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| ISBN-13: | 9781742697147 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin Pty., Limited |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 5 MB |
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Tasmanian Aborigines
A History Since 1803
By Lyndall Ryan
Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2012 Lyndall RyanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74269-714-7
CHAPTER 1
Trouwunna
Tasmanian Aborigines tell several stories about their origins. One ascribes the creation of the first woman, who had a tail like a kangaroo, to a star god who tumbled to earth at Toogee Low (Port Davey) and who was turned into a large stone. Another says they came to Tasmania by land and that the sea was subsequently formed. Both stories are supported by current Western research which suggests that they arrived in Tasmania at least 40,000 years ago when the island was linked by a land bridge to mainland Australia. Like all other human groups they had originally come from Africa and had made the long journey to Tasmania over many thousands of years.
The Aborigines inhabited most areas of what was then a much larger land mass of Tasmania and were the most southerly occupants of the globe in the Pleistocene era. They appear to have clustered in family groups in caves like Kuti Kina and Deena Reena near the Franklin River, at Warragarra on the Upper Mersey River and at Cave Bay Cave on Hunter Island, at sheltered sites in the forests and on river banks such as on the Jordan River near present-day Brighton.
The women used wooden digging sticks to search for a wide variety of vegetable roots. They collected berries, and caught possums and wombats and shellfish, which they carried in kelp, animal skins or tightly woven grass and reed baskets. They used stone tools to grind their food and to make fire by percussion. The men used wooden spears and waddies to regularly hunt wallabies and to spear scale fish and used bone tools made from wallabies and stone tools manufactured from chert, crystal quartz, quartzite and spongelite to skin the animal carcasses and to make their wooden tools. Both men and women smeared wallaby fat on their bodies for warmth and used charcoal and ochre for body decoration and making hand stencils on cave walls. It appears that they highly prized ochre as a sacred and ceremonial item and for gift and exchange.
At this time the climate was cool and moist, especially in the west, and much of the region was covered with rainforest. Then, about 18,000 years ago, with the onset of drier, colder conditions, some of the region was transformed into open grassland, and in the higher areas glaciers appeared. It seems that the Aborigines adapted to these new conditions by abandoning the higher areas, like the caves at Kuti Kina and Cave Bay Cave, to concentrate on resource-rich areas along the coasts and inland rivers.
Ten thousand years ago, the sea rose to form Bass Strait, and the Tasmanian Aborigines were separated from other Aboriginal groups on the Australian mainland (see Map 1). About 6,000 years ago they began to expand their occupation along the east coast and hinterland and especially to the western half of the island in areas of marginal and peripheral rainforest, which they managed with the use of firestick farming. They also occupied new sites to exploit fat-rich foods such as seals, shellfish and mutton-birds and appear to have introduced techniques like stone traps for shallow-water fishing. These changes may have coincided with the period of territorial expansion, including the reoccupation of earlier sites like Hunter Island, the use of multi-resource sites like West Point and Rocky Cape, the increasing seasonal use of offshore sites like Maatsuyker Island for sealing and the use of firestick farming to manage the plains around the Jordan River for kangaroo hunting. Their development of watercraft over the last 2,000 years, in the north-west, south-west and south-east, to exploit seals, would have aided such expansion.
By then, some Tasmanian Aborigines called their island Trouwunna. With a land mass of 67,870 square kilometres — almost the same size as Sri Lanka and a little smaller than Ireland — the island lies between 40 and 43 degrees south of the Equator, which places it within the influence of the roaring forties and produces what is, for the region, a temperate marine climate of abnormally mild winters and cool summers. Trouwunna is a mountainous island. In the centre, east and south-east the mountains are plateau-like; in the west they are ridge-like. Very little of the island's surface lies close to sea level, and continuous lowland plains are limited to the extreme northwest and north-east and to the northern Midlands between present-day Launceston and Tunbridge. With these exceptions, the mountains and hills directly adjoin the coast and rise from there to heights of over 1,524 metres, forming a rugged landscape that includes some of the most spectacular mountain scenery in Australia. Trouwunna contains thousands of lakes — the north-east section of the Central Plateau alone has about 4,000. On the west coast the annual rainfall varies between 127 and 381 centimetres, but the high ridge of mountains along the western spine of Trouwunna provides a buffer against the roaring forties in the central and eastern part of the island, where the annual rainfall is between 38 and 152 centimetres. With such topography the island abounds in swift-flowing rivers.
The Tasmanian Aborigines' physical appearance differed somewhat from that of Aboriginal groups on the Australian mainland; in particular, they possessed distinctive woolly hair and reddish-brown skin. Their physical size and other physical characteristics, however, varied among themselves as much as in any other Aboriginal group in Australia and 'diverged no more than might be expected if Tasmania were still attached to the mainland'. As an uncircumcised people and largely monogamous they can be likened to the Aborigines who arrived on mainland Australia more than 40,000 years ago.
Their spiritual beliefs and practices were so complex that the agents of British colonialism who tried to record them in the early nineteenth century confused them with notions of nationalistic animalism and neglected to note important cultural variations between each of the nine major national groups. Their cosmologies involved the intertwining of landscape, ritual, music, art and law so that none formed a truly separate domain. Thus the men were associated with the sun spirit and the women with the moon, and their customs were based upon totems (each of the 100 or so clans that may have inhabited Tasmania in 1803 taking a designated species of bird or animal as a totem) and taboos, especially concerning whether an individual ate the male or female kangaroo and wallaby. Their spiritual practices appear to have been based upon the idea of the good spirit (Noiheener or Parledee), who governed the day, and the bad spirit (Wrageowrapper), who governed the night. These and other spirits were associated with the creation, fire, rivers, trees and the dead. When a person died, their relatives usually decorated the body with ochre and clay, wrapped it in leaves with items from their totem such as bird feathers or animal skins and then cremated it, in a sitting position either on a specially prepared wooden platform or in the hollowed-out base of a tree, amid intense ceremonies to farewell them on their journey to join their relatives in the spirit world. A guardian spirit or 'soul' that lived within their left breast went to live elsewhere — such as the islands in Bass Strait. After the body was cremated, female relatives might extract small bones from the charred remains, wrap them in kangaroo fur and use them as amulets to ward off evil spirits of harm and illness. Sometimes the women lit fires during bad weather, or when rivers were in flood, to appease malignant spirits.
Tasmanian Aborigines made bark drawings and stone and rock carvings or petroglyphs of geometric designs. Their significance remains unclear, although they could possibly represent the sun-male and the moon-female deities associated with particular Aboriginal groups, formations, and numbers or movements in a similar context to their myths and legends.
Recent research by John A. Taylor into Aboriginal place names in Tasmania suggests that each group of Aborigines on the island spoke at least one of four major languages, all of which had very close connections with Aboriginal languages in south-eastern, central and western Victoria and parts of South Australia. I have called them the north eastern, southern, central and north western Tasmanian languages. If one puts together the similarities in these languages and the findings by osteo-archaeologist Colin Pardoe that there is only a small degree of genetic divergence between Tasmanian and Victorian Aborigines, it would appear that the Tasmanian Aborigines shared important physical and cultural characteristics with the Victorian Aborigines.
In their daily lives, the men usually carried fire as a lighted torch of sticks and leaves, and the women carried flints in their baskets to make fire. Both men and women could make fire by friction with two pieces of wood, by the percussion method of briskly rubbing two stones with tinder from the bark of a tree, or by striking a flint on stone. Women carried water containers made of kelp as well as grass and animal skin baskets to hold stone and shell tools, flints, amulets of the dead and ochre. They also carried their newly born children in kangaroo skins on their backs. The women's hair was closely cropped into a short coronet. Each arrangement may have had significance in the identification of their particular clan or nation. They may have used a 'black glittering mineral', perhaps an ore of antimony, 'to enhance the appearance of the eyes'. They used grinding and mortar stones to grind seeds and made wooden chisel-like digging sticks to find plant roots and small animals like bandicoots and rats, to prise wombats, mutton-birds and penguins from their burrows as well as oysters from the rocks and to strip bark from the trees to make catamarans and build shelters. They were very strong swimmers and dived to prodigious depths for shellfish like abalone, mussels and crayfish, used their agility to hunt larger sea mammals such as seals and used long ropes made from tough grass to clamber up trees for possums. They used spatulate and pointed sticks to extract small molluscs from their shells after cooking and twisted plant fibres to make handles for water containers and as binding for their 'relics of the dead'. They usually cropped their hair with sharp flints and made necklaces from tiny shells and plant fibres, used stone tools to cut kelp and animal skins, and grass and reeds to weave baskets, and twisted animal sinews to make holders for ochre, which some of the men wore around their necks.
The men regularly hunted kangaroos, wallabies, emus, potoroos and stingrays with wooden spears and waddies. They selected the wood from slender trees to make their spears, which were about 2.4 to 5.4 metres long and about 1 to 2 centimetres thick, tapering back from a robust point. They threw their spears in such a way that they spun in flight and were a lethal weapon at 60 to 70 metres. Their waddies were thick wooden sticks about 60 centimetres long and 2 to 3 centimetres in diameter, one end bluntly pointed and the other roughened for holding — either to strike a blow or to throw with a rotary motion. They used stone tools made from striking flakes of stone off a larger mass, to make the spears and waddies and to cut up their catch before braising it on the fire. They also used stone tools to make bark canoes and trap waterbirds like swans and ducks, which the women prepared for cooking with sharp shells, and to make fish traps in shallow waters.
Men loaded their scalp hair with a mixture of bird and animal fat, charcoal and ochre, twisting the individual ringlets into tubular masses which hung around the head and almost concealed their eyes. They either allowed their beards and moustaches to grow naturally or used sharp shells to trim or cut them short. If they wore beards, these would also be greased. Sometimes they wore feathers or flowers in their hair for ornamentation. They also wore loops of twisted sinews loaded with ochre around their necks and sometimes suspended the jawbone of a dead friend from their neck, bound with string made from a plant fibre.
Both men and women incised their bodies and rubbed into their wounds powdered charcoal and red ochre mixed with animal and marine bird fat, in order to raise high weals on the skin. These cicatrices took the form of lines, dashes and circles and were to be found principally on the upper arms, chest, shoulders, back and buttocks. They had deep spiritual significance and in the case of the women they appear to have signified clan affiliation. Both men and women sometimes wore kangaroo skins draped over their shoulders for warmth and might use a skin to dress a wounded foot.
They took shelter in at least four different types of dwellings, found in different parts of Trouwunna. In the east, men and women constructed temporary open lean-to shelters with several sheets of bark placed vertically and held together horizontally with tree branches; cupola-shaped windbreaks, which they also made from sheets of bark in the shelter of two trees; or vertical one-sided windbreaks, which they also made from sheets of bark. Each dwelling could hold up to eleven people, and such constructions were often seen clustered around creeks and lagoons near the coast in the east and south-east. English and French explorers who visited the region in the decade before British invasion made visual records of these dwellings and were surprised to find that they offered very good protection from wind and rain. In central and eastern Trouwunna, Tasmanian Aborigines often utilised the hollow of a tree or a cave in which a single family of up to eleven people might have sheltered on a regular seasonal basis. The third type of dwelling was a large hut, found in the north-east and the central highlands and made by men and women from sheets of bark and tree branches, accommodating up to forty people, possibly for major ceremonial gatherings. The final type was found on the west coast, where people faced the full force of the roaring forties and higher rainfall. Here, behind the dunes but with close access to the sea, they built permanent beehive-shaped huts of at least 3 to 3.5 metres in diameter, which, at 1.8 metres high, could hold up to fourteen people. They constructed these huts from tree branches which they steamed and bent by the fire and then packed closely together. The entrance, according to one description, was less than 1 metre high. These huts were clustered in a village and were used all year round. Inside, the Aborigines decorated the huts with bird feathers and shell necklaces and lit small fires. In their sheltered location, the huts offered excellent protection from the weather. At least one colonial observer, Charles Jeffreys, considered that 'the houses or huts, are much better formed than those of the Port Jackson natives' and 'the huts made by the natives of Van Diemen's Land approach nearer the principles of regular architecture'.
How, then, did the Tasmanian Aborigines organise their social relations at the time of British invasion in 1803? Like most other hunter and forager peoples, they appear to have operated in a complex social system of three units: the domestic unit, or family group; the basic social unit, or clan; and the political unit, or nation. The family group camped and cooked around a single fire and, on the west coast, occupied a single hut. Its core consisted of husband, wife, children and relatives, and sometimes friends and other relations; the number of people in the group appears to have ranged from two to eleven. Families were 'invariably monogamous'. Men and women married in their late teens, the husband and wife being about the same age. They remarried quickly on the death of a spouse, and the new partners assumed responsibility for the children of previous unions. There were parental prohibitions and punishments for 'wrong' marriages and adultery, and although 'divorce' took place, infidelity, jealousy, and raids for women were the chief causes of violent conflict. They sometimes resulted in the death of some of the principal parties, although few cases were observed by either English or French explorers before British invasion and they could have escalated in the early colonial period. Even so, in several respects, Tasmanian Aboriginal marriage customs seem to have been significantly different from some of those practised by Aborigines on the Australian mainland.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Tasmanian Aborigines by Lyndall Ryan. Copyright © 2012 Lyndall Ryan. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements,List of illustrations,
List of maps,
Preface,
Part I Invasion: 1803–26,
1. Trouwunna,
2. Wrageowrapper, 1803–07,
3. Creole society, 1808–20,
4. Pastoral invasion, 1817–26,
Part II War: 1826–31,
5. Arthur's war, 1826–28,
6. Martial law, 1828–30,
7. The settlers regroup, 1830,
8. The Black Line, 1830–31,
9. The reckoning,
Part III Surrender: 1829–34,
10. Robinson and the Nuenonne on Bruny Island, 1829,
11. Mission to the western nations, 1830,
12. Surrender in the Settled Districts, 1830–31,
13. Western nations: forced removal, 1832–34,
Part IV Incarceration: 1835–1905,
14. Wybalenna, 1835–39,
15. Wybalenna, 1839–47,
16. Oyster Cove, 1847–1905,
Part V Survival: 1840–1973,
17. The Islanders, 1840–1902,
18. Resisting protection and assimilation, 1908–73,
Part VI Resurgence: 1973–2010,
19. Reclaiming rights and identity, 1973–92,
20. Breakthrough, 1992–95,
21. 'Unfinished business', 1996–2010,
Epilogue,
Notes,
Bibliography,