Discourses on Tasmanian Aboriginal Heritage

Extinct No More: Discourses on Tasmanian Aboriginal Heritage By William Price Submitted to the graduate degree program in Geography and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ________________________________ Chairperson Jay T. Johnson ________________________________ Richard Howitt ________________________________ Barney Warf ________________________________ Stephen Egbert ________________________________ Bartholomew Dean Date Defended: December 10, 2013 The Dissertation Committee for William Price certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Extinct No More: Discourses on Tasmanian Aboriginal Heritage ________________________________ Chairperson Jay T. Johnson Date approved: January 30, 2014 ii Abstract A belief has persisted that the Tasmanian Aboriginals became extinct in 1876, in the aftermath of colonization. Heritage has assumed a central role in the contemporary efforts of Tasmanian Aboriginals to reassert their identity and regain self-determination. As a consequence, Aboriginal heritage is a contentious political issue in Tasmania, with dispute focused particularly on efforts to replace the existing state Aboriginal heritage protection legislation, the Aboriginal Relics Act 1975 . Additionally, the completion of a highway bypass at Brighton in 2012, despite the discovery of a significant Tasmanian Aboriginal heritage site, caused unprecedented Aboriginal protests in the state. In this dissertation, I analyze the discourses that surround Tasmanian Aboriginal heritage in: 1) the currently enforced and proposed Tasmanian Aboriginal heritage protection legislation; 2) public opinion on the Tasmanian Aboriginal heritage protection legislation and Brighton Bypass controversy; and 3) tourism material produced by the Tasmanian government. I demonstrate the continuing influence of the "myth of extinction" on Tasmanian heritage legislation and public perceptions, the discrepancy in enforcement of measures designed to protect European and Aboriginal heritage in Tasmania, the discursive positioning of Tasmanian Aboriginals in the past and spatial periphery in tourism interpretive and promotional material, and the need for increased collaboration between the Tasmanian Aboriginal community and the Tasmanian government. iii Acknowledgements First and foremost, I wish to express my gratitude to my advisor, Jay T. Johnson. His encouragement and mentoring enabled this project to succeed, and I will always be grateful to him for providing my first exposure to substantive fieldwork in New Zealand, his availability and openness, and his efforts to secure me grant and assistantship funding. Moving forward in my academic career, I will strive to follow his example as an advisor to my future students. I also wish to convey my deep appreciation to the members of my dissertation committee: Richard Howitt, Barney Warf, Stephen Egbert, and Bartholomew Dean. I was particularly fortunate to have the opportunity to interact with such a superlative group of scholars and people. As a gracious host and mentor during a semester at Macquarie University in the Spring of 2010, Dr. Howitt supervised the beginning of this project and did his utmost to ensure that I left Macquarie a much better scholar than when I arrived. I wish to thank Dr. Warf not only for being a splendid instructor and committee member, but also for his friendship and guidance outside of the classroom. I much appreciated, too, the insight and enthusiasm of Drs. Egbert and Dean. I am especially thankful for having such a supportive family. My father, Eric, accompanied me to Tasmania, assisted in the archival research, helped me to pick up the pieces when my original dissertation project fell apart, and provided invaluable feedback and edits. My mother, Jean, guided me through some difficult moments in my doctoral program and provided endless encouragement. I would also like to acknowledge the support of my siblings and their families: Laura and Anthony Hill, Catherine Ronck, and Owen and Angela Price. This dissertation could not have been completed without the assistance and support of many other individuals. I wish to specially thank the following individuals for making my time at the University of Kansas enjoyable and productive: Andy Allen, Austen Charron, Austen Thelan, iv Blake Mayberry, Cassie Wilson, Christina DeVoss, Emily Fekete, Emily Pabst, Eric Weber, Evie Schlife, John Biersack, John Oakes, Kate Oakes, Katie Vaggalis, Katie Weichelt, Lara O’Brien, Matt Hubbard, Michael Bergervoet, Mike Kozak, Nathaniel Ray Pickett, Nathan Sparks, Sarah Saffa, Stephanie Kozak, Stephanie Willis, Terri Woodburn, Til Willis, Vincent Artman, and Zane Price. Finally, I would like to thank the University of Kansas and the Geography Department, more specifically, for the opportunity to conduct my research. v Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction……………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter 2: The Pre-Colonial History and Culture of the Tasmanian Aboriginals……………….11 Chapter 3: The Dispossession, “Extinction,” and Survival of the Tasmanian Aboriginals……...39 Chapter 4: The Tasmanian Aboriginal Rights Movement……………………………………….75 Chapter 5: The Aboriginal Challenge to the European Heritage Discourse……………………100 Chapter 6: Protection of and Threats to Aboriginal Heritage…………………………………..142 Chapter 7: Research Questions and Methodology……………………………………………...178 Chapter 8: Discourses Surrounding Tasmanian Aboriginal Heritage…………………………..189 Chapter 9: Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………..243 References………………………………………………………………………………………254 vi Chapter 1 Introduction Similar to other British colonial settler-states such as the United States of America, Canada, and New Zealand, contemporary Australia is faced with the simultaneous challenges of coming to terms with a history of broken promises and violence directed towards Indigenous peoples and finding the best way to move forward. The path to reconciliation in Australia is necessarily multifaceted. Although the land claims process and the National Apology have received more scholarly and public attention (e.g., Head 2000; Gooder and Jacobs 2001; Foley and Anderson 2006; Barta 2008), heritage recognition and control, over both land and cultural productions, are also a crucial part of the process. The word “unique” is much over and misused, but it can be applied accurately to the Tasmanian Aboriginals. After the last ice age ended about 10,000 years ago, Tasmania became separated from mainland Australia by the Bass Strait, which is about 150 miles wide at its narrowest point and generally more than 150 feet deep, with notoriously rough waters. Although there are about 50 islands in the Bass Strait, they are well separated. Thus, for nearly ten millennia the Tasmanian Aboriginals lived in total isolation, without any contact whatsoever with other human groups, on an island with an area of about 26,000 mi 2—about the same size as Ireland, Sri Lanka, or West Virginia, for perspective. In the known history of the world, a comparable degree of isolation never happened elsewhere. Despite European colonial contentions, there is no evidence that the Tasmanian Aboriginals degenerated intellectually, culturally, or physically. Rather, the Tasmanian Aboriginals developed a complex culture, with 1 many elements distinctive from mainland Aboriginals, and intimate ties with the land. Every indication is that they were well nourished and lived to relatively old ages, not suffering greatly from infectious diseases. The Tasmanian Aboriginal population is believed to have been stable at 6,000-8,000 people at the time of European arrival in the early nineteenth century and they lived as nine different nations with recognized territories across the island, following established migratory routes. The Tasmanian Aboriginals are often held up as the recipients of the worst treatment of any Indigenous peoples in the long history of the British Empire. Like the rest of Australia, Tasmania was considered to be terra nullius and the Tasmanian Aboriginals were displaced from their land without negotiations or any form of recompense. Tasmanian Aboriginals were in several notable instances the victims of large scale massacres inflicted by settlers and were subject to frequent occurrences of cruelty and depredation before their eventual relocation to Flinders Island in the Bass Strait—a series of events that is often referred to as a genocide. As McFarlane (2008) highlights, though the specific details of events may be debatable, there is little doubt that numerous atrocities were committed against the Tasmanian Aboriginals by government agents, soldiers, bushrangers, employees of the Van Diemen’s Land Company, and other colonists. The Tasmanian Aboriginals fought against British colonization for over a decade, quickly adapting to British military strategies and technologies, but their numbers were ultimately too few to hold out against colonists and soldiers. Elder (2000, 31) states that “the British, with a malicious and arrogant sense of their own superiority, proceeded on a path which would culminate seventy-five years later in the virtual extinction of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people.” 2 While this discourse pertaining to genocide is of great significance to ongoing societal and political debates in Australia (and other former settler-state colonies), as the aforementioned sentence by Elder (2000) indicates, it frequently implies that Tasmanian Aboriginals are extinct.

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