In Tasmania

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Tasmanian Aborigines today do not have access to the language or ‘dreamings’ that allow mainland Aborigines to connect with their land. They have their dreams, like Jimmy, and an oral history that teaches how to find, trap and kill animals in the bush. And the records of men like Robinson, white fellas who had led their ancestors to their graves. But Jimmy’s separation from his lost culture was no less painful and profound than the longing of an Afro-Caribbean for Africa, quoted in an essay by Greg Lehman: ‘I have come from a place to which I cannot go back and I have never seen. I used to speak a language which I can no longer speak, I had ancestors whom I cannot find, they worshipped gods whose names I do not know.’

  The little that is known about Tasmanian Aborigines must itself be hedged with caveats. As Lloyd Robson warned, what was recorded of Aboriginal culture and behaviour may have been wildly atypical of them when they were undisturbed. The fact that so little is known means that ‘quite contrary conclusions concerning motivation may be drawn with equal facility … how the Aborigines behaved during the course of their destruction at the hands of the Europeans may reveal little or nothing or be absolutely misleading about practices during the period prior to conquest.’

  It is possible that each of Tasmania’s nine tribes spoke a different language, but the problem is that no Tasmanian Aborigine who may have become educated in English ever produced a dictionary of his/her language. No text or recording exists that might enable linguists to resurrect even one of these languages – as has been done in South Australia, where young Aboriginal girls wrote letters and German missionaries made recordings. In Tasmania, much fund-money has gone into ‘restitution’ and there has been some ambitious linguistic work, but a language remains frustratingly out of reach. Henry Reynolds says, ‘Putting all the word lists of all the languages together, there is a vocabulary of some hundreds of words. But no grammar, no sentence structure, no pronunciation.’

  One reason for Robinson’s success with the Oyster Bay tribe was that he was practically unique in having learned Tongerlongetter’s dialect, and although the vocabulary he claimed to have compiled has vanished (along with Jorgenson’s so-called ‘dictionary’), Robinson did note down in his journal the phonetic equivalent of a number of Aboriginal words as well as accounts of their beliefs and myths. In the absence of a native alternative, his journal has assumed the status of a sacred text. Patsy Cameron says: ‘The stories they told Robinson were, I believe, for us. We’ve got to look between the lines and pull them out.’ But she accepts that it is an excruciating position to be in: to have to count on imperfect mediators like Robinson, Péron and Jorgenson to revive her culture. The inherent contradiction exposes her to historians like Windschuttle, who is quick to point out that the white man’s record is quite as much Patsy’s inheritance as her Aboriginality. ‘Most of those who today trace their ancestry to the Bass Strait community must be the descendants not only of Aborigines but also of people who committed atrocities against Aborigines … In short the Tasmanian “Aboriginal community” today embodies both the invaders and the invaded.’

  A society that accepts its mixed identity is not so likely to be troubled by this contradiction. But in the Dechaineaux Theatre I had seen for myself that Tasmania’s Aboriginal community was confused and divided. Two of its most important leaders regularly accused each other of not being Aboriginal nor able to point reliably to a tribal ancestor. I wondered how much of the confusion had arisen from a decision by the political leadership to reject the richness of their background and to embrace Aboriginality as the sum of their identity. The impulse was understandable, a response to a century and a half of brutality and denigration, but it could result in decisions that many perceived to be skewed, unimaginative and confounding. A powerful example was a ruling in September 2002 by the Independent Indigenous Advisory Committee to reject the claim for Aboriginality of Tracey Norman from Snug, but to uphold the claim of her brother, Damien Coulson. ‘I am not happy at all,’ Norman said. ‘We have the same parents.’

  Doubt was sown not only about who people were, but about who they had been. Talking to Tasmanian Aborigines, it was easy to gain the impression that the fact of their white blood was an inconvenience to be ignored. This willingness to overlook one aspect of their background obscured their project of forming an accurate picture of the past, and helped to recreate in its place a culture in which it was possible to shelter and be vague and secretive.

  Even those opposed to Windschuttle’s thesis, like the archaeologists Tim Murray and Christine Williamson, agree that ‘the absence of evidence has made it relatively easy for historians, anthropologists, even archaeologists to construe Aboriginal Tasmania to suit their needs’. Nor are Tasmanian Aborigines exempt. Henry Reynolds finds it ‘consistently fascinating and distressing’ to witness how ‘those who have the least make the claim to most’. He says: ‘There is bad faith on all sides – bad faith in their pretensions, and bad faith in the way people sit around and say: “That’s right.”’ Reynolds yields to no-one in his knowledge of post-colonial Aboriginal history. He has championed the rights of the Aboriginal community over four decades. But he is forced to admit: ‘Pursuing Aboriginality has been a bad thing in a way. It would make much more sense to say: “Of course, we’re mixed.” It would solve the problems about who is and who isn’t Aboriginal.’ He gives the example of the Métis in Canada, another product of the colonial frontier that is proud of its distinctive culture, and that reminds Reynolds of the community in Bass Strait. ‘The Straits people know exactly who they are, where they come from. They don’t have to try and be who they’re not. If you say you’re a Tasmanian Aboriginal, you are saying that you’re something you don’t know how to be. You don’t know how to live it.’

  Reynolds is in a good position to make this observation. He discovered five years ago that his late father, whom he believed was Armenian, was in fact Aboriginal, and yet the discovery has not persuaded him to claim Aboriginality. ‘If you say you’re Aboriginal, it makes it easy to assume a position of moral authority and not to have to do the work. It gives an authority that doesn’t come from you, but from what you’re supposed to be.’

  My conversations with Reynolds made it clear that an important element of Tasmanian Aboriginality was motivated by the need to belong. This explained to him the surge in numbers of those who registered themselves as Aboriginal. In 1976 it was fewer than 3,000. Now the figure has risen to almost 16,000. ‘I suspect lots of these people once upon a time identified [themselves] as working-class. When you take away class, you need to find some other identity. Many were rural. As the middle class spread, they were removed from a strong working-class identity, and got lost.’

  But in Bass Strait one cultural activity had survived that most parties agreed was central to defining modern Aboriginal identity.

  XIX

  THE SMELL HIT ME AS I CAME OVER THE RIDGE, OILY AND THICK, with the smokiness of wet hay. ‘The perfume is not readily forgotten,’ wrote an early visitor. I was told that it disappeared with the last mutton-birds at the end of April and returned with them in September, and that fishermen could smell it out at sea.

  The only birds in sight were a pair of gulls battling against the updraught. The horizon was dotted with islands, and across it a northeasterly blew clouds the colour of grey down. The path sloped through a field of tussocks and lomandra grass. The burrows lay in a springy labyrinth beneath.

  ‘This field, you’re looking at 100,000 birds,’ said the man taking me to Furley’s shed.

  The mutton-birds arrived from Siberia, punctual as blossom, on September 27 each year. In 1798, Matthew Flinders was amazed at the sight of a sky black with ‘sooty petrels’, as he called them. They passed overhead without interruption for a full 90 minutes in a broad stream. ‘On the lowest computation, I think the number could not have been less than a hundred millions.’ Numbers had dwindled, but an estimated 12 million birds still made the 9,000 mile journey to the rookeries in Bass Strait. With
a salmon’s accuracy, they returned year after year to the same burrow to hatch their chicks. ‘If you’re standing in front of their burrow,’ Jimmy said, ‘they’ll fly straight into you. They’ll go through tankers if the port-holes are left open.’ A fisherman who had anchored off Chappell Island during the forest fires of February 2003 told me that Mount Chappell had been alight, and he had watched a thick constant line of birds fly into the blazing mountain.

  The wind dipped the tips of the grass into the grey sand. I would not see any birds until dusk. They were out at sea, feeding for krill to regurgitate to their chicks. It was mid-April and the old birds were thinning out. They would come in from the east right on dark, spend the night in their burrow and leave at daylight, and gradually they did not come back. When they returned to find the chick gone, they stayed one or two more days, and then moved on too.

  But in thousands of cases, the chick had not flown. Either it had been eaten by a tiger-snake or, more likely, it had had its neck broken by a ‘birder’.

  A pidgin language had evolved in Bass Strait using phrases like ‘curpa china’ for cup of tea and ‘old co’, after the Cornish for ‘old cove’. Mutton-birding also combined native and European traditions. The Aborigines had hunted birds for their own consumption. The sealers turned this into a commercial industry. By the 1950s the industry employed 300 people at a canning factory in Lady Barron from which the birds were exported as ‘squab in aspic’. So strong was the tradition that the Islanders demanded control of the rookeries as compensation for the loss of their homelands. Recently, the government had restored control to the community, but the importance of the activity was metaphorical as much as financial, and had come to symbolise the survival of a culture. Patsy Cameron says: ‘You have a feeling of spiritual communion with the bird. You’re thinking of the journey that the bird takes, coming back to the same hole, under the same tussock. While you’re birding, you’re thinking of that journey.’

  At last we reached Furley’s shed. A teacher stood on the wind-nipped grass, preparing to lead a group of children to the boat. They had completed three days on Big Dog Island, part of a project to bring young Aborigines from the mainland so that they could learn about mutton-birding from the woman inside.

  She sat by the fire with her back to the window, olive-skinned with white curly hair and dressed in pink trousers and a home-knitted lavender jersey. She turned to see who had come in, and the lines in her strong face contracted about her eyes.

  ‘Auntie’ Furley’s son was Michael Mansell, the most active of Tasmania’s Aboriginal leaders. He had a flair for controversy. In 1987, he had flown to Colonel Qaddafi’s Tripoli to divert attention onto his community. He had not met Qaddafi, as many people thought, but the ploy succeeded. Jimmy said: ‘There wouldn’t be any Tasmanian Aborigines without Mansell.’ And Furley was his mother.

  Tacked to the shed walls were pieces of paper, each with a word printed on it and a translation.

  Muna – yes

  Nayri – good

  Putiya – no

  The words reminded me of Robinson’s English lessons to the Aborigines in the museum at Wybalenna: ‘Has not a cat fur? It has and so has a fox. The sun has set. I do not see the top of the hill.’

  ‘Ya is hello,’ Furley said. ‘And waluka is goodbye. That’s as much as I know.’

  ‘Did your mother and father use these words?’

  ‘No. They’ve come out since. They’ve done research.’

  I thought of the Scottish lady I was staying with, who was learning Gaelic from cassettes – ‘something I’ve always wanted to do.’ So far she could say: ‘How do you do?’ and ‘Would you like coffee?’

  I asked Furley: ‘When did you first go birding?’

  ‘I was five,’ she said. ‘It’s a long, toiling job for little money.’

  On Babel Island, there had been 27 sheds. She had worked in a group of eight and the highest number of birds they took in a season was 14,500. She said: ‘Everything of the mutton-bird is saleable apart from its head and feet, which they feed to the flathead.’

  The feathers were sent to East Germany, the oil to a chemist in Launceston. ‘We were made to take it for chest troubles, although I can’t swallow it without sugar. It’s got a certain flavour of its own.’

  ‘Can you describe it?’

  ‘A bit chickenish, a bit fishish.’

  ‘Are there “dreamings” associated with the mutton-bird?’

  Furley smiled. ‘I used to dream about looking forward to next time.’

  She painted the scene: a family gathering, cricket matches and singing at the weekend. ‘There was always a concert somewhere on Babel, a shed with people playing the violin and accordion and guitar.’

  ‘What were the songs?’

  ‘Mainly country and western.’

  ‘Which song do you remember?’

  “‘Blue eyes cryin’ in the rain.”’

  The net loosened on her face. Her mouth opened and she began to sing. I thought of Clem at the Anangarra waterhole.

  ‘Someday when we meet up yonder

  ‘We’ll stroll hand in hand again

  ‘In the land that knows no parting

  ‘Or blue eyes cryin’ in the rain.’

  XX

  NEXT MORNING I WENT WITH DUSTY ON HIS TRACTOR, BOUNCING along a sandy path to the rookery where Tas and Angus stood in the tussock grass.

  They staggered towards us, two stooped figures in a thunderstorm of feathers. Each carried a spit of 50 birds across his shoulder and the backs of their hands were scratched red. Tas complained that the beaks were starting to toughen up and that the burrows near the shore were occupied by penguins with beaks like pairs of bolt clippers. He said that he had to put on antiseptic cream every night and bathe his cuts in salt water. ‘Main thing in birding is all the time look after your hand.’

  He slithered his harvest onto the back of the tractor.

  ‘How many will you catch today?’ I asked.

  ‘I reckon if you get a hundred birds a day you’re doing a pretty good job.’

  ‘If we’re not getting them, it’s a dirty bastard of a job,’ Angus growled. ‘Matter of upstairs agreeing with us.’ He cursed the work, the distance from the shed, the rain darkening the sand.

  But for Tas the rain was a good thing. It made the birds scratch their pen feathers out, and so the flesh was firmer and easier to pluck. ‘Without rain, they’re soft and shitty,’ and he pulled out a feather and snapped it. A dark colour half-filled it, the shade of ink in a quill. He said: ‘When they fly, they don’t have blood in their feathers. They drink salt water and it dries up the blood.’

  ‘Couple of days of this, that’s enough for me,’ grunted Angus. He offloaded his spit and I saw that he had ‘Hate’ and ‘Love’ tattooed across his knuckles. Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter.

  Dusty started up the tractor, and I walked into the field with Tas and Angus to catch my first mutton-bird.

  It was once called a ‘flying sheep’ or a Norfolk Island petrel, but its correct name is the short-tailed shearwater, or Puffinus tenuirostris. It lives to an age of 38 and got its nickname after a British officer remarked that it tasted like mutton.

  A shearwater is five before it lays its first egg. This takes 53 days to hatch, and until the chick can fly it is prey to water rats that swim over from Little Dog Island to suck its brains out. And tiger-snakes.

  The image of a tiger-snake waiting in a burrow for a mutton-bird to hatch reminded me of Kemp. In February 1805 at York Town he had watched Paterson make the experiment of putting a tiger-snake into a cask together with a wounded seagull to see what happened. The snake at first attempted to choke the gull by twisting his body round the bird’s neck. Then it bit the gull in the foot and under the eye. ‘In about two minutes the poison began visibly to operate … and in one minute more he had two or three spasms and died.’

  Tas wore no gloves so that he could better gauge the temperature down a hole. Genera
lly speaking, if the burrow was warm a chick was inside. ‘Reckon if it’s cold, a snake’s in there.’

  ‘Last half of March is the mating season,’ Angus said. ‘They’ll chase you down the track for a hundred metres.’ It was the second week of April, but two days earlier Angus had come across a snake. At first he thought it was a bracken fern root – then it moved across the back of his hand and he felt cold scales on his knuckles. He said: ‘A copper-head will kill you – you’ve got two hours.’

  Already, I had asked the women in the shed if the danger from snakes was exaggerated.

  ‘It is not exaggerated,’ Patricia said. ‘My nephew was bitten twice, two years in a row. On this island.’ A man had died on Chappell where her uncle, Wallaby Jackson, had killed 90 snakes in half an hour. Tiger-snakes thick as his wrist.

  Frances was Wallaby’s sister and had been birding since 1947 and has seen off many snakes in that time. ‘I’ve grabbed them in the burrow by the tail and chased them and cracked them.’ She advised me: ‘When you grab a snake by the tail, you crack it like a whip, very quickly.’

  Once on Chappell Patricia saw a tiger-snake swallowing a whole mutton-bird, fully grown. ‘It was a lump in its stomach.’

  Not to be outdone, Frances recalled the first occasion when she put her hand down a hole and felt something. It was 1952. The burrow had an awkward turn and there was a granite stone in the way. ‘As soon as my fingers touched the smooth skin, my hair stood up. I felt this cold scaly thing, and Jesus, I came out of that quick.’