Frontier of space, frontier of mind: The British invasion of Loonwonnylowe

This dissertation was completed in 2019 and conferred in 2020 at the University of Tasmania under the supervision of Dr Mitchell Rolls (Principal), Professor Stefan Petrow and Professor Hamish Maxwell-Stewart. Additionally, the author wants to acknowledge Dr. Val Ranson for her intellectual support and assistance in the field. It was partly funded by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship. Loonwonnylowe is an hour-glass-shaped island, of 353 km2, lying close off the south-east coast of Tasmania, and now known as Bruny Island. It comprises two bioregions that, with a temperate maritime climate, 250 km of coastline, diverse geology, and hills rising over 500 m, encompass highly variable habitats containing rich suites of natural resources. Over the past 6000 years it was the home of 30 or so Aborigines. The inhabitants maintained close relationships with nearby Tasmanian mainland tribes who lived across a swimmable strait, less than 2 km wide in places. This proximity to the mainland contributed to the rapid obliteration of Loonwonnylowe's inhabitants when, in 1804, British colonists established a permanent settlement, Hobart, just 20 km to the north. British hegemony manifested immediately through wide-scale depredation of the natural resources that were fundamental to the daily existence of Loonwonnylowe's inhabitants. This culminated with the murder, kidnapping, rape, and death of the Aborigines from introduced diseases. Frontiers in Australia, particularly Tasmania, have attracted extensive historical treatments. Nevertheless, modern histories (for example, Clements, 2013) barely acknowledge the invasion of Loonwonnylowe, despite it suffering Tasmania's earliest European incursions. Loonwonnylowe provides a remarkable location for a microhistorical study of the evolution of a frontier due to its contained island nature, allied with a wealth of ethnographic and historical evidence related to its people and their destruction. My thesis interrogates this evidence. Chapter 1 introduces the rationale and methodological approach of the study. As an archaeologist, I am trained to extract the maximum of information from minimal material: to employ, for example, a variety of evidence-based techniques on a single piece of shell, a stone flake, or a fugitive hand-print, in order to tell a coherent story of the past. I have applied the same mindset here to documentary sources. I was influenced by the method of enquiry advocated by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess of asking ever-deeper questions of a particular norm, term, or concept, until the basis for a fundamental understanding is reached (Hay, 2002). I was also influenced by the ideas of logical positivists, promulgated by the 'new archaeology' of the 1960s and 1970s, who sought to use scientific methods to leverage data to promote, refine, and test hypotheses about the past (Binford, 2001). Silberbauer's (1994) recommendation to perform 'rescue anthropology' using ethnohistorical sources in the absence of a traditional forager people to study and question about their past, also resonated with me. Drawing on ethnohistorical sources such as diaries, newspaper accounts, advertising, and shipping news, allows for the emergence of a detailed account of the Aboriginal dispossession. In 1829, the British eventually attempted to 'ameliorate' the desperate condition of the survivors by setting up a village on Loonwonnylowe, in which Aborigines could be inculcated in the ways of agriculture. This Aboriginal Establishment (as it was known) quickly became a mechanism of oppression. It was superintended by a builder-come-missionary, George Augustus Robinson, whose activity generated over 500 manuscript pages (journals, notebooks, letters, lists, memoranda, maps). The thesis provides a close reading of these and other evidentiary sources, drilling down to understand events on the frontier's edge, most especially for the people whose property was forcibly taken and who left no documentation of their own. Chapter 2 'The land of the Stringy Bark People', as Loonwonnylowe was known to other Aborigines, describes the hunter-gatherer landscape of the past. Land is paramount to hunter-gatherer sustenance, underpinning their very survival. The biogeographical diversity of Bruny Island is reflected in a greater variety of terrestrial mammal species than on any other Tasmanian offshore island. The plants and animals that coexist on that land represent food and raw materials for consumption and exchange. The land, and its flora and fauna, simultaneously facilitate and constrain an individual forager's day-to-day existence, their social organisation and their mobility. Food questing was dominant in the forager's mind. Using human behavioural ecology and, particularly, optimal foraging theory (Kelly, 2013), I modelled this pursuit. Questing involved movement and dispersal across the landscape in search of food; procurement of raw materials to make tools to help gather and process food; and transport of food back to camp. At camp, food was prepared for consumption, social relationships forged and maintained to facilitate sharing in times of shortage, and storying of the landscape encoded information to be passed down to the next generation. The chapter goes on to describe terrestrial mammals available on Loonwonnylowe, together with associated human predator behaviour and hunting techniques. The Loonwonnylowe Islanders were, paradoxically, severely constrained by their diet despite the rich resources available. Marsupial meat is lean; consuming too much risked protein-poisoning. The plant foods available may have made a poor dietary contribution on Loonwonnylowe. Acquiring carbohydrate-rich plant foods to counterbalance the lean meat was probably limited to harvesting plant roots, a very labour-intensive occupation for the women. The more-easily-gained macronutrient that would offer an alternative energy source to protein, therefore, was fat, for which the focus turned towards the coast. Chapter 3 'The search for fat' concentrates mainly on coastal foodscapes centring on cetaceans and seals and, to a much lesser extent, avifauna and shellfish. New evidence came to light during this research that the Stringy Bark People scavenged and hunted cetaceans, a major source of fat. George Augustus Robinson wrote that the Loonwonnylowe Aborigines "eat also whale blubber sea hogs porpoise" (Robinson, 1837–1865: Frame 1001, c.f. Frame 1002). This passage, not noted by previous researchers, opens a new dimension in the study and interpretation of the Tasmanian food quest. Consumption of whale, particularly from seasonal strandings, which are common on the island in the present day, is estimated to have had a strong influence on the economy, seasonal movement, and periodic social congregations. Seals and birds, too, were sources of fat, though it is unlikely that the latter were a major component of the Bruny Islanders diet. Swans and mutton-birds have long been thought by historians and archaeologists to be a major food source and a driver for human seasonal movement in Tasmania (Bowdler analysing the needs and behaviour of the indigenous people as they engaged with their estate and 30-odd people struggled against the overwhelming force of the British Empire. I wanted to comprehend and appreciate how the calamitous changes wrought by the invaders might have been experienced by the Tasmanians. Inevitably, the thesis struggled to fully appreciate and represent the horror and resulting anomie the Loonwonnylowe experienced during this time—an experience that still resonates for Aborigines today. Thesis supervisors: Dr Mitchell Rolls (Principal), Professor Stefan Petrow and Professor Hamish Maxwell-Stewart. Dr Val Ranson editing. Open access publishing facilitated by University of Tasmania, as part of the Wiley - University of Tasmania agreement via the Council of Australian University Librarians. This thesis was partly funded by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.