December 12.
“A Portrait of Australia With Important Bits Missing” by Glenn Loughrey
Tongerlongeter – Tasmanian war hero
Aboriginal warriors faced impossible odds, not just now and then but always. And yet they went on fighting. In the case of the Oyster Bay-Big River nations, they resisted until there were only twenty-six of them left. It was a heroic story in anyone’s language. Tongerlongeter and his people were great patriots fighting as patriots have done over time all across the world to defend their homeland against foreign invaders. Sympathetic contemporaries recognised patriotism when they saw it. Lieutenant William Darling, when talking to the exiles in Bass Strait, found they were a ‘brace and patriotic people’ who considered themselves to have been ‘engaged in a justifiable war against the invaders of their country’. [1]…
JE Calder...a Tasmanian settler who thought deeply about the island’s war, wrote to a local newspaper in September 1831:
We are at war with them: they look upon us as enemies – as invaders – as their oppressors and persecutors – they resist our invasion. They have never been subdued, therefore they are not rebellious subjects, but an injured nation, defending in their own way, their rightful possessions which have been torn from them by force. [2]
Why is it so hard for today’s Australians to see what was clear to observers almost 200 years ago? Why is Tongerlongeter virtually unknown? There are no relevant monuments. His name has never been chiselled in stone, cast in bronze or placed on an honour board. No tree has been planted in his honour. No one tends his known place of burial. No official ceremony has ever been held to commemorate his struggles. There is nothing in the Tasmanian landscape to remind locals or visitors that once an island of patriots fought a desperate war against an invader. Why ever is Tongerlongeter not one of Australia’s national heroes? It is hard to think of any historical figure more deserving of that honour.
The important role he played in Australia’s colonial history is, as we have shown, beyond dispute. He led the most significant Aboriginal campaign against the British invasion. He continued to play a leadership role in the life of the exiled community on Flinders Island until his premature death. The campaign that he led had a large impact on Tasmania itself, and helped bring about major changes to British imperial policy, not as dramatic as the abolition of slavery, but of real importance to the Indigenous peoples of the Empire. The Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 and the recognition of Aboriginal rights of land under pastoral lease right across the Australian colonies were innovations that continue to have relevance today. Although almost unknown, Tongerlongeter was without doubt one of the most influential leaders of Australia’s First Nations to have emerged since the British first invaded the continent 233 years ago.
Darling to Burnett, 20 February 1833, Weep in Silence (A History of the FlindersIsland Aboriginal Settlement) NJB Plomley [ed.], Blubber Head Press, Hobart, 1987, p. 999. Darling to Arthur 4 May 1832, Arthur Papers, ML, SLNSW, vol. 28, A2188/A1771, p. 108. Italics in original.
Launceston Advertiser, 24 September, 1831, p. 299.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds and Nicholas Clements, Tongerlongeter: First Nations Leader & Tasmanian War Hero, NewSouth Publishing, 2021, pp. 219-220, 262, n.24, n.26
____
The colony’s Solicitor-General, Alfred Stephen, explained that the effect of the proclamation introducing martial law was ‘to place the Aborigine, within the prescribed limits on a footing of open enemies of the King, in a state of actual warfare against him’. [1]
Henry Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, Penguin, Melbourne, 2004, p. 111.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds and Nicholas Clements, Tongerlongeter, pp. 6, 226, n.5