‘It’s not George that we follow’
Essay on the historiography of Tasmanian Aboriginal people and George Augustus Robinson’s journals.
Essay originally published in Uninnocent Landscapes- Following George Augustus Robinsons’ Big River Mission, Ian Terry, Outside the Box/ Earth Arts Rights publishing, (Tas), 2023
In March 2022, my mum and I presented a joint address for International Women’s Day. I was so preoccupied with my own nerves that I didn’t really stop to ask her what she would be speaking about. While the details of her address have long escaped my memory, one part did make a deep impression on me. She spoke of the impact that the publication of George Augustus Robinson’s journal in 1966 had on her, noting that this was the first time her generation had easy access to this account of the lived experience of our ancestors. The excitement with which she spoke of her first encounter with his journals made clear how this glimpse into the experiences and culture of our ancestors opened up a profound world of connection inside her mind.
My mum is a Tasmanian Aboriginal woman in her 70s. She has lived a great deal of her life in a society that was still actively propagating the widely accepted Tasmanian Aboriginal extinction myth, and has spent the large majority of it at the forefront of the struggle for our rights. In her lifetime she has seen changes that have resulted in the return of our land, revival of language, ancestorial repatriation and official dual place-naming, to name a few. She was 16 when the journals were first published, so for me to hear, some 50 years later, her recollections of reading a book, impressed their significance on me. After the first year of my history degree, in 2012 she gifted me the 2008 edition of Friendly Mission as congratulations, although I must admit that, for quite a few years, it was used as nothing more than decoration for my then sparse bookshelf.
In reality, our family’s connection to Robinson’s journals long predates their transcription and any analysis of their contents. In fact, his original journals capture real and tangible moments in the lives of our own family. Our ancestorial grandmother Tanganutara walked with that man for nine months in 1831 and 1832, accompanying his mission to our Country in the North East and also on the Big River Mission. She was sent with the Big River and Oyster Bay warriors from Hobart to tayaritja, then survived more than 20 years of incarceration right through her time at Wybalenna, to die at putalina/Oyster Cove. Robinson’s journals provide a first-hand account of our family’s dispossession and incarceration. As this experience is mirrored in the family histories of many of our community today, our people’s interest in his accounts goes far beyond historical curiosity.
The journals not only give us these second-hand glimpses of our ancestors, but also provide a snapshot of the social context in which they were written: a time we are so clearly marked by today. In giving us a portrayal of the final years of the prolonged and violent war for our Country, texts like this function as portals into a period that has become foundational to who we are as a people—a community which has inherited the work of resistance, land reclamation and cultural revival. With around seven generations of our people undertaking these efforts within a society that has worked tirelessly to make this history invisible, unacknowledged and untold, having access to white narratives of our dispossession has proved useful.
What has always been surprising to me, though, is the level of fascination this man’s diary has exercised over the broader public. His journals have captivated white historians and the popular imagination for generations. I will never quite understand the allure for those who have received the opposite inheritance from the events described—their share in and unhindered access to our Country—as the spoils of war. It is the tradition of white historical analysis to impute the motives and thought processes of our people, so I intend to briefly do the same here in making my own assumptions on the white fascination with Robinson’s journals.
Initially, it seemed to be his front-row view of the so-called last days of a ‘vanished race’ that preoccupied historians for so long. There have also been debates over his character, the old-fashioned white historical dichotomies, such as the classic ‘Trucanini: Queen or Traitor’, that are more subtly applied to the big man himself. Historians have offered a huge array of competing views of Robinson, from ‘earnest humanitarian’ to ‘self-serving opportunist’.
His receipt of a salary, land grant and per person bounties for his work in successfully persuading our Old People to leave our homelands, point to a financial interest of seemingly less than pure intent. His change of tactics from negotiation to gunpoint round-up of the Takayna people on his mission to the west, as well his actions as one of the most prolific collectors of our people’s cultural and physical remains—even, while superintendent at Wybalenna, going so far as removing our people’s skulls before their burial to gift to his influential friends—is more than enough to damn him in my opinion, however useful his accounts might be. In reality, while I have felt the need to engage briefly with Robinson, when I look at his role in the colonial mission to remove our ancestors from the mainland of Lutruwita, to make way for extensive colonial expansion and land degradation, a debate about the character of the man himself seem pretty pointless.
Robinson has an interesting position as one of the first self-appointed white experts on our people and the archetype of white saviourism. His journals have provided the foundations for a very long and, so far, unending line of historians seeking to enlighten the populace on the truth of Tasmanian history. In line with Robinson and his transcriber, the work of almost every successive historian shares the same biased Eurocentric lens and lack of understanding about our culture and community. Almost all historical analysis shares the same characteristic absence: the one voice that is always excluded is that of our people, our living, breathing community today. Historians often force themselves into the role of enforcers of an imagined separation between us and our Old People, protecting their positions as the experts of a history and people that is not their own.
This becomes a problem for our people, as we are always seen as the least authoritative source of information about our own culture and experience. This is especially disheartening when we see white experts, whose status and wealth has been garnered through expounding Tasmanian Aboriginal history, openly arguing against the campaigns, wishes and opinions of our own people, as if they know better (remind you of anyone?).
In his review of Cassandra Pybus’s book, Truganini: Journey through the Apocalypse, Greg Lehman argues that white historians will get nothing new from the colonial record: the same journals, letters and reports that have been scoured and analysed repeatedly from every angle, year after year, are not changing anytime soon. He observes that, when there are no new sources to uncover or new angles to take, these writers tend to move on to creative writing as the hook. They increasingly place themselves in the minds and experiences of not only their own ancestors, but ours as well, usually imputing thoughts and emotions, and describing the inner experiences of our people, while writing from the exact opposite lived and inherited experience. I think that when this point is reached, they should stop and leave that work to our own people, Aboriginal storytellers who would do a better and certainly more appropriate job.
While I am the first to criticise white historians, of course a lot of my own work uses the research and resources they’ve produced. But rather than build on it, the aim of my storytelling has been to remove them, their opinions and social lens from the people and events they describe. Instead, I prefer to reassert communal and cultural knowledge to fill that gap in narrative.
So, what attracted me to this project was Ian’s approach. I do see this project as something different from the norm, in that it finally takes this story off the paper and recentres our land as the storyteller and story-keeper. Seeing how Ian did the legwork (literally) and then chose to prioritise Tasmanian Aboriginal voices is what made me excited to contribute. Ian reflected on his own experience and relationship to this history and invited Rebecca Digney and me to do the same, on our own terms. It warms my heart to see beneficiaries of Aboriginal dispossession choose to live and work in ways that acknowledge their own inheritance.
In these images I could feel the loss of the landscape: both the loss of it and the loss experienced by it. Seeing the photos presented in this book, alongside the quotes from Robinson’s journal, reminds me that our Country feels our dispossession as keenly as we do. Land is the keeper of memory and story. Just as it has borne witness to the culture and care of our people, it has also borne the impact of colonisation in the same way that we have. I see our people’s experience mirrored in our Country: both are battered, yet still recognisable, the same to the core. The truth of the war in Lutruwita can seem invisible and untold everywhere; everywhere except in our Country itself. The record it keeps is irrefutable.
My only gentle criticism of Ian’s work is this: it is not the landscape that is uninnocent.
It was not party to the atrocities committed here, but a witness to them, and truly a victim itself. Our land shows the mark of the waves of colonisation that have degraded it in the same way that the ocean can erode the seashore when a rough tide grows and grows. This landscape remains innocent. The most innocent party, still here to tell the tale.
Although this work draws on history, it leaves me feeling focused on the future. I see in these landscapes a cry from our Country, a Country that holds our ancestors and millennia of their care. In Robinson’s reflections of their former glory, we can see possibilities for the future of these places. We have seen this already, in the dual regeneration of our community and Country, with Aboriginal land returns enabling us to engage in decades of culturally centred land-management practices. The landscapes presented in this book are images of Country that waits for us still.
Just as we are forever bound to and shaped by the past, heirs of the gifts and the struggles of our forebears, there is no imagined future that is not fought for and created in the present. As a people, we have seen that to be true in our political and cultural movements: I hope these images imbue a sense of duty to care and repair our Country, in everyone that views them. I also see in these landscapes the future of our cultural revitalisation work. Robinson’s second-hand recollections of our people’s knowledge are contaminated with his cultural lens and his limited understanding of both our language and culture. But if only one of us were to be in his place to hear those stories of the stars, of culture and kin, what might we be able to learn?
I remember one afternoon reading Robinson’s journals, specifically a section on his Big River Mission. He wrote of walking with Kikatapula, on his Country at trayapana[1], on different days describing forests of native cherry, wattle, stringybark and peppermint gum. I desperately tried to imagine the landscape and moment that he described but, although I knew the place and most of the plants described, I couldn’t. The moment, the landscape and the experience felt lost to me. The next weekend I went on a bushwalk with my older cousin Andry and told him about that passage, how I wanted to be able to know it better.
Andry started showing me the peppermint gums around us, the one tree from the passage I did not yet know. He taught me how to recognise one tree from another, through the bark and the leaves. More than that, he got me to smell the leaves. We started to crunch them up and breathe them in while we practiced the palawa kani name for each tree, etching that knowledge into my memory. Bringing culture and language into the equation turned what started out, a week earlier, as reading the journals of a dead white man into a profound experience of cultural learning, shared with my family.
That is the only ongoing value I see in texts like Robinson’s—as another tool for cultural revival and reconnection. We can undertake these journeys, using his journals as nothing more than a travel guide, him as nothing more than an intermediary, adding to his account the breadth of our communal knowledge and experience. Then what might our Country be able tell us about the stories of our Old People that his pages couldn’t help but miss?
In following his journeys, we must remember that he was himself following our own people. It was our people that set the course and knew the way. His words give only clues to where to head, on a route that will always lead right back to our ancestors. The topsoil may be disturbed but the memory is intact. As long as our people remain and as long as our Country is still here, bearing even a remote resemblance to its former self, the process of revival and reconnection remain endless and exciting indeed.
[1] Spring Bay area.
