August 18.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Truganini
From 1830 to 1835 a government emissary, George Augustus Robinson, sought to negotiate an end to the fighting...[he and his companions began] a nine-month journey of geographical and cultural discovery through the west coast in which the Aboriginal people travelling with Robinson arranged many friendly meetings with the local people. One influential member of Robinson’s party was the young Nueonne woman Truganini, who in her short life (she was probably then about eighteen) had already experienced her mother being killed by sailors, her uncle shot by a soldier, her sister abducted by sealers and her fiance murdered by timber getters. [1] It is not surprising that Truganini and other members of the conciliation expedition experienced with the reality of the British conquest, including her husband, Woorady, and Kickterpoller...believed that there was no option remaining but to negotiate with the invaders. As Truganini later reflected: ‘I knew it was no use my people trying to kill all the white people now, there were so many of them always coming in by boats.’ She believed that the only option was to work with Robinson to try to ‘save all my people that were left’. [2]
However, equally understandably, it proved to be the case that none of the west coast people wanted to be removed from their comparatively safe homeland. If it was not for the fact that the friendly relations developed at this time with the west coast people were to be critical to Robinson’s betrayal of them three years later, the 1830 mission would have had no political impact...In November 1830 an Aboriginal group agreed to Robinson’s offer to give them a few weeks’ protection on Swan Island, where they would also be able to obtain a good supply of seasonal food. The essence of the agreement with the colonial government – that the Aboriginal people would temporarily leave their homeland until peace had been restored and they could return protected and provided for – was never upheld.
...Colonial government policy had always been (and, as far as it was written down or communicated to London, always remained) to remove only ‘hostile Aborigines’ from the ‘settled districts’, but in January 1832, the government engaged Robinson on a contract that would see him receive a large financial bonus if he removed all the Aboriginal people...[A]lmost all of the people removed...(about two thirds of the total) resulted from either Robinson’s personal deceit or his arming of convict assistants. The Aboriginal people removed in 1832 and 1833 were captives who never agreed to a peace settlement, honoured or otherwise.
Alison Alexander, ‘Truganini’, in Alexander (ed.), The Companion to Tasmanian History, p. 370.
Henry Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, Penguin Books, Melbourne, 1995, p. 142.
Acknowledgment: James Boyce “Towlangany – To Tell Lies” in Rachel Perkins and Marcia Langton eds, First Australians, pp. 58-62, 258 n.15, 259 n.16.
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...the legitimate owners of their ancestral homelands...
Every thing changed in 1992 when the High Court handed down its judgment in the Mabo case. The judges overthrew 200 years of legal precedent, deciding that before the arrival of the British invaders the First Nations had both settled inhabitants and land law. They were the legitimate owners of their ancestral homelands. As Justice Brennan declared in the imperishable words, the Meriam people were ‘entitled against the whole world of possession, occupation, use and enjoyment’ of their traditional land. [1]
Mabo v Queensland (No 2) (1992) 107 Australian Law Reports 1, at p. 55.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, Truth-Telling – History, Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement, pp. 135, 255 n.7