Moore, Clive --- "Book Review - The Aboriginal Tasmanians (2nd Edition)" [1997] AboriginalLawB 18; (1997) 3(89) Aboriginal Law Bulletin 27

• Book Review The Aboriginal Tasmanians (2nd Edition)

---

Book Review

The Aboriginal Tasmanians
(2nd Edition)

by Lyndall Ryan

Sydney Allen & Unwin. 1996, xxxii & 380pp

Reviewed by Clive Moore

The first edition of The Aboriginal Tasmanians was published by University of Queensland Press in 1981. The book has no equal and deserved reprinting, but as with many second editions the reviewer is left with the task of working out what has changed. The first chapter of Ryan's book examines the pre-European-incursion lifestyle of Tasmania's Aborigines, now known as the Pallawah. The book then follows their fate after European colonisation through eighteen more chapters, with the second edition text now extended through to the 1990s. The nineteen chapters trace the gradual decimation of Pallawah numbers, but quite strongly stress the survival of Indigenous Tasmanians. Indirectly, this is a suitable counter to Tom Haydon's Rhys Jones-influenced film The Last Tasmanians, released in 1978, which created a picture of a declining race not fit to face the European onslaught.

The original book was written at a time when there was very little decent literature available on the history of Aboriginal-White relations in Australia. Henry Reynolds' first book, The Other Side of the Frontier, was published the same year. The only substantial studies available for inspiration were Charles Rowley's 1970 trilogy Aboriginal Policy and Practice (Vol 1, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society; Vol 2, The Remote Aborigines; Vol 3, Outcasts in White Australia), and Raymond Evans' early work on Queensland (Evans, K Saunders and K Cronin, Race Relations in Colonial Queensland, 1975/1988). Given this context, Ryan's book is remarkably well researched and perceptive. It also has one important strength, its wonderful set of forty-five maps. Seldom has a history book been so well served by cartography. Even without the text one can follow the seasonal movements of the Pallawah, graphically seeing the effect of European pastoralism on their movements, and look region by region at the results of colonisation.

The new Acknowledgments pages left me with the impression of a totally reworked text, but a closer check shows that apart from perhaps minor corrections, the original body of the text has been left unaltered. The real changes are additions: a new fourteen page Introduction, which discusses recent archaeological finds and places the 1981 edition into a wider historiographic context; a new twenty-seven page chapter on the politics of Tasmanian Aboriginal identity, 1973 to 1992; and a final twenty-three page chapter on Mabo [No. 2], reconciliation and the new Aboriginal politics of the 1990s. The upshot of 1990s politicking was the 1995 decision by the Tasmanian government to transfer 3,800 hectares of land back to the Pallawah, including mutton bird islands in Bass Strait and historic sites on Tasmania, although there was to be no official apology for the massacres and forced detentions of last century.

The most interesting legal points arising from the book are the contrasts between Henry Reynolds' arguments presented in The Law of the Land (1987), Fate of a Free People (1995) and Aboriginal Sovereignty (1996), which have placed considerable stress on the colonial legal precedents of the 1830s and 1840s. For Tasmania, Reynolds argues that a verbal treaty was made between the Pallawah and the colonial government to induce surrender, which was dishonoured (1995: pp 122-3, 156-7). Ryan does not believe that there ever was anything that can be construed as a formal treaty (1996: p xxviii).

The second edition is sixty-five pages longer, the number of illustrations has been increased, and some of the originals have been replaced with better quality reproductions. The new edition is worthwhile for one photo alone: a 1977 shot of a very concerned Queen Elizabeth, wearing a tiara, being presented with a lands rights petition by a casually dressed Michael Mansell.