TARRA BOBBY, a BRATAUALUNG MAN Bain Attwood
TARRA BOBBY, A BRATAUALUNG MAN Bain Attwood In the last decade biographical writings have provided much-needed Aboriginal accounts of the history of their interaction with Europeans in Australia. Nearly all of these life histories have been oral-based, transmitted by their subjects or by others who have known them.1 * It has been much more difficult to provide voices for individual Aboriginal men and women who lived in the nineteenth century, but several recent essays have shown that it is possible to provide from the documentary record some indications of the perspectives of this historic- ally inarticulate group. In the case of Tarra Bobby, he left no written sources for he was illiterate, but a scouring of the correspondence of missionaries and government officials, the reporting of provincial and metropolitan newspapers, and the writings of ethnographers provides some of the pieces from which Tarra Bobby’s life can be reconstructed. The record is, nonetheless, undeniably patchy, and so I have adopted two approaches: firstly, where I have been unable to learn anything directly because the sources are simply not extant, I have described the wider social context in which he lived (this method seems sensible for the ‘individual’ and ‘society’ are not mutually exclusive entities, especially in traditional Aboriginal societies where the notion of a discrete individual personality is particularly problematic); and secondly, where the evidence is much fuller, I have dwelt on particular incidents in Bobby’s life, using these as a window through which we might look upon some of the main strands of his life history.
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