional lands, and running battles of violence on both sides ensued. Against modern weaponry, the tribes, their birth rate already collapsing from disease, harassment and upheaval from their traditional areas, had no answer. Robinson was given a mission, with the instruction that Governor Arthur was ‘desirous of your having an opportunity of conciliating and bringing in the natives by gentle means’.
In a series of treks through the wilderness accompanied by a handful of English-speaking Indigenous guides, including the famous Truganini, Robinson sought out the remaining tribes and convinced them to accept the governor’s offer of resettlement. Conscious of the forces arrayed against them, they agreed.
They were told they were to be taken to a place where they could still hunt in their traditional ways, and eventually look forward to the prospect of returning. Neither of these promises were kept.
The Hunter Group was first considered, then rejected, after which Robinson surveyed the islands of the Furneaux Group. Clarke’s Island he found to be ‘barren and with indifferent water’, but he also looked at Preservation, Woody, Big Dog and Tin Kettle. Preposterously small, Swan Island off the mainland’s north-east tip became a temporary solution, then in a report to Governor Arthur’s ‘Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs’ in Hobart, Robinson (who had by now become something of a local celebrity as the man who could bring an end to the conflicts between settlers and Indigenous people) reported that Gun Carriage Island, also called Vansittart, was an ideal site. The committee recorded:
Mr Robinson is of the opinion that if the natives were placed on an island in Bass’s Strait they would not feel themselves imprisoned there, or pine away in consequence of the restraint, nor would they wish to return to the mainland, or regret their inability to hunt and roam about in a manner they had previously done on this island. They would be enabled to fish, dance, sing and throw their spears in the usual way.
Then, as well as now, few agreed with his assessment.
‘It is utterly incomprehensible,’ thunders RM Fowler in his two-volume history of the Furneaux Group (1980), ‘that a man who had spent so much time in proximity to the blacks; who had learned their language … could favour Gun Carriage Island if he were sincere in his desire for the improved welfare of the race. That they would not feel imprisoned there, is almost too absurd for comment’.
However, Gun Carriage Island was where the Indigenous people were settled. But when disease began to ravage their numbers, scattered as they were about its chilly and windswept slopes, another place was found on Flinders’ south-west point, known gloomily as The Lagoons. Says Fowler of this dismal spot:
… at the rear of a dreary tea-tree scrub, nearly bordering the sandy shore was a salt lagoon or shallow lake. Fresh water was only to be found in the hollows of granite rocks, or dug for in morasses, or in the white sea sand.
None of these places resembled anything like the ‘splendid country’ the Aborigines had been promised. Twelve miles to the north of the Lagoons, however, was yet another spot the sealers once called Pea Jacket Point, then Civilization Point, but for ever after, ‘Wybalenna’, meaning ‘house of the black man’, is the name by which it has been known. It was to here the last of the Tasmanian tribes were taken to what would be the resting place of an entire people. A government surveyor had informed Brownrigg that when the first of the Aboriginal people saw their new and permanent home:
… they betrayed the greatest agitation, gazing with strained eyes at the sterile shore, uttering melancholy moans, and with arms hanging beside them trembling with convulsive feelings.
Nor were they reassured upon landing by the sight of plenty of kangaroos:
… in the chase of which they so much delighted. They were located on the south-western side, exposed to the ever boisterous western breeze, unsheltered by forests, and unprotected by rising ground near. The winds were violent and cold; the rain and sleet were penetrating and miserable. With their health suffering from chills, rheumatism and consumption diminished their numbers, and thus added force to their forebodings that they were taken there to die.
Despite the sanguine predictions of Robinson and the committee, Wybalenna was not to be a happy place. For a time their immediate health was said to improve. Says Brownrigg:
Some four and twenty cottages were erected for the natives, and quarters for the Commandant, the Doctor, the Catechist and the soldiers. A plain brick church, 41 feet long by 19 feet wide, and a two-celled watch-house complete the list of edifices. The dwelling places of the whites, were built of brick, while those occupied by the natives were of wattle and clay, and thatched with course grass.
The initial intake into Wybalenna was between 130 and 200 Aborigines, but within a short time, their numbers had started to drop, never to recover. Brownrigg observed:
The increase in the population scarcely exceeded one soul within a year, but the mortality was excessive … At the time of their capture most of the men were fine muscular fellows, and excited great interest and sympathy; but in a short time a majority of their number died from that strange disease … they pined away and died from home-sickness.
Eleven superintendents came and went in as many years at Wybalenna, presumably ground down by the depressing atmosphere of a people fading away before their eyes. Within a couple of years, Robinson was recommending the place be scrapped, and the remaining Aborigines relocated to the mainland. Even Governor Arthur himself seems to have had a conscience-pricking change of heart. In a dispatch to the Colonial Secretary, Viscount Goderich, he describes the process of Wybalenna as:
… driving a simple but warlike, and, it now appears, noble-minded race from their native hunting ground … a measure in itself so distressing, that I am willing to make almost any prudent sacrifice that may tend to compensate for the injuries that the Government is unwillingly and unavoidably made the instrument of inflicting.
His anguish did not help the people of Wybalenna.
‘Had they,’ observed James Backhouse Walker, writing a few decades later in his Notes on the Aborigines of Tasmania, ‘been left in possession of a portion of their hunting grounds … they might have lived healthily, and even happily for a long period of years, though that would not have averted their final doom.’
Even in death, they did not remain unmolested, and a ghoulish practice began where soldiers and convicts associated with Wybalenna began a thriving trade selling off exhumed bones for anthropological researchers, anxious to explore the physiognomy of a ‘dying race’. I was told by more than one person that all through the Furneaux’s forty-two islands, one can find odd little clumps of clover in hidden-away places, a secret mark of the grave of an
Aboriginal ancestor who was spirited away and buried beyond the reach of grave-robbers.
Finally, in 1847, the surviving few dozen remnants of the Wybalenna experiment were taken back to Tasmania, to peter out within a few years, at an abandoned convict settlement at Oyster Bay near Hobart. ‘They knew they had been brought there to die,’ says Fowler. ‘The tedium of living they enlivened with the white man’s solace of alcohol.’
The last pure-blooded Tasmanian Aboriginal man, William Lanney, died in March 1869; Truganini lived on, something of an identity in Hobart, perhaps even a curiosity, until May 1876. Always a handsome-looking woman, it was said that even into her sixties, she was vivacious and irresistible.
By the time Brownrigg visited Wybalenna, years after its demise, and on the eve of the final extinction of the very last of the full-blooded Tasmanian Aborigines, he observed a pitiful sight:
It would be difficult to conceive of a more weird, melancholy, and desolate scene than that which now meets the eye. The buildings are a heap of ruins. The Superintendent’s quarters are almost incapable of repair. The brick church, so far as its interior is concerned, is in a pitiable condition, and is used as a shearing shed. The state of the burial ground is truly deplorable. No vestige of any fence remains. The graves are scarcely distinguishable.
I felt, as I read his simple and sensible words, terribly close to the good Reverend Brownrigg, who, over a century earlier, had wandered silently across this same dilapidated cemetery. Was it, I wondered, on a similarly perfect day as this? Did he too glance back and forth from the little chapel – now thankfully restored to something of its original dignity – to the surrounding hills and hear the westerly wind sucking at the scrubby eucalypts and acacias, now nearing the end of their lives?
The Forgotten Islands Page 15
