March 5.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Oppression of indigenous women
The abduction and enslavement of native women in Bass Strait
Some sealers, up until at least 1816, were able to establish trading relationships with coastal tribes [but]...trading opportunities evaporated as relations [between white sealers and Tasmanian Aboriginals] broke down. Still, up to 100 sealers continued to operate in the straits during the early and mid-1820s, and they all desired women. Consequently, the practice of gin raiding became widespread. According to Captain James Hobbs, who knew the straits well 'when [the sealers] could not purchase women, they shot the men and carried their wives away'. [1] Indeed, the missionary James Backhouse, who spent considerable time in the straits from 1832, asserted that '[m]ost of these women were originally kidnapped' – a claim consistent with all the evidence. [2]
The abduction and enslavement of native women in Bass Strait went back to at least the early 1810s. In 1815, Major William Stewart reported that:
For several years it had been the practice for whaleboats, twenty to thirty feet long, to clear out of Hobart and Port Dalrymple apparently with only two or three on board, but in fact with several convicts hidden...These buccaneers raided the Tasmanian mainland for aboriginal women and they traded in them...keep[ing] them as Slaves or Negroes, hunting and foraging for them, who they transfer and dispose of from one to another as their own property; very few of whom ever see their Native Home [again]. [3]
If the practice was common in 1815, it was entrenched by the early 1820s. A number of women told [George] Robinson of how they were abducted by sealers who 'rushed upon them at their fires and shot the men'. [4]
Hobbs to AC, 9 March 1830, in Shaw, Van Diemen's Land, p. 50.
Backhouse, A Narrative, pp. 88-89; Plomley, Friendly Mission, 1047-48.
Stewart to Campbell, 28 September 1815, HRA, ser. 3, vol. 2, pp. 575-76.
Plomley, Friendly Mission, pp. 212-15, 284-85, 345.
Acknowledgment: Nicholas Clements, The Black War, pp. 192-193, 251 n.11, n.12, n.13, n.14.
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The oppression of indigenous women
Women were also taken away by white men and sometimes never saw their families again.
I feel sure that if half the lubras now being detained (I won't call it kept, for I know most of them would clear away if they could) were approached on the subject, they would say that they were run down by station blackguards on horseback, and taken to the stations for licentious purposes, and there kept more like slaves than anything else. I have heard it said that these same lubras have been locked up for weeks at a time – anyway whilst their heartless persecutors have been mustering cattle on their respective runs. Some, I have heard, take these lubras with them, but take the precaution to tie them up securely for the night to prevent them escaping. Of course, sirs, these allegations are, as you know, very difficult to prove against any individual persons, still I am positive these acts of cruelty are being performed, and I think still worse. [1]
Constable R. C. Thorpe, Camooweal, 5 March 1898 Submitted to Select Committee on the Aborigines Bill, SAPP, 1897, No. 77, pp. 113-*14.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, Dispossession – Black Australians and White Invaders, p.143-4.
The female workers, who were the backbone of the domestic economy on outback pastoral properties, were caricatured and ridiculed by cartoonists and commentators. Unable to understand the Indigenous need – unencumbered by shoes – to have sensory contact with the land beneath their feet, they depicted domestic workers in white women’s houses as having grossly enlarged bare feet.
Acknowledgment: Review by Barbara Dawson of skin deep: Settler Impressions of Aboriginal Women by Liz Conor UWA Publishing, Crawley, 2016, in Aboriginal History, Vol. 40 (2016) p.351.