TRUTH TELLING ON kanamalukaTAMAR

 

On Paterson’s Plains near Launceston, in the late 1840s, the historian John West interviewed settlers about a visit to Launceston by 200 Aborigines in December 1826. He recorded that: "When crossing Paterson’s Plains they were wantonly fired on by the whites, and in their return some of their women were treated with indescribable brutality. When they reached the Lake River, two sawyers, who had never before suffered molestation, were wounded with their spears."

As much as anywhere in colonial Tasmania there are dark stories that until recently were like dust to be swept under the carpet until their memories were troublesome. As is the way of world such stories are ridiculed, then violently opposed and finally they are accepted on the evidence hanging in the air for all to see. There are no bouquets for lifting carpets yet eventually its something that must be done.

On Marbo Day there is no more room for dust and there is no hiding it anymore. Saturday 27th of May marks the 50th anniversary of the referendum that should have changed Australia more than it did. The statement Uluru Statement from the Heart was released on 26 May 2017 by delegates to the First Nations National Constitutional Convention. 

More recently palawa/pakana people have won accolades nationally/internationally and sometimes curiously appointed to 'reference committees' named mostly to be silent and authorised to do little. Stolen cultural property has been conditionally returned and late in the day the palawa/pakana story got to be told albeit funded from elsewhere. By-and-large reconciliation gets LIPservice as histories are carefully told.

On the kanamalukaTAMAR like elsewhere there is so much unfinished business and far too few who want get on with it. It seems that every fact of science was once damned and every invention was thought to be impossible. Likewise every discovery was shock to some belief system or other and every artist's new way to see the world has been called out as fraud, folly and downright silly. 

The entirety of culture and everything not 'natural', to far too many, is a manifestation of somebody's refusal to bow to some higher authority or other and comply.  If this is 'the truth' we are doomed to live blighted lives.

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LIST OF MULTIPLE KILLINGS OF ABORIGINES IN TASMANIA: 1804-1835 Tas  5 -5 2008 - Ryan Lyndall  

"Tasmania (known as Van Diemen’s Land until 1855) was occupied for at least 30,000 years by a hunter-gatherer people, the Tasmanian Aborigines, whose population in 1803 was estimated at 7,000 (Lourandos 1997:244; Calder 1875:17). Contrary to a long and widely held belief that they were a stone age people who were destined to die out as a result of 10,000 years of isolation from the Australian mainland, more recent research indicates that they were a dynamic people who not only reshaped their culture and society during the Holocene, but were increasing in population at British colonisation in 1803. (Lourandos 1997:281) By 1835 only one family remained in Tasmania. The vast majority had been killed, or had died from introduced disease, or had been forcibly removed from their homeland. The only survivors were those who escaped government control - in a sealing community on the Bass Strait islands.

The war on the pastoral frontier in Tasmania had terrifying consequences for the Tasmanian Aborigines. At the outset, in 1823, an estimated 2,000 Aborigines were in the war zone. By 1831, an estimated 448 at least, had been killed by the colonists, or 22% of the population, and that an estimated 413 had lost their lives in 27 known multiple killings of five or more. .................... The practice of multiple killings, matches the evidence from the pastoral frontier in the colony of Victoria between 1835 and 1859 and in the Gulf Country in Northern Australia between 1872 and 1900 (Clark, 1995; Broome, 2005; Roberts, 2005). In Victoria, it has been estimated that 10% of the Aboriginal population were directly killed by the colonists, mostly in multiple killings (Broome, 2005:80-81). .................... So in Tasmania, more Aborigines were killed in a shorter period, than perhaps in any other part of Australia. .................... However, there was also a high loss of life among the colonists on the Tasmanian pastoral frontier. It has recently been estimated that at least 250 colonists were killed by Aborigines in at least 113 separate incidents where between one and two colonists were killed and two incidents where four colonists were killed (Ryan, 2006; Plomley, 1992:58-100). This makes an Aboriginal/colonial death ratio of less than 2:1, far lower than the nearby colony of Victoria where in the period 1835 to 1859, the death ratio is estimated at 12:1 (Broome, 2005:80-81). .................... The major difference between Tasmania and pastoral frontiers in other parts of Australia is that the combatants on both sides lost their lives in great numbers. The Black War in Tasmania was a mighty struggle for possession of the country. The Aborigines lost the war, with a huge loss of life. The survivors were deported from their country."