In Tasmania (20 page)

THE CAPTION BENEATH LANNE READ:
‘
LAST MALE DESCENDANT OF
that race who succumbed as the white man advanced. Hastily have they disappeared and left no “footsteps in the sands of time”'. Until 30 years ago, this statement was commonly accepted as true. Aborigines, wrote the anthropologist Bill Stanner in 1968, were regarded as a ‘melancholy footnote' in the past and no account was taken of their continued presence. In other words, they had become just one more example of what Martin Flanagan calls Tasmania's ‘convenient silences'.

This silence extended to the Aborigines themselves. Patsy Cameron grew up on Flinders, and she told me of the 1978 film,
The Last Tasmanian
, in which her cousin Annette Mansell had made the remark: ‘I'm not an Aborigine … There are no Aborigines now. We're Islanders.' Cameron says: ‘And
then
we weren't. We didn't know it existed – Truganini being the last, we were taught. It didn't really come about till the 1970s.'

How people with Aboriginal blood came to terms with their Aboriginality, at first by keeping it hidden and pretending that it did not exist, and then by flaunting it as a badge of honour, is something that perplexes the whole Tasmanian community. But the historian Peter Chapman understands the defensive and contradictory behaviour that has characterised the position of many Tasmanian Aborigines for the last 30 years. ‘I can remember being told aged nine by some revolting figure out of the RAAF, a schoolteacher, how he'd been in the Northern Territory and he'd get the “Abos” round the campfire, make them take a mouthful of petrol from a bottle and spit it out on the fire – and whoosh. I can remember as a nine-year-old roaring with laughter at this jocular way of putting down a race. Of course they're defensive, and we expect them to deport themselves with Western rational dignity …' He goes on: ‘Even in the late 1960s the propellers would be going on Flinders – to take the children away from their upset mothers and put them into social care. They were regarded as Aborigines then, all right.'

Many of Tasmania's Aboriginal descendants came, like Patsy Cameron, from Flinders and Cape Barren Island in Bass Strait. They were the offspring of European sealers and Aboriginal women – whom the men left behind on the islands to skin the seals and clean the hides – as well as a handful of Maori and Indian women. As late as the 1960s they called themselves Islanders or ‘half-castes', but were treated – in terms of prejudice – as full Aborigines, and brutalised, insulted and patronised as ‘Boongs'. Cameron said: ‘My mother grew up when there was a black bar and white bar. She had to go in what was called “the bull-ring”.'

Segregated drinking was outlawed in 1967, but Cameron recalled seeing another cousin, Daisy Maynard, on her first day at school in Lady Barron. ‘A teacher was putting white powder in her hair for lice. Someone from Sydney, they didn't get their hair white, but all the Aboriginal kids did. At times, I did think: Why are they doing it?' Patsy's father was Italian, her mother an Islander, but Patsy identified only with her mother's side of the family. ‘We knew that we were different. I always had a sense of seeing these strange people, my mother's relations, speaking in a strange language, with a different melody, wearing headscarves, and lots of frizzy hair. Even though we were isolated from everyone, we did have our get-togethers. The women would bring shells, and the old uncles would play cards and drink and fight a lot – but they fought with each other. It was internalised.'

In the 1970s attitudes changed. Angered by the prejudice and by a long-festering sense of grievance that Robinson's promise to Tongerlongetter had never been honoured, the community began to fight for full-blooded recognition. Under the leadership of men like Roy Nicholls and Michael Mansell, they refused to acquiesce in the notion of their extinction. Consciously or not, they were fulfilling the prediction reported by W. Horton, a Wesleyan Methodist who interviewed Aborigines in Bass Strait in 1821, ‘As to a future state, they expected to reappear on an island in the Straits and jump up white men.' This is more or less what happened. All over Flinders and Cape Barren Island, men and women sprang up to speak on behalf of their ancestors. Their calls were heard across Bass Strait and one day they reached Edna Webb in Forget-Me-Not Cottage outside Swansea.

EDNA HAD PINK CHEEKS, DEEP-SET ROUND BROWN EYES AND LION-
coloured hair. ‘It's too nice a day to do anything,' she said, letting me in. She lived across the field from the Cellar – we could see the corrugated iron roof from her window – and she knew about the holes through which William Lyne poked his gun to shoot Aborigines.

She had grown up in Latrobe in the north-west. Her father was a noisy Irish bushman who sang mad Irish songs and ran a 50-acre block at Dawson's Siding. Her mother was known as ‘Dellis', and did not talk about her past.

Edna drifted south to work in the Swansea hotel, and was walking home over the Meredith River when a man with a big cheeky grin passed by in a truck. ‘Hello, love,' he called out. They met a few nights later at a picture-show and married soon after. ‘That was 44 years ago. He was my first love and my last love,' and she pointed at a high-backed couch. ‘He died sitting there six years ago this August. I think about him every minute of every day.'

She had been married to Murray 14 years when Bill Mollison, a lecturer at the University of Tasmania, came to stay at Glen Gala. Mollison met Edna's husband and was interested to know whether he had Aboriginal ancestry. ‘My husband was dark, with a flat nose, and known to all the shearers as their “half-caste mate”.' Mollison offered to find out. ‘A month later he rang me up. “It isn't Murray, it's you.”'

The news shocked Edna. ‘At school we weren't taught nothing about the Aborigine past. That never came to light. We only heard the bad side – that they were lazy hangers-on and wouldn't help themselves and that sort of stuff. Well, your mind just boggles. I said, “Oh no, I don't think so.”'

She drove to Latrobe to speak to her mother. ‘It was news to her as well. “Well, well, it's there,” she said. “Nothing you can do about it.”'

Not until her mother's death did Edna discover that her mother had been born with the name Dalrymple, after their ancestor Dalrymple or ‘Dolly' Briggs – the daughter of a red-haired, freckle-faced sealer from Bedfordshire and the Aboriginal woman, called Woretermoeteyenner, whom he seized from her land.

To Edna, the discovery explained a connection: ‘When we were kids we never wore shoes, but raced through the bush. I always felt – even when I was a child about the land – that I belonged out in the country, that I was part of it.'

‘What else did it mean?'

‘We were entitled to so much money every quarter for our children.'

‘How much?' There was a widespread perception in Tasmania that many, as one man said to me, ‘hauled up the flag when the money came in', and that a lot of people applied for Aboriginality because there were lucrative grants.

Edna said that she had had an allowance of $60 each term for each of her three children to help to pay for their schoolbooks and clothes – hardly an incentive to switch cultures.

‘How did you feel all of a sudden to be an Aborigine?'

She thought for a long second. ‘Proud, I suppose.' But she refused to get involved in the cause, unlike her brother Albert, who flew the Aboriginal flag outside his house near Railton, and whose pride in their mother's past had led him to investigate their Irish father's genealogy as well.

‘I don't know if there's any truth in it, but he's found out we're related to the Spencers in the UK.'

THE WOMAN WHO DELIVERED THE PEA-STRAW HAD BLUE EYES. SHE
remembered the moment when she became aware that there were Aborigines still in Tasmania.

She was 16, just out of a Catholic boarding school, and fishing with her father for crayfish off Trefoil Island on the far north-west coast. ‘We anchored right into a very steep rock on the northern side and I looked at these people, and I looked, and I saw that they were black. This old black woman was sitting by a pot, plucking, flicking mutton-bird feathers all over her lap. I wanted to get over there, talk to her, know about it. I ran back to call Dad.

‘“There are black people!”

‘“Yeh, bloody Aborigines.”

‘“Aborigines? What, there's Aborigines?” I was so excited. I didn't know there were such people in Tasmania. I didn't know they existed.

‘“Yeh, bloody take all the government money. You know what they bloody do, burn the house down,” and he mumbled away.

‘I got hurt. Why does he think they're no good, does he know them? I knew that he had lived at Wybalenna. “What's your problem, Dad? Why does it upset you so much? I think I know.”'

The idea took root that she might be linked to the old woman. She had hot, strange dreams in which an Aboriginal Elder appeared. She pestered her mother. She pulled out the family album and pointed to her mother's brother, known as ‘Blackie'. ‘How come he's so dark-skinned? What about his curly black hair, brown eyes, broad nose? Why do you think he looks like the traditional Aboriginal?' At first her mother denied any connection. But one night she remembered something, a detail: ‘It's a funny thing, but when I was little – you know what it's like with adults talking and you're meant to be in bed. I heard this talk in the kitchen and I hid behind the door. Your Nan wasn't there, and the men were talking about the fact she was a black fella and thank God she wasn't
that
black and no-one had to know.'

The woman had since changed her name to an Aboriginal word meaning ‘near the sea'.

AROUND SWANSEA THERE WERE FEW ABORIGINES, BUT I WAS GIVEN
the name of a man who lived 20 minutes away in Little Swanport.

He sounded cagey when I telephoned. His septic tank had blocked and he was waiting for a truck. How did I plan to use my material? Had I read this and that, had I seen Greg Lehman and Doug Maynard? He was reluctant to say anything that would have his name on it. ‘Everyone looks at it and there are seething arguments.'

‘I'll call you Jimmy,' I proposed.

‘What do you want to know?'

‘I want to know how you came to realise that you're an Aborigine. Also, how the culture of a so-called extinct race can have been preserved?'

He asked where I lived.

‘How far along Dolphin Sands?' a new note in his voice.

I give him the number.

He chuckled. ‘How's Helen?'

It turned out that he had lived three years in my shed.

‘I'm ringing you from there,' I told him.

Another chuckle. Once, he said, he found half a pound of cannabis in a hole up the wall where I had heard the scratching. And if I was to go in a diagonal from the kitchen to my desk, and walk outside, about 30 yards, up in the mound behind the big gum tree I would discover the remains of a dope plantation.

‘Then you'll talk to me?'

‘You should look into your own ancestors.'

‘That's exactly what I'm doing.'

 

Jimmy lived in a wooden house by a river. He was mid-50s, small, with a long grey beard and brown hair parted in the middle. He caught me looking at him and grinned. ‘People expect me to be black as the inside of a dog.'

He had rented my shed off the man who owned the house before Helen and admitted that he pined for the sight of the sun bouncing off the clouds onto the Hazards. ‘I see those colours and think Albert Namitjira.'

I wanted to know if there was any advice that he, as an Aborigine, would give in connection with the house. He spoke of burial sites near the beach. ‘Try not to disturb the land too much. And leave the place as it is.'

His grudging manner dissolved the more he remembered Dolphin Sands and the shed where I now worked. ‘The waves, you could feel them. The whole building shook. I'd go down after every storm. A southerly coming up sometimes takes ten years off the shore and rips it off – and all comes back. I'd pick up sea-slugs, like old men's dicks, and feel so sorry and throw them back. I'd take rock oysters to eat. And once I kicked a large shell in the sand, and it was a cowrie shell, that big.'

The buff-coloured shell had sat on the barbecue for a year. ‘But I knew it was a little bit different. One day I took it in my pocket to the Hobart Museum, check shirt and country trousers. I asked: “Is there a shellologist?” They brought a woman, a marine invertebrate specialist. I told her, “I've got this old shell.” She back-flipped, pissed herself and turned purple: ‘Ah … ah … ah …'

‘“Not a bad old shell.”

“‘Do you know what that is? Quaternary. 100,000 years old.”

“‘Oh, I know it's pretty bloody old, lady.”

“‘What do you want to do with it?”

“‘I'll give it to the museum as long as you put my name on it.”'

Later, I spoke to Liz Turner at the Hobart Museum. Yes, she confirmed, she had been ‘very excited' when Jimmy produced the shell. ‘I hadn't seen a fossil that old before. It's extremely rare to find this type of cowrie, enormously old and robust.' She thought it had probably washed from the Aboriginal midden at Brown's beach.

I wondered if this was the beach that had featured in Jimmy's dream.

 

Jimmy could not remember when he had had the dream, but I spoke to two women who said that he had dreamed it in my shed. They met him next morning in Swansea's main street. Normally, you could shoot a cannon down it without hitting anyone, but on this day you would have hit Jimmy Riley.

He had dreamed he was walking on Dolphin Sands or on a beach near it. Suddenly, he was surrounded by a mob of Aborigines, taunting him. ‘These young bucks were harassing me: “You're not Aboriginal.” I said: “Be fucked I am!” and tore my shirt open. And there on my body were scars – big cicatrices – that only the Oyster Bay people have. “OK, you are,” they said. I went back to sleep. I started to feel my chest. I still remember the marks. They were my marks. They're the equivalent of body painting: your totem, who you are, who you're related to. Just because the white fellas came here 200 years ago doesn't mean that the dreamings stopped.'

He sat back, fiddling with an empty mug. ‘After that dream, I decided: I'm out of here. It's in front.' All his life he had kept his Aboriginality hidden. From that night, he went public.

I asked about his family. His grandfather on his father's side was a member of the Light Horse cavalry. His grandmother was a Purton from Ulverstone who had an old people's home named after her. It was from her that Jimmy inherited his Aboriginal blood.

‘Do you see yourself as part-Aborigine?'

‘No.' He embraced his Aboriginality as a total identity. ‘Those who don't identify themselves with the struggle are out. Only people who don't understand about being Aborigine call themselves “part”. You can't be a part Jew. You're either of the Jewish religion or not.'

‘My great-great-grandmother was Jewish and spoke Hebrew,' I said. ‘But that doesn't make me Jewish. How can you decide to make a
¹
/
₃₂
of your inheritance your total inheritance?' According to one reckoning, Winston Churchill could have claimed to be an Iroquois on the same basis.

‘It's a feeling, a political decision.' He lifted the white mug. ‘If I put in a teaspoon of coffee and add water what do I get? Coffee. And if I put more water in it? Coffee. And if I put this much milk in it?'

‘Are you saying that your Aboriginal blood is much stronger than any of your other bloodlines?'

He put down the cup. ‘Did you find the dope?'

‘No, just some fence stakes and wires.'

He nodded. ‘To stop the wallabies. The plants were already going to seed when I came across them. They're unlikely to have lasted so high above the waterhole.'