Unearthed: The Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island

By Rebe Taylor, Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2002, 386 pages, paperback, $29.95. Reviewed by Bernard Whimpress in the October 2003 issue.

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There couldn't be a better title for this book which is about digging, uncovering, discovering, sifting and weighing evidence of an untold story.

Tantalisingly, it has not one but three beginnings. It starts with Kingscote woman Mavis Golder glancing through Walkabout magazine in 1954 to find a photograph of her grandfather, described as the 'last Tasmanian half-caste of Kangaroo Island'; continues four years later with her son Michael finding a reference in the Australian Junior Encylopaedia to a Mrs Seymour (his grandmother's maiden name) who died at Hog Bay, Kangaroo Island as the 'last Tasmanian aborigine'; and extends to Adrian Waller reading the Chronicle newspaper in Adelaide in 1960 and noting Mary Seymour described as the last 'half-caste Tasmanian aborigine' but also mentioning his uncle 'Tiger' Simpson as her nephew. The reactions of the three run through varying degrees of shock, confusion, and puzzlement but lead to the unveiling, in 1991, by Mavis and Adrian, of a plaque to their ancestor, Nathaniel (Nat) Thomas, in what author Rebe Taylor eloquently describes as 'a marker of a journey begun, not ended'.

The main theme of the book is the history of Nat Thomas and his Aboriginal wife Betty and their descendants, but it also embraces histories of the Dudley community at the eastern end of Kangaroo Island, of race conflict, and of gender, as well as an engaging discussion of metahistory.

The book has four main sections: Discovering, Remembering, Descendants and Identity, and each is divided into chapter-length parts. In the Discovering section, for example, we begin with Exploring, Arriving, Judging, Knowing, and Settling and it is worth giving some examples of the range of material covered. The exploring starts with Flinders and Baudin. Flinders notes the 'absence of people', and Baudin thoughtfully releases livestock for those who will come after. Within a year, however, the 'humanless sanctuary has become a sealer's paradise'. Those who arrive (and stay) include Nat Thomas, George Wallen and George 'Fireball' Bates, sailors and sealers who are tired of the hard, brutal life on board ship. Taylor notes that figures like Bates become colonial characters, and that the stories of both Tasmanian Aboriginal women like Betty, Suke, and Sal and those from the Kaurna and Ngarrindjeri communities, who were abducted, maybe raped, and taken to Kangaroo Island, are told through the eyes of their captors as ripping yarns.

The judgements made on the early white inhabitants vary, however. Colonial depictions of the sealers often equate savagery with criminality, although, as Taylor asserts, a subtle reading of William Cawthorne's 1854 novel, The Islanders, suggests that the savagery of the white community on Kangaroo Island was no crueller than that of the penal system in England. It is a point, she says, that is missed by mainstream twentieth century historians such as Manning Clark, Geoffrey Blainey, John Molony, and Robert Hughes. In pre-settlement times Kangaroo Island had to be a 'meeting place of cultures', and the white minority had to negotiate with terms set by mainland Aboriginal people, which suggests that the 'Aboriginal women spoke of their country, and the white men listened'.

Settlement changed things. Nat Thomas was London born but is referred to as 'sailor, sealer, farmer, wildman' in the folk history display captions at the Penneshaw Museum. It makes sense that his descendant Mavis Golder wanted him depicted as an intelligent man because it seemed his voice had been taken from him. He was certainly far from a wild man. A Cawthorne painting revealed him living in an ideal, rural setting while South Australian Police Inspector Alexander Tolmer stated that he kept a good, clean house and an excellent farm. He was also a legal landholder for thirty years and the second keeper at Cape Willoughby lighthouse. In common with fellow pioneers George Wallen and 'Fireball' Bates, however, he was not a legitimate or official settler.

The book has many sad episodes. One chapter, 'The Shadows', attempts to revise the record of the elderly Aboriginal women, from tragically comic figures as begging old fools, to fiercely independent women fighting for their survival. When Nat Thomas died in 1879 the substantial landholdings passed to his oldest grandson Nat Simpson. Over the next twenty-five years Nat and his brothers worked the land successfully and Nat featured as one of the founders and builders of the state in the Cyclopaedia of South Australia in 1907. Apart from their landholdings, family members served on the Dudley District Council, as a justice of the peace and as a locally appointed constable, and also took part in leading sports teams. The Simpsons joined the local gentry, but they would not stay there. The reason was racial. No white girl would marry a Simpson. They could join the gentry, but they could not marry into it. The Simpson land was lost because there was no one to carry on. There was no third generation of Aboriginal families on Kangaroo Island and among many descendants their ancestry was hidden.

This is a book with multiple entry points and the author herself comes into the story as a child of English and Dutch migrant parents seeking to find their own connectedness to a new land through holiday experiences in Antechamber Bay. She also remains there as a direct questioner of her subjects. This could be intrusive and irritating in less skilled hands but Taylor conveys her history through stories that are ably cross-checked and balanced by counter views.

As noted earlier Taylor is not afraid to take on the big guns----Clark, Blainey, Molony et al----and she makes some powerful observations. 'History is imagined, it hangs off the bones of facts.' In the mid-to-late nineteenth century Australian colonists feared that white men would go native. The sealers took a step towards savagery, and though at times they are seen as Robinson Crusoes 'they were in fact his antithesis'. This is a reason for their later exclusion while the Aboriginal women, Sal and Suke, who both survived Trukanini as the last Tasmanian Aboriginal, suffer dual exclusions. As Taylor writes:

As the two histories met, Kangaroo Island fell out of both of them. It is only a footnote to the narrative of the Aboriginal Tasmanian community of Bass Strait ... It was cordoned off, roped into the colonial narrative of South Australia. But it is only a footnote in that story as well.

Citation

• Bernard Whimpress. 'Review: Unearthed: The Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island by Rebe Taylor' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), October 2003. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 19 June 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• 'This is a powerful and passionate exploration of cross-cultural history, and it is also an intriguing detective story. Taylor skilfully interweaves experience and memory, narrative and genealogy, politics and place so that this island saga becomes a history of the national psyche.' -- Tom Griffiths, Australian National University
  
  It is relatively well known that the Palawa community of Tasmania is mostly descended from the Aboriginal Tasmanian women who sealers took to the Bass Strait Islands in the early nineteenth century. But few people know that sealers also took Tasmanian women to Kangaroo Island, establishing a cross-cultural community before the settlement of South Australia. Aboriginal Tasmanian descendants are still living on Kangaroo Island today and this book is their story. Beginning in the sealing days, it tells how they became successful farmers, but how many grew up unaware of their Aboriginal ancestry, and are still struggling to face questions of identity today.

Have You Also Read?

• The Wakefield Companion to South Australian History
  
  Wilfrid Prest ed, Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2002, 635 Pages, Hardback, $79.95
  Reviewed by Jack Bowers in the June 2003 issue.
  
  Wilfrid Prest (ed.)The Kaurna and Peramangk peoples are the traditional owners of the land now known as Adelaide; they are just two of more than fifty Aboriginal groups which comprise South Australia. With The Wakefield Companion to South Australian History, the first such reference book dedicated to the history of a single state, South Australians now have an excellent starting point to learn about and discover their country. The most obvious method of assessment for The Companion is to consider what it includes, what it leaves out, and to expose the biases of the editorial team. Why, for example, does Adelaide Miethke, pioneer of education for girls, get a mention, but Kathleen Mellor, ... read more.