The Tasmanian Aborigine

In doing research for my presentation I came across a subset of the dearth of material there is out there on Tasmanian Aborigines, seeing that most of their original cultural knowledge is now lost. This was somewhat disappointing, as I wanted to see and understand Tasmanian Aborigine culture in connection with indigenous issues in general, an issue especially pertinent to me as my best friend from back home is over 20% Native Hawaiian.

The tragedy of the destruction of Native Tasmanian culture is of course great and must not be lessened, but I do not want to write about the tragedy here. What I do want to write about is the interesting side-effects of a history, the plot twists, that I have come upon in my search.

Most people assumed the native Tasmanians to be completely extinct since 1876. For example, H.G. Wells even wrote in The War of the Worlds that "The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years." Issues regarding Tasmanian natives, because they are now a thing of the past, consequently became a non-issue for the Tasmanian government, and any understanding of the Tasmanian native at all disappeared until activism in the second half of the 20th century established that the aborigine line had indeed lived on in some forms.

This is that plot twist. It took many people by surprise, because it disrupted the already long established fact that the Tasmanian native had died out. These survivors were mostly descendants of Aborigine women kidnapped or bought from aborigine tribes and white sealers, who were taken to the remote Bass Straight Islands off the Tasmanian coast. The first Bass Straight Tasmanian natives learened to fish and to shipbuild and generally assimilated into a white culture, although it has been noted that they've always held an awareness of their aborigine origin.

These descendants of Tasmanian aborigines, who are mostly indistinguishable from Tasmanians of European descent, are conscious of their status and have organized politically. However, it is here that things get fuzzy. One organization acknowledges aborigine status only for those who can document ancestry through the Bass Straight Islands, another vocally opposes this selection. Now it is harder and harder to tell. The article in the Guardian, which I read for this topic, states that "the number of those choosing to tick the box in the census asking if you are an Aborigine has ballooned in the past two decades, from 2,700 in 1981, to 16,000 in 2001." For every person of the 1,100 who applied to be recognized as an aborigine in one organization, there is are least two objections per person- father objected to son's application, cousins objected to cousins. Yet certainly in that pool of 1,100 applicants- remember, they mostly look white- there are sure to be some genuine descendents of native Tasmaninans. It's just not so easy to know who they are.

So from this survival of the native Tasmanian on the fringes of history, we get interesting current issues about aborigine identity. This non-linear and surprising story, and leaves us wondering many things. What did I learn from this? That people self-identify in many ways. Those who joined the aborigine organization chose to identify as aborigine and in some degree with aborigine culture, though they were mostly white. I liked this line in the article, which was helpful in understanding this complex issue. "Could it be that the need to be one thing denies the many things we come from, and the many things we are constantly becoming? Could it be that in the merge of Aborigine and convict cultures that occurred in Tasmania something else came into being, neither European nor Aborigine, but something different in its own terms? "

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/oct/14/australia.features11

-Zheng Ma  Jan 6