A lesson in history
The child sits at his desk
twiddling a pencil
idly staring out the window
the teacher announces
today we will learn
about the Tasmanian Aborigines
mind snaps back to the present
the child leans forward
attention eagerly given
the last Tasmanian Aborigine
died in 1876
hand goes up
but, teacher, I’m Aboriginal
how can you be
but teacher, I am, I am
Mum and Dad told me
no you are not
that’s the end of it
mouth turns down
eyes glisten and slowly fill
yes, teacher
another lesson learnt
of historical inaccuracies
closed minds and white impassivity.
Karen Brown (Clark 1983, 53)
There is a widespread myth in Australia that the original inhabitants of the island state of Tasmania were driven to extinction by colonising Europeans, a myth which is expressed in A Lesson in History, the recent poem by Karen Brown, a Tasmanian Aborigine. N.J.B. Plomley (1977, 1), the well-known scholar of Aboriginal history, stated quite unambiguously that ‘the Tasmanian Aborigines are an extinct people’ and, furthermore, that the present-day hybrid people ‘have no history’. The year 1876 is chosen as the end of the Tasmanian people because it was on 8 May of that year that Truganini died in Hobart, in her sixties.
In this chapter we will see that, sad as the circumstances of Truganini’s death were, this did not mark the end of the Tasmanian people. For one thing, Rae-Ellis (1976, 129) reports that the last recorded full-blooded Tasmanian was in fact Sukey, who died twelve years after Truganini, in 1888, on Kangaroo Island off the coast of South Australia. Truganini’s honour was simply to have been the last to die of the people who were rounded up by George Augustus Robinson in the period 1829-34 and exiled to the bleak and unhealthy settlement on Flinders Island.
Notwithstanding the death of the last full-blooded Tasmanians well before the turn of the century, there are today about 4,000 people of Aboriginal descent living throughout Tasmania and on the islands of Bass Strait (Clark 1983, 51). This figure represents about the same proportion of the total population of Tasmania as the Aboriginal proportion of the total mainland population. Recognisably non-European features can often be distinguished in the faces of these people. Moreover, they interact socially in ways that are different from Europeans, and they have a strong sense of their own history and of their own belonging to Tasmania, in particular to the Bass Strait islands. Most importantly, these people identify as Aborigines, and the world has come to hear of them in recent years through the words and actions of political activists such as Michael Mansell.
The history of the Tasmanian Aborigines is not, in fact, particularly unusual in Australian Aboriginal history at all. In all main respects, what happened to the Tasmanian Aborigines is the same as what happened to Aborigines in the more densely settled areas of the mainland. The only major difference is that nobody has tried to tell the Aboriginal people of Victoria, for example, that they no longer exist.
Archaeologists tell us that the first evidence of human occupation in Tasmania dates back to about 35,000 years ago when sea levels dropped and people were able to migrate across from the already long-populated mainland (Flood 1983, 103—10). As sea levels began rising again about 12,000 years ago, the land bridge between Tasmania and Australia was flooded, separating the people on the mainland from the Tasmanians, leaving them to develop culturally and adapt to their new and changing surroundings.
In appearance, the people of Tasmania were evidently somewhat different from the nearby mainlanders (though it should be pointed out that mainland Aborigines are not uniform in appearance either). The most noticeable difference involved the Melanesian-looking woolly hair of the Tasmanians, as against the relatively straight hair of the mainlanders. The beautiful watercolour portraits of Tasmanian Aborigines painted by Thomas Bock in the 1830s present facial features that are similar to those of people from some parts of Melanesia.
At around the time that Europeans first arrived in Tasmania, we know that there were at least nine separate communities ranging in size from 250 to 700 people, making a total population of about 4,000 (Ryan 1982, 13-44). Each of these groups was divided into smaller groups — or ‘bands’ — of probably between forty and fifty people each, which roamed over a range of land together in search of food, and were in periodic contact with other bands of the same group, and probably those of neighbouring groups as well.
Map 6: Tasmania, showing the regions to which vocabularies have been assigned. Dotted line indicates earlier coastline linking Tasmania and mainland Australia (from Crowley and Dixon 1981, 394).
The members of those bands belonging to the same group would all have spoken basically the same kind of language, though some bands or groups of bands apparently spoke locally recognisable dialects of these languages. The language of each group would probably have been fairly distinct from that of the neighbouring group. Examining the vocabularies of the various bands for which we have written records, as well as paying attention to what observers from the time said about who could and who could not understand each other, it seems that there were probably at least eight separate languages, and possibly as many as a dozen (Crowley and Dixon 1981, 398-403), a conclusion that is roughly consistent with the earlier observation that there were nine distinct communities.
Unfortunately, it is impossible on purely linguistic grounds to be any more precise than this because the records of the speech of all areas are very poor in quality, and the records of some areas are fragmentary. Thus, it is almost impossible to say what the Tasmanian languages were like.
As an illustration of the difficulties we face in trying to interpret early written sources, we find that the word for ‘emu’ in the South Eastern language was recorded variously as (Plomley 1976, 147):
gon.nan.ner
gonanner
’ngunannah
nganana
(Thanks to the early European colonists, there are no longer any emus in Tasmania.) The word probably began with the [] sound — the sound heard at the end of English hang or sing. But this sound does not occur at the beginning of English words, and those who wrote ‘g’ at the beginning of this word probably failed to hear the pronunciation correctly. While we may be able to make an intelligent guess about the pronunciation of the word for ‘emu’ in the South Eastern language, other words are more difficult to reconstruct from the written record. For instance, the word for ‘ear’ from the North Western language was represented variously as follows (Plomley 1976, 113):
nin.ne.woon.er
hen.ne.wun.ner
un.ne.woo.ner
These words were all recorded by one person on different occasions, and exactly what was the shape of the first syllable is almost anybody’s guess.
Despite occasional contacts between Tasmanian Aborigines and European sailors from as early as 1772, contacts between the two peoples did not commence in earnest until the early nineteenth century. In 1804 Lieutenant-Governor Collins arrived to set up a convict colony near what is now Hobart. Among his papers was an instruction similar to that given to Governor Phillip in New South Wales. He was to:
endeavour by every means in your power to open an intercourse with the natives and to conciliate their goodwill, enjoining all persons under your Government to live in amity and kindness with them.... (quoted in Turnbull 1948, 20)
The European population of the colony grew rapidly, and quickly overtook the Aboriginal population. About half of the Europeans were convicts, while the remainder were military officers and free settlers who took up land and developed farms in the rural areas.
The early European settlers found life in the new colony much harsher than did the Aborigines, who had a superior knowledge of what the land had to offer. The Europeans came to rely heavily on kangaroo meat for sustenance, thereby encroaching on Aboriginal hunting areas to obtain their supplies (Turnbull 1948, 38). As the Aborigines came to be deprived of their own food by Europeans, incidents began to take place in which Europeans’ houses were raided for flour (Turnbull 1948, 42).
The official policy of the administration, however, was to discourage hostility and to prevent the frequent instances of unprovoked cruelty that the Europeans often inflicted upon the Aborigines. In 1828 Governor Arthur had boards nailed to trees in the bush, depicting peace and happiness if the law was obeyed, and equal punishment for Aborigines and settlers if it was broken (see Plate 1).
As European settlement spread further into the rural areas, Aborigines were less and less able to avoid contacts with Europeans, and they found that their food resources were increasingly coming under pressure. As a result, the 1820s saw a significant increase in hostile contacts between the two peoples. The result was the decree of 1828 in which Arthur effectively stated his intention to impose a partition of Tasmania. Under the provisions of this proclamation, Aborigines were forbidden to enter into defined settled areas, except with special ‘passports’. The perimeter of these areas was to be policed by a series of military posts (Turnbull 1948, 85).
Partition failed. Rural Aborigines, still for the most part speaking no English, did not understand the proclamation, and it was unenforceable in any case. Conflicts continued, and Governor Arthur was forced to look to other solutions to his problems.
Plate 1: The pictures on the boards Governor Arthur ordered nailed to trees in 1828 (courtesy Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery).
In 1830, he decreed that every male settler was to make himself available to his local magistrate and, in a vast military operation, the entire settled area of the colony was to be systematically scoured. A giant pincer movement was to force those Aborigines still remaining at large onto the Tasman Peninsula, which was attached to the mainland by the easily guarded narrow Eaglehawk Neck. This operation — the so-called ‘Black Line’ — was also a total failure. Only one old man and a boy were captured (Clark 1983, 40), at a cost of £35,000. Five or six soldiers died in accidents (Turnbull 1948, 199).
After this failure, conflicts between Aborigines and Europeans in settled areas continued to be reported. The colonial administration saw as the last hope the commissioning of George Augustus Robinson to directly contact those Aborigines living in the bush and to persuade them to relocate to an island in Bass Strait, where they would be cared for by the government. Between 1829 and 1834, Robinson was successful in gathering together all the remaining Aborigines and they were relocated ultimately to a settlement on Flinders Island where they were to be ‘civilised’ and Christianised.
By 1835, after three decades of conflict, the Aboriginal population had declined from about 4,000 to a couple of hundred. Severely reduced birth-rates, poor health as a result of loss of hunting grounds and introduced diseases, and murder were the main reasons for the sharp reduction in numbers. The total number of Europeans killed by Aborigines during the same period of conflict was 183 (Clark 1983, 41).
Appalling as the history of race relations described in the preceding section was, conflict was probably inevitable: the Aborigines needed the land for gathering and hunting, and the Europeans wanted it for pastoral purposes. But a very different pattern of race relations was evolving at the same time outside the pastoral sector of the economy and beyond the area of government control in the islands of Bass Strait.
Seals were abundant on the Bass Strait islands. Even before the establishment of the first government convict settlement near Hobart, sealing ships from as far afield as Sydney, the United States and the United Kingdom had been taking skins from Bass Strait (Ryan 1982, 66). A pattern of mutually beneficial contacts quickly emerged between these sealers and the local Aborigines on the adjacent mainland, with Aborigines exchanging seal and kangaroo skins for tobacco, flour and tea (Ryan 1982, 67).
It was a fact of Tasmanian Aboriginal culture that the men seldom learned to swim: when they needed to cross a body of water, they were often ferried across on rafts by the women, who were proficient swimmers. The Aboriginal men were therefore of limited use as labourers to the sealers, but the women proved to be invaluable. Ryan (1982, 67) reports that by 1810, local Aborigines had begun to gather along the northeast coast in anticipation of the seasonal arrival of the sealers, and a number of Aboriginal women would be offered for the season as labourers (and as sexual partners), for which the men were compensated with dogs (which were new to the Tasmanians), muttonbirds and flour.
A number of sealers — often convicts and ex-convicts - gradually settled permanently on various Bass Strait islands. None of these islands had a permanent Aboriginal population at the time of European contact, and far from representing a threat to the Aborigines on the adjacent mainland, the presence of these sealers was generally regarded in the early years as beneficial (though relationships deteriorated when the proportion of women in the population was reduced as a result of kidnapping and increased death rates among Aborigines). The sealers generally took numbers of Aboriginal women as labourers and wives (Ryan 1982, 67) and by 1820, there were about fifty European men and about a hundred Aboriginal women (and their mixed-race children) living on various islands throughout Bass Strait (Ryan 1982, 69).
Seal numbers declined and so, too, did the size of the sealing population. By 1830, there were seventy-four Aboriginal women living with the remaining European sealers in Bass Strait, twenty-eight of whom came from the North Eastern community, twenty-one from the North Western community, and the remainder from a variety of other eastern Tasmanian groups (Ryan 1982, 71). The Bass Strait community also included a few mainland Aborigines, and this ethnically mixed group became the nucleus of the surviving Aboriginal population in Tasmania today (Ryan 1982, 71). Eventually, because of the shortage of seals, the sealers who remained were forced to shift their economic activity to the seasonal gathering of muttonbirds, which were valuable for their oil.
In the preceding chapter, Jakelin Troy has described the emergence of a pidgin in early colonial Sydney. The Bass Strait sealing trade between about 1800 and the 1830s was another situation in which such a pidgin might have developed for use between the European sealers and the Aboriginal women. Those Aboriginal women, both from Tasmania and the mainland, who did not share common languages would have been able to use such a language amongst themselves as well. Ryan (1982, 150) and Plomley (1976, 59-60) both report that these women had indeed formed a new ‘lingua franca’, or contact language. From historical references, we can say very little about what this pidgin spoken in Bass Strait was like, other than that it comprised mostly English vocabulary — as we would predict — along with an admixture of local Aboriginal words, predominantly from the various languages of the numerically dominant eastern part of Tasmania.
From elsewhere in Tasmania at the same period, Rae-Ellis (1976, 22) reports that Truganini, then a sixteen-year-old, began to take a keen interest in the European men at a government timber cutting settlement on the mainland adjacent to her native Bruny Island in the southeast. She and her Bruny Island female friends were also frequently found consorting with European convicts, sealers and whalers when they called in at the area. What we would expect is that Truganini and her friends would also have ended up picking up a form of pidgin. Almost certainly the whalers they came into contact with would have spoken to them in what has come to be known as South Seas Jargon, which was the incipient pidgin widely spoken on whaling vessels around the Pacific at the time (and from which many later pidgins in the southwest Pacific ultimately evolved).
Truganini (see Plates 2 and 3) and her Bruny Island people also had close contact with Robinson from the time that he attempted to establish a government settlement on Bruny Island in 1829, and subsequently when Truganini accompanied him on his travels around Tasmania to round up the last groups of Aborigines still living in the bush. Robinson is often quoted as having spoken ‘the Aboriginal language’, a quality which he considered particularly qualified him for his role as ‘conciliator’. Many sources (for example, Rae-Ellis 1988) also indicate that Robinson was a man of limited intellect — and even dishonesty — who tended to exaggerate his achievements. As Plomley (1976, 34) points out, while Robinson’s diaries provide plentiful examples of Tasmanian vocabulary, there is no evidence that he acquired any real knowledge of the grammar of these languages.
For instance, in 1829 Robinson claimed that while on Bruny Island he ‘preached to the Aborigines in their own tongue’ (Plomley 1966, 61). Given that he had only been on the island for eight weeks at the time, this would seem to be a somewhat presumptuous claim. The extract from the relevant section of his journal reads as follows (Plomley 1966, 61):
At 11 am performed divine service in the natives’ hut. Four of the prisoners attended. Preached to the aborigines in their own tongue. Part of the sermon — MOTTI (one) NYRAE (good) PARLERDI (God) MOTTI (one) NOVILLY (bad) RAEGEWROPPER (devil). PARLERDI (God) NYRAE (good). PARLERDI (God) MAGGERER (stop) WARRANGELLY (sky), RAEGEWROPPER (devil) MAGGERER (stop) TOOGENNER (below) UENEE (fire). NYRAE (good) PARLERWAR (native) LOGERNER (dead) TAGGERER (go) TEENY (road) LAWWAY (up) WARRANGELLY (sky) PARLERDI (God) NYRAE (good) RAEGE (whiteman) etc, etc. NOVILLY (bad) PARLEWAR (native) LOGGERNER (dead) TAGGERER (go) TEENNY (road) TOOGUNNER (below) RAEGEWROPPER (devil) UENEE (fire) MAGGERER (stop) UENEE (fire).
Plate 2: Truggernana (1837), watercolour 29.2 x 22 (courtesy Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery).
The text of his sermon contains words strung together in an order that is identical to English, but stripped of all grammatical markers such as suffixes and prepositions. What this text looks like, in fact, is a pidgin in which the English lexicon has been systematically replaced by vernacular words.
Thus Truganini would have been supplied with a variety of inputs from which she presumably worked out some form of communication that she could use with Europeans and with Aborigines from other areas. Exactly what was the nature of the ‘English’ that Truganini eventually learned is impossible to say. Despite various claims in Robinson’s official reports that Truganini learned to speak English ‘fluently’ (Turnbull 1948, 203-5), he admitted in his private diaries that none of the Tasmanian Aborigines ever learned to speak English ‘properly’ (Rae-Ellis 1988, 127). For instance, Sir Charles Du Cane, a one-time governor of Tasmania and an acquaintance of Truganini in her late years, reported that:
every now and then [she] paid us a visit of ceremony at Government House where she would laugh and chuckle...and occasionally savour us with a few words of English. On one occasion she eyed me intently...and said ‘This fellow he too much jacket’ meaning thereby that I had become stouter than comported with her notions of vice-regal dignity. (quoted in Rae-Ellis 1988, 46)
If this utterance was typical of Truganini’s speech in her old age, and in the company of the Governor, presumably she used pidgin throughout her life in her dealings with all Europeans.
Contacts of a similar sort to Truganini’s were repeated all over the settled areas of Tasmania between the beginning of European settlement and the 1820s. By 1822, there was one band of acculturated Aborigines in the Oyster Cove area known as the ‘tame mob’. No longer dependent on the resources of the bush for their survival, they begged for food, tobacco and alcohol, and suffered from lack of hygiene and associated health problems (Turnbull 1948, 61—62). This band was headed by an Aboriginal convict from Sydney named Mosquito. Mosquito is quoted in Turnbull (1948, 63) as having said:
I stop wit white fellow, learn to like blankets, clothes, bakky, rum, bread all same white fellow: white fellow give’d me. By and by Gubernor send me catch bushranger — promise me plenty clothes and send me back Sydney, my own country: I catch him, Gubernor tell too much a lie, never send me. I knockit about camp, prisoner no liket me then, givet me nothing, call me bloody hangman nose. I knock one fellow down, give waddie, constable take me, I then walk away in bush. I get along wid mob, go all about beg some give it bread, blanket: some take’t away my gin: that make a fight: mob rob the hut: some one tell Gubernor: all white fellow he never give, mob make a rush, stockkeeper shoot plenty, mob spear some. Dat de way me no come all same your house. Never like see Gubernor any more. White fellow soon kill all black fellow. You good fellow, mob no kill you.
Plate 3: Woureddy (1837), watercolour by Thomas Bock, 29.5 x 22.3 (courtesy Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery).
A number of features of later Aboriginal or South Pacific Pidgins were already present in the speech of Mosquito, such as the use of ‘stop’ to mean ‘stay’, ‘all same’ to mean ‘like’, ‘by and by’ to mark the future tense, ‘plenty’ as a marker of the plural before nouns, the suffix ‘-it’ as a marker of transitive verbs, and ‘no’ as a negative marker before verbs. Given that Mosquito was regarded as the leader of this ‘tame mob’, it is likely that other members of this community also spoke this pidgin by the 1820s.
Despite the mortal threat they were believed to pose in the settled areas, only 135 Aborigines from all parts of the colony remained in the bush to be rounded up by the early 1830s. They were removed from the mainland and settled ultimately into a single community on Flinders Island. Coming from all different areas, they spoke a variety of languages.
Given that a form of pidgin was probably already spreading among Tasmanian Aborigines in the 1820s, this set of circumstances would have been ripe for the further spread and development of this new contact language. Access to English on Flinders Island would have been less than in the sealer communities, where each working group included at least one European male. Thus, we might expect that any contact language that was used on Flinders Island would have contained a higher proportion of Aboriginal words than was the case with the sealers’ women’s pidgin. Some Aborigines, such as Truganini herself, arrived at Flinders Island with a fair knowledge of some form of pidgin already, and there was also some direct input from the pidgin spoken in Bass Strait as Robinson succeeded in forcing some of the sealers’ women into the government settlement. There was also further contact with mainland varieties of Aboriginal Pidgin, as Robinson took thirteen Tasmanian Aborigines with him for a time when he was transferred to Port Phillip in what is now Victoria in 1839 (Rae-Ellis 1976, 34-38). Davies, a sailor, made several voyages to the Flinders Island settlement between 1832 and 1837, and he noted that:
The Aborigines from the westward, and those from the eastward, did not at first understand each other, when brought to Flinders Island...but they afterwards, in common with the whites, used a kind of lingua franca. (quoted in Plomley 1976, 79)
Bonwick (1870, 153) also reports the catechist Clark on the island as saying: ‘...on my first joining them in 1834, I found them instructing each other to speak their respective tongues’. He also reports that in this settlement ‘they had constructed, by force of circumstances, a sort of lingua franca — a common language’ (Bonwick 1870, 153). Clark apparently learned to use the ‘gibberish peculiar to the settlement’, a fact which was condemned by Robinson (Rae-Ellis 1988, 174). A Board of Enquiry set up to investigate Robinson’s administration of the Flinders Island settlement and his claim to have ‘civilised’ the Aborigines, and to have taught them English, reported finding Aborigines participating in church services only in what it called ‘broken dialect’ (Rae-Ellis 1988, 169-70). Dr Henry Jeanneret, a medical superintendent at Flinders Island, also reported that the people there spoke a ‘...barbarous English...replete with native words and pronounced with little regard to the distinctions of consonants...’ (quoted in Rae-Ellis 1988, 113).
We will never know the exact nature of this language, though it is almost certain that it was a variant of the same pidgin that was in use in Bass Strait and which had previously been in use in various parts of rural Tasmania. Plomley (1976, 39) quotes a manuscript reference from the catechist Clark in 1837 which bears out the earlier prediction that it would have contained a substantial proportion of non-English vocabulary:
Noemy, after some introductory observations in his native language, commenced speaking in the dialect of the settlement —
God narracoopa [good]. He coethee [loves] us, you coethee God, coethee plenty a big one you taplaldy [go] weethicallee [heaven?]. God sent Jesus Christ to save us to parraway [chase away] the Devil, pother [if?] you coethe the Devil, parraway coethe God coethe Jesus Christ the son of God. You taplady luthra [hell?] you coethe you norocoopa God make you good man, go top wiethienetta [heaven?].
Another manuscript reference from Clark to Robinson in 1837 quotes the dying words of an Aborigine on Flinders Island, which reflect a similarly mixed lexicon:
I said to Hector ‘you are very sick?’ Hector ‘yes me plenty menaty’ [sick]. You coethee God? Hector ‘yes me coethee plenty’. You coethee Jesus Christ? ‘Yes me coethee Jesus Christ the son of God‘. Do you pray to him? ’Yes me pray to him plenty, me pray last night our Father which art in heaven plenty‘. You very sick you krakabuka [die] by and bye? ’Yes me talbetee werthickathe [?] to God, me coethee‘. (quoted in Plomley 1976, 39-40)
Finally, Robinson quotes the words of an Aborigine in an official report explaining his absence from the settlement:
Blackfellow no come back. Too much sickness at Flinders at Pea Jacket Point. Too much dead man. Blackman frightened like to crackenny [die] bust. (quoted in Rae-Ellis 1988, 128)
By the time that the Flinders Island settlement was established, the Aboriginal birthrate had dropped catastrophically. For example, one tribe, which had formerly numbered about 500 people, by 1830 consisted of just seventy-two men, six women and no children (Clark 1983, 44), and by 1832 the whole Flinders Island community consisted of twenty-six men, thirteen women, but only one child (Turnbull 1948, 145). This was due to a combination of circumstances, which presumably included the severe imbalance between males and females (largely a result of women being abducted by European sealers), stress, and health problems brought about by food shortages and introduced syphilis. Conditions on the Bass Strait settlements were so uniformly bad that the death rate among residents was phenomenal. Of the 135 people who had been relocated from the mainland to the Flinders Island settlement by 1834, only forty-seven survived by 1847. Most of the casualties succumbed to lung infections and other avoidable diseases. To replace those who had died during the same period there were only fourteen births (Turnbull 1948, 222).
Because of the appalling mortality rate, the government decided in 1847 to move the community back to the mainland, to a new settlement at Oyster Cove, south of Hobart (Turnbull 1948, 225). In their new location, the members of this sad little community continued to die one by one. William Lanney, the last of the men of this community, died in 1867, and Truganini was the last of the women to die, in Hobart, in 1876. After her burial, Truganini’s body was exhumed and her bones were placed on public display in a glass case in the Tasmanian Museum. According to her final request, she was eventually buried at sea near her home of Bruny Island on the centenary of her death, in 1976 (Rae-Ellis 1988, 41).
The Tasmanian languages were probably doomed well before Truganini’s death. The nature of the linguistically fragmented Flinders Island settlement as far back as the 1830s was sufficient to ensure that the languages had no viable future, and the sealer communities could not ensure the survival of the languages either. Children born in the Flinders Island settlement, such as Fanny Cochrane Smith and William Lanney, probably acquired only a very limited knowledge of the language of their parents. Tasmanian Aboriginal Pidgin was probably the only commonly used language.
It is likely that if this community had been able to maintain itself for another generation, with full-blooded Tasmanians surviving into the twentieth century, these people would probably have ended up speaking English, just as Aborigines in many parts of Victoria and New South Wales today do. Although Robinson was trying to force people to give up their traditional songs and dances, he evidently did not try to force them to give up their languages. He did not need to, as the languages would have disappeared simply because of the nature of the social context into which the people had been forced.
Although Truganini and people like her spent their early years speaking nothing but their ancestral language, and did not learn some form of English until at least adolescence, the original languages did not disappear completely with the death of these ‘old-timers’. Fanny Cochrane Smith was born in 1834 on Flinders Island from an Aboriginal mother and a European sealer father. She eventually married a European, and lived until 1905. In 1899, and again in 1903, the Royal Society of Tasmania recorded her singing Aboriginal songs, which she had learned as a child on Flinders Island (presumably in secret, given Robinson’s attitude to Aboriginal songs). The technology of the time was so poor that these recordings sound like little more than a scratchy squawk. Fanny Cochrane Smith and others obviously did manage to learn some words and expressions of the languages of their parents because she and the generations that followed her were still able to transmit some linguistic remnants to their own children.
In 1908-10, Ernest Westlake interviewed about thirty people of Aboriginal descent in Tasmania and gathered around 100 words (Plomley 1976, 56-67). Fanny Cochrane Smith’s daughter, Mary Jane Miller, was one of the people interviewed by Westlake, and she was interviewed again by Archibald Meston in 1941—42, when she was able to supply nineteen words that she had learned from her mother (Crowley and Dixon 1981, 397).
Other people of Tasmanian Aboriginal descent also retained some knowledge of remnants of the old languages. In the 1930s, the anthropologist N.B. Tindale interviewed descendants of Tasmanian women and European sealers on Kangaroo Island, from whom he recorded four phrases of Tasmanian language (Tindale 1937, 36). Tindale’s 1939 journal from Cape Barren Island also included a few words and a single sentence, which were published for the first time in Crowley and Dixon (1981, 397).
In Tasmania in 1972, I interviewed Mrs Heffernan and Mrs Mundy, who are two of the granddaughters of Fanny Cochrane Smith. Mrs. Heffernan remembered begging her mother to tell her anything of the old language that she knew, though neither she nor her mother (nor probably even her grandmother) ever used the language for communicative purposes. The words that I recorded were all pronounced with normal Australian English phonology, and the word langana that she gave as the word for ‘foot’ was even given with the English plural suffix ‘-s’. Mrs Heffernan also remembered a whole sentence, which she pronounced with a fairly typical Australian English accent as if it were spelt as follows:
Tabbenty ning-ena moomera probbeby par-drooler.
This meant, she explained, ‘Get a bit of wood and put it on the fire’. Finally, she also remembered a fragment of a song that she said was sung by her grandmother before an audience at Government House in Hobart. The meaning of the song is unknown, but it went as follows (Crowley and Dixon 1981, 398):
Kumerayngo kunekuneli Rrpa rrpa hiriyawa tachima tachima
Although the Tasmanian languages are now extinct, it is testimony to the power of the Tasmanian Aboriginal sense of identity that scraps such as these should have survived in people’s memories for almost a century-and-a-half.
People who lose their original language by the force of circumstances beyond their control often maintain their distinct identity using the language of their oppressors. For instance, even when speaking English, Aboriginal people prefer indirect methods of seeking information, rather than the direct questioning approach of Europeans (compare comments on this in other chapters of this book, especially chapters 2 and 13 by Yallop and Eades respectively). The differences between an Aboriginal way of speaking and a European way of speaking in situations such as these may be lost on the average European unless they are carefully pointed out.
A separate Tasmanian Aboriginal linguistic identity did not disappear completely with the loss of the original languages, just as the Tasmanian Aborigines themselves did not disappear. Through the remainder of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the mixed-race descendants of the Bass Strait sealers continued to raise pigs and goats, grow wheat and potatoes, and catch kangaroos, seals and muttonbirds for their sustenance; and the women continued to make necklaces made of small shells (Clark 1983, 47). Although the government negotiated leases for the land they were occupying in the nineteenth century, there were problems over access to muttonbird rookeries, and an area was set aside for a single reserve on Cape Barren Island (Ryan 1982, 222-27). In 1951 this reserve was abolished on the grounds that the occupants were ‘no longer Aborigines’. Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, these people often called themselves ‘Islanders’, but from the early 1970s they began to refer to themselves again proudly as Aboriginal Tasmanians (Ryan 1982, 253).
English was the language of this new Cape Barren Island Aboriginal community, though the people retained a knowledge of some words in the Aboriginal languages passed on to them by their mothers and their grandmothers. The descendants of these people still live today on Cape Barren Island and they still hunt muttonbirds. They still make shell necklaces, from the shells which they call ‘mariners’ — a word which is also recorded in the vocabularies of Tasmanian languages from a century-and-a-half ago (Plomley 1976, 326). West (1984, 15, 75) reports a number of other words in use in English among Bass Strait Aborigines which may also be of Aboriginal origin:
barilla | saltbush |
bidgie-widgie | burr |
kanie gan | pigface |
boobyalla | baby food |
ne na | amen |
The English spoken by the Tasmanian Aboriginal residents of Cape Barren Island today is noticeably distinct from other varieties of Australian English. Sutton (1975, 65) notes that ‘traces of early nineteenth-century or dialectal British English, and traces of Aboriginal foreign accent, are clearly discernible...in...Cape Barren English’. For instance, there are people on Cape Barren Island who pronounce ‘follow’ and ‘swallow’ as ‘folly’ and ‘swally’ respectively, which are also characteristic pronunciations in certain Scottish and southwestern English dialects of English (Sutton 1975, 69). Sutton (1975, 82) also notes that a certain amount of variation between sounds such as [v] and [b] in Cape Barren English may derive from the fact that the original Tasmanian Aboriginal languages did not make this distinction.
There are also English words that occur only on Cape Barren Island, or which occur elsewhere but have special uses among the people there. Sutton (1975, 90-95) notes that what most Australians call a ‘house’ is referred to there as a ‘bungalow’, and people use ‘chains’ as a measure of distance in addition to yards (or metres). ‘Getting dark is’ ‘getting duskified’. What most Australians would call ’chooks’ or ‘chickens’ are referred to there as ’fowls’ (as is also widely found among mainland Aboriginal speakers of English).
Probably for as long as the Tasmanian Aborigines living on Cape Barren Island feel different from other people in Australia, they will continue to speak their own variety of English.
1. Languages can die out in a number of different ways. What can you find out about how other languages have disappeared (or show signs that they may disappear)? How do these compare with what happened in Tasmania? Case studies that you could investigate include the following:
2. ‘Languages generally don’t die, they commit suicide.’ What do you think this means? Did the Tasmanian languages commit suicide or were they murdered?
3. If you had been in Governor Arthur’s position in 1830, what might you have done to ensure that the Tasmanian languages survived to the present? (check some of the other chapters of this book)
4. If you were doing research on your family history and you discovered that your great-great-great-grandmother was a Tasmanian Aborigine, would that make you an Aborigine?
Bonwick, J. | |
1870 | Daily Life and Origins of the Tasmanians, Sampson, Low, Son and Marston, London. |
Clark, J. | |
1983 | The Aboriginal People of Tasmania, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart. |
Crowley, T. and R.M.W. Dixon | |
1981 | Tasmanian. In R.M.W. Dixon and B.J. Blake (eds), Handbook of Australian Languages, vol 2, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 394-421. |
Eades, D. | |
1985 | “You Gotta Know How to Talk”... Information Seeking in South-East Queensland Aboriginal Society. In J.B. Pride (ed), Cross Cultural Encounters: Communication and Mis-Communication, River Seine Publications, Melbourne, 91-109. |
Elder, B. | |
1988 | Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatment of Australian Aborigines since 1788, Child and Associates, Frenchs Forest, New South Wales. |
Flood, J. | |
1983 | Archaeology of the Dreamtime, Collins Publishers, Sydney. |
Plomley, N.J.B. | |
1966 | Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals of George Augustus Robinson 1829—34, Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Kingsgrove, New South Wales. |
1976 | A Word-List of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Languages, N.J.B. Plomley, Launceston. |
1977 | The Tasmanian Aborigines: A Short Account of Some Aspects of Their Life, Adult Education Division, Launceston. |
Rae-Ellis, V. | |
1976 | Trucanini: Queen or Traitor?, O.B.M. Publishing Company, Hobart. |
1988 | Black Robinson: Protector of Aborigines, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne. |
Ryan, L. | |
1982 | The Aboriginal Tasmanians, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Queensland. |
Sutton, P. | |
1975 | ‘Cape Barren English’. In J.V. Neustupny (ed), Linguistic Communications 13: Working Papers of the Linguistic Society of Australia, Monash University, Melbourne, 61-97. |
Tindale, N.B. | |
1937 | Tasmanian Aborigines on Kangaroo Island, South Australia, Records of the South Australian Museum 6, 29-37. |
Turnbull, C. | |
1965 [1948] | Black War: The Extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne. |
West, I. | |
1984 | Pride Against Prejudice: Reminiscences of a Tasmanian Aborigine, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra. |