Tag Archives: Australian First Nations

Dean Ashenden’s Telling Tennant’s Story

Posted on 28 August 2023 | 4 comments

Dean Ashenden, Telling Tennant’s Story: The Strange Career of the Great Australian Silence (Scribe 2022)

A friend recommended Telling Tennant’s Story as his number one pick for anyone wanting to inform themselves before the Voice referendum.

My own number one pick would be Patrick Dodson’s article, ‘A firelight stick on the hill’ in the Monthly July 2023 (online here), which tells the agonising story of one representative body after another created and then destroyed, and includes this:

We are on the cusp of building a true foundation for our rich and diverse nation, upholding unity, and demonstrating respect for the First Peoples of this country while honouring our Western traditions. These aims are entirely compatible. Australia’s First Peoples are holding a firelight stick on the hill, beckoning us all to build a reconciled, healed and proud nation, where their unique position is recognised and respected.

Dean Ashenden’s book was published before the referendum was announced, but it tells the same story of First Nations voices going largely unheard for more than 200 years. In terms of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, it is about Truth rather than Voice or Treaty, but my friend’s recommendation is right on target. It’s hard to imagine anyone reading this book and then voting No.

Ashenden is a non-Indigenous historian, who spent several years as a child living in Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory. The book is framed as his quest to understand what was going on in the relationships between First Nations and settler people in the town back then. Who were those Aboriginal kids who sat at the side of the picture theatre during the Saturday matinee? Where did they come from? What was this ‘Mission’ that he heard spoken of? He ties this local quest to an account of the Great Australian Silence, anthropologist W E H Stanner’s name for the way Australian mainstream culture – politicians, journalists, historians, novelists, visual artists – ignored First Nations people for so long, relegated them, their concerns and their perspectives to the margins, and turned resolutely away from the terrible violence the settlers have inflicted on them from the earliest days of settlement.

It’s an enormous topic. The book adopts a number of strategies that ease the reader’s path.

First, there’s the personal element. Ashenden begins with his own experience in Tennant Creek, both as a child and on returning as an adult historian. We’re invited to witness him revising the version of the world he was given as a child – a process of revision that all of us settler Australians need to undertake (and incidentally, I’m looking forward to David Marr’s Killing for Country, about his forebears’ involvement in the Queensland Native Police).

Second, the book has a clear structure. Its ten chapters are divided into two parts: ‘Constructing the Silence’ and ‘The Struggle to Dismantle the Silence’. There’s a clear narrative line. Within it, after a prologue placing himself in relation to Tennant Creek, each chapter is organised around a particular year:

  1. 1860: The first contact of non-Indigenous people with the Waramungu of the area now occupied by Tennant Creek John McDouall Stuart’s passing-through was far from benign, but worse it was the harbinger of devastation and violence that was to accompany the building of the overland telegraph line 15 years later.
  2. 1901: This chapter is a nuanced account of anthropologists Frank Gillen and Baldwin Spencer, who visited Tennant Creek to ‘do’ the Waramungu in this year. Ashenden argues that their main contribution to the Great Australian Silence was to ignore the violence suffered by Aboriginal people and call attention to shiny ‘scientific’ studies of their customs and beliefs.
  3. 1933: This is the year that W H Stanner, in some ways the book’s hero, visited Tennant Creek, but the chapter deals mainly with other anthropologists, especially Adolphus Peter Elkin, who proposed the policy of assimilation that in effect meant elimination of First Nations cultures.
  4. 1958: Alongside the story of increasing disruption of the lives of Waramungu people, is the presence of Paul Hasluck in the Federal government, making assimilation official policy. Stanner attacked him with cutting irony in 1958, calling him ‘the Noble Friend of the Aborigines’.
  5. 1967: One of the many surprises of this book is that the 1967 referendum, which many saw at the time as a decisive step forward in Aboriginal affairs, rates barely a paragraph. Instead, the chapter focuses on an equal pay case, which was victorious but which led to widespread unemployment on Aboriginal workers; and Harold Holt’s establishment of the Council for Aboriginal Affairs.
  6. 1971: The first chapter of the second part begins with W H Stanner’s milestone 1968 Boyer lectures, which named the Great Australian Silence. After an excellent, critical account of the lectures, Ashenden moves on to the main subject of the chapter: the courtcase in which Yolngu elders claimed rights over land that the government was about to lease to a mining company. The case was lost, but Yolngu witness appeared alongside ‘expert anthropological opinion’ and their voices were heard. Not much later, Gough Whitlam introduced a bill that was passed by the Fraser government to become the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976.
  7. 1885: Tennant Creek is again front and centre, ‘on its way to becoming Australia’s most notorious dystopia’. In 1985, the Waramungu won a significant land rights claim.
  8. 1992: This was the year of the Mabo decision. The chapter focuses on the way historians and lawyers replaced anthropologists as the main allies of First Nations people. There’s a terrific account of Eddie Koiko Mabo, including his friendship with Henry Reynolds.
  9. 2000: Three years after the Bringing Them Home report on the stolen generations (whose main author Hal Wootton emerges as a model of someone who was willing to listen and learn), a court case found that a woman who had been taken from her family as a small child was not entitled to compensation. The chapter covers John Howard’s stance on Aboriginal matters and Kevin Rudd’s 2008 apology.
  10. 2005: Ashenden visits Tennant Creek again, sees ‘winners’ history’ on display everywhere, and First Nations stories now at last being told, but in a dauntingly beautiful building that is off the beaten track.

That list barely touches the surface of what the book covers. It’s a terrific read. Then there’s an Afterword, where Ashenden laments the way the heirs of John Howard’s History Wars continue to turn us away from the reality of our history, and argues eloquently for the importance of truth-telling. I’ll finish this blog post with the book’s final words

We might have got away with the silence had Aboriginal people not declined to disappear from history, as they were once expected – in both senses – to do. The past should indeed be ‘put behind us’ but it won’t be until it has been properly acknowledged, not by fessing up, or by telling just those parts of the story that suit particular purposes, but by telling our shared story as fully and truthfully as possible. How to persuade those with control over our institutions of that case? We’re on an offer to make it joint business.

(Page 244–245)

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Winter reads 3: Tony Birch’s The White Girl

Posted on 31 July 2023 | 6 comments

This is my third post on books I’ve brought with me on my escape from Sydney’s winter, focusing as usual on page 76.

Tony Birch, The White Girl (UQP 2020)

Tony Birch has turned up in my blog fairly frequently as a contributor to Overland, winner of awards and speaker at writers’ festivals (link here). The White Girl the first novel of his that I’ve read, and it has been burning a hole on my bookshelf for years.

A friend told me she gave up on it after about 20 pages because it was full of stereotypes and it signalled crudely what was going to happen – she’d rather read non-fictional accounts of the terrible things done to First Nations families by white justice and so-called welfare, rather than something filtered through a more or less didactic imagination.

She was wrong. Many expectations are set up in the first part of the book, many disasters foreshadowed. But the expectations are more often than not overturned.

It’s the early 1950s. Odette Brown lives in the now near-deserted part of an Australian country town that once was home to a sizeable Aboriginal community. Now there’s just her, her fair-skinned, blonde-haired, twelve-year-old granddaughter Sissy, and at some distance her oldest friend Millie. Both Odette and Sissy have run-ins with a loutish young man who carries a gun and drives a dangerous truck. The local police officer no protection, and – worse – there’s a new office in charge who takes his role as Guardian of all Aboriginal children seriously. He is biding his time to take Sissy into ‘care’. Add to that, Odette has increasingly frequent spasms of pain in her side and a doctor has told her she absolutely must have surgery – surgery which she can’t afford, even if she was able to leave Sissy unprotected while she was in hospital.

So the set-up ticks a lot of boxes: apart from the above, there’s a retired Afghan cameleer, a Polish teenager on the run from immigration officials, a Holocaust survivor with a tattooed number on his arm, a brain-damaged white man who runs a junkyard, a posh white woman who buys art from Odette and sells it with a bogus tribal attribution.

But, probably at about the place where my friend gave up, the story takes off. The focus is on Odette’s courage and ingenuity. Allies turn up in unexpected places. Sissy’s white appearance becomes an asset as well as a vulnerability. Other Aboriginal people tell their stories to Odette. Partly one feels that these stories serve a didactic purpose, making sure we know that terrible things were happening to First Nations people in the real world. But they also remind us how high the stakes are, right up to a climactic scene where the evil policeman (yes, he is pretty two-dimensional) makes his final play.

Page 76 is one of two moments when a First Nations character enters a rundown settler dwelling. In the other moment, Odette finds the decrepit old man, father of the young man with the gun and the truck. In this one, Sissy is testing the limits of her freedom on a day when Odette won’t be home until late. She wanders into an abandoned white farmhouse, knowing she could be in trouble, and the scene takes on an Mrs-Haversham eeriness:

Sissy opened the door of an ornately carved wardrobe. It was full of women’s dresses, scarves and coats. She reached out and touched the sleeve of a red velvet dress pitted with moth holes. The material fell apart in her hands. In the mirror in the centre of the wardrobe, Sissy could see the fireplace and mantle behind her. A large gilded portrait sat above the mantle. She walked across the room and stood in front of the frame. It was a photograph of a white family, standing in front of the house. The men in the photograph wore suits, the women dresses and straw hats. Children sat in front of the adults. The girls had beautiful long hair and wore white dresses. Sissy put a finger to the glass and imagined herself wearing such a fine dress. On the edge of the group, at a slight distance from the family, stood two Aboriginal women. The older woman had her arms crossed over her breasts and looked sternly into the camera. The younger woman refused the lens completely, looking off to one side.

What can I say? My friend gave up too soon.

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Evelyn Araluen’s Dropbear

Posted on 4 June 2021 | 12 comments

Evelyn Araluen, Dropbear (University of Queensland Press 2021)

This is a formidable book. I’d heard Evelyn Araluen read some of its poems, which she always does with a slight, dangerous smile, and was looking forward to reading them. The smile is mostly still in evidence, but the danger doesn’t feel slight. What’s endangered is any hope of emerging with Australian settler colonialist assumptions intact, or at least untroubled. In the book’s generous notes, Araluen spells out her understanding

that the material and political reality of the colonial past which Indigenous peoples inherit is also a literary one. Our resistance, therefore, must also be literary.

(page 99)

What looks like an elegantly designed slim volume of poems is actually a piece of incendiary resistance to colonial attempts at genocide and erasure, from May Gibbs’s cute bush creatures to perfunctory or self-serving acknowledgements of country, by way of a whole gallery of settler-Australian poets and poetic tropes. There are rage-fuelled mash-ups taken from widely read, familiar texts; poems whose ideal readers have PhDs in critical theory or contemporary poetics; and longer prose poems that could just as easily be categorised as essays and short stories. There are poems that turn their gaze away from the colonisers and dwell on family and the natural world.

In her conversation with Tony Birch at the Sydney Writers’ Festival My blog post is at this link), Araluen said. ‘This is not a cancel culture book.’ And that’s an important point to make. ‘For the parents’, one of the longer pieces, is in part an expression of gratitude and appreciation for her parents who read May Gibbs to her and her siblings, which when she first ‘discovered theory’ she thought meant they were ‘losing to the settlers’:

While my siblings and I consumed those stories, we were
never taught to settle for them. My parents ever pretended 
these books could truly know country or culture or 
me – but they had both come from circumstances in which 
literacy and the access it affords was never a given. They just 
wanted me to be able to read.

The acts of resistance in this book are not rants against an easily demonised foe. They involve the poet’s own inner wrestles, and bring a finely tuned, disciplined intelligence to bear on issues that lie at the heart of Australian culture. The book isn’t an easy read, especially for old white men, but it’s not hostile. Speaking as an old white man I felt it as a bracing invitation and a forthright offer of guidance and even help.

Added later: There’s an excellent discussion of Dropbear by Jeanine Leane in Sydney Review of Books, at this link. Here’s a taste:

Dropbear is blunt, biting and beautifully crafted. Although it is those things, it is more than the sum of those things. It’s a radical and timely affront to the history, the myths, the gossip and the stereotypes that still confront us all as the Country’s First Peoples.

Dropbear is the tenth book I’ve read for the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2021.

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Julie Janson’s Benevolence at the Book Group

Posted on 20 October 2020 | 3 comments

Julie Janson, Benevolence (Magabala Books 2020)

Before the Meeting: Generally, if I read a book about a marginalised group I try to read one by someone from that group soon after. Even though both Truganini (the Book Group’s last title) and The Colony (which I read just before Truganini) are committed to telling colonial history with First Nations perspectives to the fore, they are both written by white/settler women. So I was happy when this book by Julie Janson, a Burruberongal woman of the Darug Nation, was chosen for the Book Group.

Julie Janson has described the novel as ‘a First Nations response to The Secret River by Kate Grenville’:

[The Secret River] is a wonderful book, but I was challenged by the ending where all the Burruberongal Darug people died in a massacre except for one old man. I asked myself the question: if all the Darug died, who were we?

I had researched my (Aboriginal) family history along the Hawkesbury River, and the Darug interpretation of those early days of colonial invasion is entirely different.

(Link to Booktopia interview here)

Benevolence (the title is deeply ironic) tells the story of Muraging, a Burruberongal woman whose parents give her up to a missionary-run school in 1816 when she is very young, in the hope that she will gain resources there to survive in the colonised world. Renamed Mary, she learns to read, write and play the violin, and resists attempts to make her give up on her culture, language and people. She runs away with a handsome young Aboriginal man, and what follows is a picaresque account of her travels, moving back and forth between the two cultures – now living with a group of women who have lost their men to the frontier wars, now a servant to a clergyman with whom she has a consensual sexual relationship that eventually goes very sour, now wandering with her small daughter, a servant again, a disregarded listener to callous conversations about massacre and rape, a speaker of truth to power. She finds occasional kindness and mostly avoids threats of violence and sexual assault. She spends time in prison, is often hungry, loses her daughter, has a second child after having sex with a French man in return for a bag of flour. She never gives up the search for her family and a place where she can live among her people.

It’s a story of navigating the harsh conditions of colonisation. The Aboriginal people and communities that Mary encounters are not pathetic victims, and aren’t romanticised as automatically safe and nurturing, but at the end of the novel, she finds a home in a community of survivors – precarious, under threat, but solid.

Each chapter has a year in its heading title, and most begin with a brief note on what is happening in the colony: in 1826 Darling becomes Governor of the colony; in 1832 Kings School opens in Parramatta; in 1835 Governor Bourke proclaims terra nullius; also in 1835 King William IV recognises the continued rights to land for Aboriginal people in South Australia. These landmarks serve to anchor the narrative in settler history, but most bear little direct relation to Mary’s struggles.

There are many painful scenes with settlers: the unashamedly white supremacist Reverend Masters, the weak Reverend Smythe (her first child’s father), Smythe’s insufferably prim and nasty wife Susan, a military man who forces her to guide him on a punitive expedition that culminates in massacre, and others. These characters are pretty much universally portrayed as weirdly irrational, inconsistent, bullying or pusillanimous, so that their scenes – dinner parties, domestic rows, meetings with Aboriginal warriors – read like hellish phantasmagoria. I haven’t seen any of Julie Janson’s plays, but many of the scenes involving settler characters read like scripts for rough-theatre, agitprop pieces.

To give you a taste, here’s part of the scene where Susan Smythe has caught her husband Henry having sex with Mary, after Susan has set fire to their cornfield and blamed Mary, after Mary has saved Susan’s life, after Henry has told Mary many times that she must leave. Mary is listening from behind a screen:

‘Get rid of her!’ Susan is speaking with a clear high voice. Henry twitches and ruffles his black hair with nervous fingers. He sits by his writing desk and taps his quill. He laughs like men do when confronted by a wronged woman.

‘Must we discuss this now? I am penning a sonnet and working on my native language book,’ says Henry. He dips the quill in ink and examines the tip.

“Sonnet? Are you insane? I shall call the doctor to bleed and purge these dark humours,’ rages Susan.

‘We must buy more quills – make a list … She is just a black servant. Don’t be silly, Susan dearest,’ says Henry.

‘You must choose between rich cream cake and soda bread,’ says Susan.

Mary leans forward to hear his answer. She holds her breath.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, dearest. It was a mistake such as many better man than me have also on occasion made. You must forgive me. I command you to find forgiveness. I am only human,’ says Henry.

‘I have heard about such servants! The other colonial wives have spoken of these creatures!’ says Susan. ‘You are shaming me and have no respect for the sacred promise of our marriage. You are a colonial joke. Everyone is laughing at you – behind your back – at your lack of Christian fidelity or conscience as you preach your pious sermons on the Sabbath. Look at you now, damaged by a violent savage and yet you dare to defy me and you let her stay.’

(Pages 178–179)

Clearly both these people are unhinged. Yet they have life-and-death power over Mary and her daughter.

It’s exhilarating to have stories of early settlement told from a strong, unapologetic Aboriginal point of view that makes no attempt to humanise the invaders.

This is an unsettling book, not only because of its content. Very unsettling for me as a white, middle-class man who has worked for decades as a copy-editor, is a kind of knockabout quality to the text, something that I took at first to be poor proofreading but which is so pervasive that it has become a feature rather than a bug. In these sad times when publishing companies don’t generally have in-house copy editors, it’s a rare book that has no typos, but this is at a whole other level.

There are moments, like this from page 110, that are impossible to visualise:

Mary sips the tea and smiles with her hands pressed between her thighs.

There are malapropisms – some Aboriginal people are to be punished for their ‘trepidations against settler families’. A tribe in the north-east of Sydney is called the ‘Awakabal’, twice, which is surely a misspelling of ‘Awabakal’. A character is described as Bungaree’s grand-daughter and on the same page as the sister of Bungaree’s son.

I don’t think these errors are deliberate, but whether they survive to the published text through lack of resource or failure of editorial attention they amount to a kind of nose-thumbing. I think of that Audre Lorde quote: ‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.’ Benevolence uses the colonisers’ tool, the novel, to respond to a ‘wonderful book’ that has erased a people’s survival. There’s a kind of rough justice in that tool being treated with disrespect.

After the meeting: We met in person for the first time in months. At least seven of us were there in person – even making a little physical contact. An eighth had been about to leave his home when a friend and recent contact called to say she was feeling sick, so he did the ‘abundance of caution’ thing and joined us on a screen for as much as he could stand.

It was good to eat together. It was so good to be in a room with other bodies, where cross-currents of conversation were allowed to flow (though that was hard on the virtual participant). Somehow, I think, being physically together made it easier to talk about this book – about the roughness of much of the writing, and the shameful sense most of us shared of having light shone on our ignorance about the realities of colonisation.

Others were – of course – less disturbed than I had been by the typos etcetera. I had hoped someone might have seen Julie Janson’s plays at Belvoir Street, but no one had. Someone mentioned Kim Scott’s books, That Deadman Dance and Taboo (links to my blog posts) as covering similar territory, brilliantly. A couple of guy had gone in search of historical information, and reminded the rest of us that Samuel Marsden, presumably the inspiration of the novel’s Reverend Masters, was on record as perpetrating hideous atrocities. We generally acknowledged the heartbreaking difficulty of the task Julie Janson had taken on: to draw on scholarly historical works and stories passed down by generations of survivors, to imagine herself into the life of one person in those terrible times. The general sense was that, for all its flaws, we were glad to have read the book. The Chooser, who was absent because of a non-Covid infection, was thanked in his absence.

And of course, we shared our responses to whatever the President of the United States had done (it was last night and he’s said so much since then!), to the Premier of New South Wales’s self-inflicted damage, to some recondite celebrity gossip (did you know about Bug Beats, a children’s show on Netflix, that has permission to use a whole slew of Beatles songs), to the adventures of some of our offspring, etc. We took a moment to honour the achievement of Victorians in bringing the infection numbers down. The potatoes that our host had put in the oven some time before we all arrived were ready to eat soon after we all left. He sent us a photo on WhatsApp.

Benevolence is the 17th book I’ve read for the 2020 Australian Women Writers Challenge.

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The Book Group and Cassandra Pybus’s Truganini

Posted on 8 September 2020 | 7 comments

Cassandra Pybus, Truganini: Journey through the apocalypse (Allen & Unwin 2019)

Before the meeting: It was my turn to choose the book. I was tossing up between Truganini, about which I’d heard a terrific podcast from the Sydney Writers’ Festival (here’s a link to my blog post), and See what You Made Me Do, the Stella Prize winner. When I put it to the group there was an overwhelming preference for Truganini’s journey through the apocalypse over Jess Hill’s exploration of abusive men. If we thought this would be less gruelling we were probably wrong.

Truganini is known to non-Indigenous Australian popular history as ‘the last Tasmanian’. That’s rubbish of course. There are still many Indigenous Tasmanians alive and kicking. But Truganini’s life is better documented than any of the survivors of genocide in Tasmania, and she has become, as Cassandra Pybus says in her Preface, ‘an international icon for extinction’. The mythologising began almost as soon as she died, and she has been seen ‘through the prism of colonial imperative: a rueful backward glance at the last tragic victim of an inexorable historical process’. In this book, Pybus sets out ‘to redirect the lens to find the woman behind the myth’.

Pybus’s main historical source is the writings of George Augustus Robinson. To quote the Preface again, ‘Truganini and her companions are only available to us through the gaze of pompous, partisan, acquisitive, self-aggrandising men who controlled and directed the context of what they described’. I’m grateful that Cassandra Pybus did the hard yakka of extracting a story line from such sources, reading them so we don’t have to.

In the 1820s, the Aboriginal clans of south-east Tasmania (Van Diemens Land as it then was, lutruwita before that) were all but wiped out by massacre and disease. Truganini belonged to the Nuenonne clan, whose country included Bruny Island. When George Augustus Robinson, fired by missionary fervour and ambition to be seen as a man of significance, set out to rescue the surviving First Nations people from the violence of the colony, Truganini, her father and some friends accepted his protection and became his guides and later his agents in persuading people from other clans to come under his protection.

For five years the band trudged through forests, over mountains, across streams. Truganini had terribly swollen legs, possibly as a result of syphilis she had contracted from sealers who had abducted her early in life, but she was an adept diver for seafood, and she and the other women in the group were the only ones who could swim, so were often called on to pull rafts across icy rivers. For the most part, Pybus tells the story straight without commenting, for instance, on the moral dilemmas involved in persuading resisting warriors to surrender to Robinson rather than face deadly violence elsewhere, as at the hands of John Batman, who emerges from these pages as a ruthless, brutal slaver.

The result of all these rounding-up missions is that, whatever promises Robinson might have made, people were sent to virtual island prisons, mainly on Flinders Island in the Bass Strait, where the death toll were horrifying. what started out as a ‘friendly mission’ became the coup de grâce of a genocidal program.

After being taken to Port Phillip on the mainland where Robinson hoped they might again play an intermediary role, Truganini and her companions were conclusively dumped by Robinson. He simply turned away from them and never mentioned them in his journals again.

Truganini and her companionos, including a husband and a close woman friend, were settled in Oyster Cover on the east coast of Tasmania, from where they would go on hunting excursions to Bruny Island and elsewhere. One by one, her companions died. With extraordinary restraint, Pybus simply tells us that their deaths were unrecorded. She doesn’t have to spell out the callous disregard of the colonial establishment. Truganini, the sole survivor, spent her last years in the care of John Dandridge and his wife (unnamed) in Hobart. Dandridge would take her across to Bruny Island, so that she could still walk in her own country. To the end, she cared for country, and slept on the floor rather than the coloniser’s bed.

For all the horrors that were inflicted on this extraordinary woman and her people, the one that comes across with most poignancy in this narrative comes right at the end. As people die, the scientific establishment waits like vultures for their skeletons. Graves are dug up, newly dead bodies are decapitated, collections of skulls are sent to England. Truganini expressed her terror at having this done to her own remains, and asked Dandridge to scatter her ashes in the channel between Bruny Island and the main island of Tasmania. But he died before her. Her body was buried, dug up and later exhibited in the Tasmanian Museum – until 1947! After a long legal battle by Tasmanian Aborigines, the museum allowed the skeleton to be cremated, and her ashes were scattered according to her wishes on 30 April 1976, a few days short of the centenary of her death.

And then there are the illustrations. Truganini, her warrior husband Wooredy, the great leader Mannalargenna and others challenge our gaze in portraits painted by Thomas Bock in 1835. There are photographs too, perhaps taken with ethnographic intentions, but when Truganini looks at you from a photo taken by Charles Woolley in 1866 (here’s a link), she isn’t offering herself as an object. At the Sydney Writers’ Festival, Jakelin Troy said, referring to the fact that Truganini walked about Bruny Island in old age:

I’m sure she was making the point that this was still her country and that she’s there, and even if they didn’t think deeply about the fact that it was her family’s country, I think that in reality you can’t avoid that that’s what it is.

It’s hard to look at Truganini in these portraits and not feel that she’s making a similar point: she is still herself, and even if the photographer, the curators, the scientists, the colonial historians don’t think deeply about the fact, she challenges us to acknowledge that she is a human being. As she tells us in a final chapter, Cassandra Pybus has reasons to take that challenge personally: her ancestor received a grant to part of Truganini’s country, and in her childhood she heard stories of the old Aboriginal woman who walked about the family’s property. This book is a powerful, humble and devastating response to the challenge.

After the meeting: We’re still meeting on zoom, probably not for the last time. This book generated a very interesting discussion among us white middle-aged and older men. Some were less enthusiastic about it than others. The negatives first.

One man had studied George Augustus Robinson on the 1980s, particularly the collection of his papers published in 1966, The Friendly Mission. He had approached this book with high hopes, but found that it didn’t add much by way of new perspectives or insights – despite its intention of focusing on Truganini, it largely stayed with Robinson.

Another, who read this just after Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light (my blog post here), was disappointed that neither Truganini nor Robinson, or really any of the other characters, emerged as fully rounded characters. There was precious little exploration of motivations or emotional responses. Maybe, he said, you can’t expect that of history: this might be excellent history but it’s not much chop as literature.

Someone who agreed with that latter point said that the question for him was, if that is so, then how come the book held his attention the whole time, when he usually gave up on history books after 15 pages? Someone said that the subject commands our attention, as this is a story that cuts through to our souls as settler Australians. I think that’s true, but I also think the book is well written, and the failure to flesh out the characters is a strength: Pybus doesn’t speculate or invent, but largely leaves us to join the dots. As someone said, it’s fairly clear that for Truganini and her companions, Robinson’s offer of protection was their best bet for survival.

Challenging the notion that the writing was generally flat and factual, someone read a short passage about Truganini’s father, Manganerer, who had encountered convict mutineers:

These men abducted his wife and sailed away with her to New Zealand, then on to Japan and China. Hastily constructing a sturdy ocean-going canoe, Manganerer had attempted to follow them but had been blown far out into the Southern Ocean. His son had died and he himself was half dead from dehydration when he was found by a whaling ship.

The tragedy was almost too much for this proud man to bear. He had endured the murder of his first wife and the abduction of his two older daughters by the intruders, and now they had taken his second wife. His only son was dead and his remaining daughter had abandoned him for the whaling station. His distress was compounded when he discovered that in his absence almost all of his clan had succumbed to disease, as had all but one of the people visiting from Port Davey, who were under his protection.

There was a moment’s silence on the zoom space. With such a litany of horrors – and this is early in the book, the worst devastation comes towards the end – there’s not a lot of need for further authorial commentary.

One man took up the cudgels on Robinson’s behalf. He said he felt protective of him. Yes, he took on the role of ‘Protector of Aborigines’ out of a kind of opportunism, and yes, his ventures finished off the ‘extirpation’ that the notorious Black Line failed to achieve. But he had a huge inner struggle. At some level he recognised and respected the humanity and the cultural strength of the people in his care (there are scenes in the book where he eats and sings and dances with them). But he was blinded by his belief system and could only at rare moments acknowledge what he was actually doing. And – I think I’m quoting correctly – isn’t that blindness something that we all have?

I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration that the book had us staring into the abyss of our nation’s foundation story. Today, someone is offering to send us all bumper stickers in support of the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

Truganini is the 14th book I’ve read for the 2020 Australian Women Writers Challenge.

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