Terry, John --- "Book Review - The Aboriginal Tasmanians" [1982] AboriginalLawB 17; (1982) 1(3) Aboriginal Law Bulletin 15

• Book Review-The Aboriginal Tasmanians

---

Book Review -

The Aboriginal Tasmanians

by Lyndal Ryan

University of Queensland Press,

St Lucia, Queensland, 1981 ($22.50).

Reviewed by John Terry

The constitutional fiction that the occupation of Australia by the British was effected by way of peaceful settlement rather than a bloody war of conquest has received a severe blow with the recent publication of The Aboriginal Tasmanians.

It is an important precept to understanding Ryan's work that the Tasmanians were not simply some antiquated group of anachronisms destined to an extinction hastened by the arrival of the British. That theory, so convenient for the nineteenth century Imperialists and resurrected recently by some anthropologists, sits ill with the facts. Not only does the evidence disclose that over a long period of time the Tasmanian Aborigines had adapted adequately and admirably to a demanding environment, but that they continue to survive to this day as a distinct group of Australians. The double lie - that the Aborigines of Tasmania were an inferior primitive people, suffering en masse from a slow strangulation of the.mind which led to their complete extinction - is exposed.

Lyndall Ryan's approach is scholarly and her prose is lucid. By the use of maps and tables accompanying the text, the complex of Tasmanian society prior to European invasion is unravelled and shown to be a determined exercise in continuity. The food supply, managed properly, was sufficient and indeed at times abundant for the needs of the people. The imagination of the people gave rise to enquiry and explanation of the nature of things, communion and fellowship, joy, passion and sorrow. This is evident from archaelogical research and even from the myopic observations of the early European visitors.

Ryan's account of the first permanent European residents of the area, the sealers who took Aboriginal wives, makes an Interesting contrast to those morally pure agriculturists and pastoralists who were shortly to arrive and who, unlike the sealers, had an interest in the land itself rather than its residents. European land usage necessarily adversely affected traditional patterns of existence. As on the mainland, the Aborigines responded to the invasion by recourse to warfare. To the Europeans, unable to accept any concept which required a belief in the fundamental humanity of the owners, this retaliation to invasion was murder and savagery, theft and incomprehensible perfidy. Their failure to conform to 'fade-away and die' anticipations led to resentment calling for the most inhuman solutions.

It is her account and assessment of the Aboriginal response to war which marks Ryan as the reasoned researcher. She brings to bear a modem mind on the old accounts, recognises the partisan position of the recorders and extracts data to present as objective an account as can be reconstructed after the lapse of a century and a half. As an historian she appreciates that the nineteenth century writers recorded what they understood, and were either mute or crtical of what they could not understand. She does not try to ascribe inner-feelings or personal reactions to long-dead Aborigines through guesswork, concoction or conjecture; rather Ryan draws on her own knowledge of human response to threats of danger, together with the known responses of these people, and comes up with surprisingly simple yet profound conclusions. The Aborigines fought an undeclared war which they eventually lost because of the superior fire-power of the Europeans combined with the dislocation associated with their fugitive status within their own country. By 1831, there was little choice available to those in the `settled' districts but to surrender and submit to George Augustus Robinson, appointed by the Governor to befriend the Aborigines and deal with the 'problem' they presented. To the modern observer, the conflict inherent in Robinson's role is obvious. His descent from the express humanitarian to the bounty hunter is a tale reminiscent of the treachery associated with Wounded Knee, laced with a particularly nasty preoccupation with miscegination. Yet Ryan does not carp, criticise or condemn outright Robinson and his crew. Her own cold moral outrage to the whole shameful story is allowed to emerge in the presentation of indisputable facts; the dismemberment of the corpse of William Lanney, for example, as some scientific curio, does need deprecation.

No more does the bleak, institutionalized conformity imposed on the Aborigines at Flinders Island settlement under the authoritarian and terribly well-meaning Robinson regime call for comment; the parallel between it and more recent concentration camps is all too plain. The parallel is reinforced by the documentation of incipient disease, high mortality rate, poor rations, the use of spies - all in the name of civilization.

We were taught the Tasmanian Aborigines had died out when poor old Trugannini passed on. Lyndall Ryan's work will, one hopes, allow this dangerous myth to be put finally to rest, for the last chapters of the book trace the history of the community up to the present. When it was obvious to the Government that the Aborigines would not fade away like all good biological misfits, they were gathered together on Cape Barren Island. At the beginning of the twentieth century a Reserve was created, yet the Aboriginal identity of the Islanders was denied by the authorities and a steady agricultural existence was required from them.

Interestingly and very properly, material used for the account of developments in the twentieth century includes recollections of the Aborigines themselves. Ryan is thus able to present the frustrations and ambitions of the people in a reliable fashion, while cross-checking with official records the exact details of dates and official attitudes. It is important, for example, to appreciate that the assimilation policy of the Government during the 1950s was not regarded by the Aborigines with joy.

In contrast to the policy of having their society disappear into the broader Tasmanian community, the Cape Barren Island people resented the Government moves and imaginatively resisted attempts to shift them. The last thirty years have seen some former residents of the island drift back to the main island, there to suffer the discrimination and oppression common to all black Australians.

The Cape Barren Island Community survives however, and Tasmanian Aborigines are a prominent political force. The book is important portant for all those still hung-up on the notion that full-bloods are the only 'real Aborigines'. The British always treated mixed race offspring as natives.

The Commonwealth of Australia sits on a very shaky constitutional foundation. No war was ever declared on Australian blacks, no conquest ever effected. The judges and politicians pretend that Aborigines were, prior to the European arrival, a pack of wandering nomads casually eking out a pathetic existence until it was time to die off. Events did not happen that way at all, and it is appropriate to recognise the truth.