…A touching sadness surrounds their presence, from our distance of time. They seem an insubstantial people. Polygamous by custom, they were affectionate by disposition, and merry- singing in a sweet Doric harmony and dancing strenuous, hilarious, and frequently lascivious animal dances. But living on the edge of the world, they seem to have been on the edge of reality too. Their small tribal bands seldom strayed outside their own hunting circles, and they inhabited a little inconstant world of a few families.
—1792 Australia: While on an expedition to find Captain Jean François De La Pérouse, who had vanished after departing Botany Bay on March 10, 1788, French admiral, Joseph-Antoine Raymond de Bruni d’Entrecasteaux (1739 – 1793) and crew set foot on Tasmania.—Read More:http://wilsonsalmanac.blogspot.ca/2006_04_01_archive.html
If they met another tribe, they generally fought it, but the moment a man on either side was killed, the battle ended and the tribes withdrew. If they had a religion, it was concerned only with local sprites and goblins; few had any conception of an afterlife, most attached no spiritual importance to the sun or the moon. Some were apparently able to count up to five, others never went further than two.
Their only system of government seems to have been a patriarchal authority tacitly granted to the head of a family or to the bravest hunter of the tribe. Their only visual art consisted of rings chipped out of boulders and striped patterns in red ochre. Even their language was rudimentary, being a series of disconnected words with no linking grammar.
—After a protest by Tasmanian Aborigines, Sotheby’s last night pulled from sale a historic pair of portrait busts just hours before the two were to go under the hammer in Melbourne.
Woureddy, An Aboriginal Chief of Van Diemen’s Land and Trucaninny, Wife of Woureddy by the English artist Benjamin Law were expected to set a record price for sculpture in Australia, with pre-sale estimates of between $500,000 and $700,000.
Protesters objected to the commercial sale of images of their ancestors.
“It’s pretty crass,” said Hetti Perkins, senior curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art at the Art Gallery of NSW.—Read More:http://treatyrepublic.net/content/sothebys-withdraws-sculptures-woureddy-truganini-busts
To nearly everything about the Tasmanians there was a haunting naivete. They lived all by themselves, like children in the woods, and they seem to have thought of life as essentially provisional. The old and the sick they often abandoned when they moved on to new hunting grounds. When someone died he was usually cremated without ceremony, the tribe seldom staying to watch him burn; or he was placed upright inside a hollow tree, with a spear through his neck to keep him there.
And when a man was gone, he was gone. His name was never mentioned again. It was as though, having lived his short hard life of wandering, having fathered his sons and eaten his feasts of parrot or emu egg- having appeared briefly upon the foreshore of the world- his life had been expunged and he had never existed at all.
—William Lanne (or Laney) is thought to have been born in 1835, though his exact date of birth is not known.
Lanne lived with his family in north west Tasmania and his family is believed to have been the last Tasmanian Aboriginal family to live a traditional life on mainland Tasmania before George Augustus Robinson ‘found’ them in 1842 and took them to Wybelenna on Flinders Island.
Lanne lost his traditional name as he was just seven years old when he was moved to Wybelenna and given the English name of William.
He later became known to many as King Billy.
“He lives on not just in the name of an endemic Tasmanian species, but with all sorts of other mythologies and misunderstandings surrounding him,” says Greg Lehman, author and member of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery’s Aboriginal Advisory Council.—Read More:http://treatyrepublic.net/content/king-billys-gross-indignity-legacy-tasmanians
ADDENDUM:
(see link at end)…MARK COLVIN: A Sydney historian is trying to overturn the conventional thinking on what’s been is widely-accepted as one of the darkest moments in Australian history, the genocide of Tasmanian Aborigines.
In a book launched this week, Keith Windschuttle argues that the genocide was a myth, which began as a vendetta against Van Di
Land’s Governor George Arthur, and has been perpetuated by historians ever since.Volume One of Keith Windschuttle’s “Fabrication of Aboriginal History” claims to be the most exhaustive analysis yet undertaken of relations between settlers and Aborigines in early 19th century Tasmania, and concludes there’s no evidence of systematic Aboriginal resistance and frontier warfare.
But not everyone is convinced, as Peter McCutcheon reports.
PETER MCCUTCHEON: Keith Windschuttle has, for a number of years, questioned reports of widespread violence between Aborigines and 19th Century settlers, claiming the violence had been exaggerated by left-leaning quasi Marxist academics, including one of the most prominent historians in the field, Henry Reynolds.
Recently, Keith Windschuttle has turned his attention to one of the most infamous periods of Australian history; the extermination of most of the Indigenous population of Tasmania.
After wading through 17 volumes of archives, Keith Windschuttle concludes the evidence for frontier warfare and massacres in early 19th Century Tasmania simply isn’t there.
He argues only 118 Tasmanian Aborigines were killed directly by the British. The rest died from a lethal cocktail of introduced diseases.
The most notorious cases of conflict, according to Keith Windschuttle, did not involve Aborigines fighting for their homeland, but rather what he described as “detribalised black bushrangers”.
KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE: The first and the principle Aborigine who committed violence and killed and robbed a number of settlers in Tasmania, in fact he wasn’t a local Aborigine at all, he was a man named Mosquito, he was from Sydney, he wasn’t defending his tribal land, he’d been thoroughly integrated with white society, he’d worked in Hobart for 10 years, he’d even visited Mauritius with his employer, Edward Law, in order to buy cattle.
He was really a white man with black skin, and that’s been pretended, it’s been kind of manufactured into a myth of an outbreak of patriotic defence of tribal lands.
It just doesn’t make sense.
PETER MCCUTCHEON: Conflict between Aborigines and the British mostly occurred in remote areas, with few witnesses, so by the very nature evidence of these sorts of conflicts, is often going to be sketchy. If the evidence of massacres has some gaps, can you really jump to the conclusion that they didn’t happen?
KEITH WINDSCHUTTLE: Well, in Tasmania that’s a hard argument to sustain. Read More:http://www.abc.net.au/pm/stories/s746130.htm
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