Z is for Zed . . .

Z is for Zed, the last letter of the alphabet, the end of the A-Z Blogging Challenge, my 24-entry excursion into aspects of the history of Van Diemen's Land.

So today, I end with the beginning. The First Australians.

http://www.programs.sbs.com.au/firstaustralians/content/

This online video overview, hosted by Australian broadcasting company SBS, in 4-5 minute clips, introduces the longer seven 54-minute segments that took six years to create. The entire series traces the journey the first Australians have taken -- from migration and isolation from 'mainland' Australia (a time leap of some 70,000 years), to the first interactions with European explorers, from the 16th through the 21st Centuries, and ending with the great awakenings of self-awareness and the fight for political and legal recognition with very real land rights.

Two impressions stand out for me from this lovely overview. The first, a clumsy painting (most likely water color) that shows early aborigines dancing corroboree with English troops within a few days of the landing of the First Fleet in 1789. An early report says on first sight of the English led by Governor Arthur Phillip, the aborigines "danced furiously" and then vanished into the woods.

The second is harder to put into words. The faces of the descendants of these First Australians carry a sense of pride and sadness, commitment to change, sorrow for what had been lost. For the aborigines did not understand European concepts of land. To these First Australians, land was never something to be occupied and tamed. They were a part of the land, a gift from the ancient ancestors; they were the owners of the land, charged to care for it and protect it. Water holes were sacred. The geography was shaped by these ancient ones, and from father to son, certain responsibilities were transferred.  How could such a responsibility be taken away by the planting of a flag of a foreign king? The land was already occupied by these people and their traditions.

So as I continue to work on Years of Stone, even though essentially the story is not about them, somehow I want to capture some sense of their inner life, and in the 1840s the sense of cultural loss and displacement, the great divide that then existed between convicts, settlers, the government, and the First Australians.

NOTE: The complete "First Australians" is available online (in seven 54-minute segments) at http://www.sbs.com.au/firstaustralians/ or in book form through amazon. Wikipedia lists a brief description of each segment. If I lived in Australia or Tasmania, I would be haunting the library. Here in the wilds of eastern Washington, such research materials are scarce, so I am very grateful for online research and that this video program has been posted. If I had not written of this video today, I would not have learned the longer version is online! This means Z is for Zed, the end, but in reality, my research continues . . . as does the writing!

M is for Mathinna . . .

Today's entry for A-Z Blogging is short for I'm going on an all-day quilting road trip.

Anyone who has seen Thomas Bock's painting of this little aboriginal girl (1842) has been drawn into the story of her short life (1835-1852). In summary, Mathinna was born after the Black Line, that abortive effort by the Government in 1830 to remove all aboriginals from the island of Tasmania by force to Wybalenna on Flinders Island, under the auspices of Reverend Robinson.

When the new Lieutenant-Governor John Franklin and his wife, Lady Jane Franklin, visited Wybalenna in 1838, they (or rather Jane) was entranced by a little girl of 2 or 3 named Mary. They adopted her a year later, renamed her Mathinna, and took her to the formality of life in Government House. From unfettered time and surrounded by her own culture, this little girl now must wear shoes, learn to read and write, and generally adhere to Victorian rules of comportment.

Mathinna, in her own way, rebelled. She ran up and down the halls of Government House, often accompanied by her monkey (which, I imagine, terrorized the household). She refused to wear shoes. She danced with abandon at soirees and rode around town in the Franklin's open carriage, always wearing her favorite red dress.

When the Franklins were recalled in 1843, Lady Franklin very nearly had a nervous breakdown. Mathinna, then about 8 years old, was not taken to England, for the Franklin's family doctor advised that Mathinna would most likely die of the very cold climate there. So, Mathinna was taken to the Queen's Orphan School, where lessons, strict rules, and schedules reigned.

Not much is known of her life after the Franklin's left. But in 1852, she was found drunk and drowned in a ditch at the age of 17. Only her portrait remains.

Source of Thomas Bock's painting of Mathinna.

On Aboriginal Tasmania

If only I knew more. My two local libraries scraped up two older books on aboriginal life in Australia, one from 1968 and one from 1969, both recounting tales from mainland Australia, not Tasmania. Internet research revealed some additional useful background, but my characters who come out of this tradition remain hazy. And then I found The Free Library. This searchable database of journals(and much more) revealed a back door into 19th Century Tasmania -- thanks to the work of Greg Lehman, a Tasmanian academic publishing in Australian Aboriginal Studies. He highlighted five new books. I list them here for the sheer pleasure of having found them, at least on line (next stop amazon and/or interlibrary loan):

• Ian McFarlane, Beyond Awakening: The Aboriginal Tribes of Northwest Tasmania, A History (2008).
• Graeme Calder, Levee, Line and Martial Law: A History of the Dispossession of the Mairremmener People of Van Diemen's Land, 1803-1832 (2010).
• Patsy Cameron, Grease and Ochre: The Blending of Two Cultures at the Colonia Sea Frontier(2011).
• Robert Cox,Baptised in Blood: The Shocking Secret History of Sorell(2010) and Steps to the Scaffold: The Untold Story of Tasmania's Black Bushrangers(2004).

I want all of my characters to be authentic. My intuition has created placeholders, perhaps a half-dream of what the lives of aboriginal Tasmanians in mid-19th Century were like: some half-breed, some living between bush and town, some destroyed by rum, some hired or brought over from Victoria by the police as 'blacktrackers', some quietly assimilated, some moved out of 'settled districts' in that failed ethnic cleansing of the Black Line, some moved to Wybalenna, some clapped into orphanages, abandoned by both father and mother, caught between two very different cultures. I don't believe they were wiped out; I don't believe Trugernanner was the last Palawa (Tasmanian aboriginal). At least the books will give me a start on moving away from stereotype. I hope.