As the Hottest 100, Australia radio's countdown to the most popular song of the previous year as voted by listeners, blasts across the campground from the other side of the river where four teenage boys dive fatly into the cold water, I'm thinking of Bruny Island, where we spent nearly a week.
JJJ Radio had determinedly and decisively changed the date of their iconic coundown to the weekend before Australia Day out of respect for the indigenous community in this country who are reminded of the atrocities committed against them in the years following the First Fleet's arrival on these shores. Many previous landings were amicable and amiable - in Cockle Creek, the French had got along famously with the people there and were sad to leave (later, they succumbed to tuberculosis and other diseases left by the European landings), but so much savagery and brutality were written on the first inhabitants of this country, resulting in systemic racism and intergenerational trauma that to celebrate in any way is an absolute horror. JJJ had enough understanding of indigenous artist's experiences and the insensitivity of banging out tunes on a day to do something about it. It's a day which should really be about dialogue between the variously diverse nations that make up this great southern land, and honouring multiple histories, not just the victorious planting of the Union Jack at the expense of erasing those that were here before us. Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.
Jetty Beach, Bruny Island.
On Bruny Island, I tell Jamie about Truganini, arguably the most famous indigenous Tasmanian woman that ever lived. Her home was with the Nuenonne people on one of the most beautiful islands on earth, Lunawanna-alonnah or later after Bruni Deentrecasteux, to which both the channel and the island are named. It is one of those stories that has stuck with me since a child when I first learnt that she was exhumed and her remains on display in a museum against her express wishes. Even as a young girl I mourned this long dead woman, terribly sad that this beautiful being had been treated so horrifically and could not even be laid to rest on the land she loved and which had supported her people long before colonisation.
I think of her picking oysters from the rocks or hunting for fish, laughing with family or on hunting trips in the bush. She is strong and beautiful, proud and deeply connected to this abundant and wild island, one of the last places to 'fall' to colonisation. Yet it's hard to think of her without her awful history too - by 1829, her 'mother had been killed by sailors, her uncle shot by a soldier, her sister abducted by sealers, and her fiancé brutally murdered by timber-cutters, who then repeatedly sexually abused her.'1.. I never forgot this part of the story - the timbercutters luring her and two men across the channel on a boat where they tossed the men overboard and, when they tried to clamber up on the boat, they cut off their hands with axes and left them to drown.
Whilst assisting the Chief Protector of Aborigines, Robinson, in setting up a settlement for mainland Aboriginals on Port Phillip, she eventually joined a band of outlaws which robbed and shot settlers who eventually murdered whalers at a hut at Cape Paterson. Sent for trial, the men were hung in 1842 but Truganini returned to Tasmania where she eventually died - not on her home of Bruny Island, but nearby Oyster Cove, where we planned to buy a house, if we could afford it. It is hard not to be conscious that we are walking land on which so much dispossession occurred.
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Even at Oyster Cove, she was not 'on country', though she could see her island across the channel where it lays like a sleeping kangaroo. She could get a boat there, defiantly stretching the borders of her imprisonment, roaming her ancestral land that was already not hers, but owned in an entirely 'other' way by British settlers.
Glen Harwood's poem describes the popular thematic view of a dying and lost race, imagining the mudflats and seabirds witnessing the frosty ghosts:
Dreams drip to stone. Barracks and salt marsh blaze
opal beneath a crackling glaze of frost.
Boot-black, in graceless Christian rags, a lost
race breathes out cold. Parting the milky haze
on mudflats, seabirds, clean and separate, wade.
Mother, Husband and Child: stars which forecast
fine weather, all are set. The long night’s past
and the long day begins. God’s creatures, made
woodcutters’ whores, sick drunks, watch the sun prise
their life apart: flesh, memory, language all
split open, featureless, to feed the wild
hunger of history. A woman lies
coughing her life out. There’s still blood to fall,
but all blood’s spilt that could have made a child.
Truganini and Barrister John Woodcock Graves. How symbolic this image is, of the white man determining her fate as he towers over her.
But the indigenous people of Tasmania, and Australia itself, do not exist solely in the past2. Whilst popular history believes that the Tasmanian genocide was complete, they weren't. There were those on the outlying islands, and others still hiding their Aboriginality because of how they were treated and the lack of rights available to them. Withd with no tribal culture left, they were - and continue to be - questioned by politics who continue to deny their identity. If one looks white, are they truly a blackfella? It's not the scope of my expertise to talk about this experience - for more details, try this article by Richard Flanagan who explores what it truly means to be an Aboriginal in Tasmania, and ends with this beautiful poem by an indigenous man Errol West in the 1970's:
Like dust blown across the plain are the people of the Moon Bird.
And yet there is no one to teach me the songs
That bring the Moon Bird, the fish
Or any other thing that makes me what I am.
And so, shaking off the mournfulness, I happily read of Australia Day celebration cancellations because of COVID. Perhaps this is the time to shift the date to honour both past, present and future.
One should not celebrate Australia Day, but remember, reflect, investigate, talk, and tell stories of what this nation is, where it's been, and where it's going.
With Love,
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Oh wow. I love how Australia honors the aborigines that way. That's truly something that must be done. Never knew that story but I find it interesting. Was thinking of working in Australia after watching a reality TV show. 😅
Didn't think abt those deeply rooted things so this is a good way to start looking into it.
Hey thanks for your comment. I'd definitely read up about her life, there's a new book out about her. I think Australia has historically buried a lot of it's atrocities. But it's important to know about them too so we can begin to heal. It's easy to say to just move on but it's still in living memories.
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