Eva Bischoff

Bear or Gardener? Writing Vandemonian History from the Perspective of Power

In “The Bear and the Gardener,” Jean de la Fontaine tells the story of a gardener who befriended a bear. The ursine stood watch to protect his friend’s sleep. When a fly threatened to settle on the gardener’s face, the bear tried to chase it away. When his first attempts failed, he seized a stone and crushed it – and with it his mate’s face. The story leaves the reader wondering what the gardener was thinking in befriending a bear in the first place and simultaneously cringing at the bear’s decision to use brute force to solve such a delicate problem. Reading Nicholas Brodie’s study on the Vandemonian War evokes a similar sense of surprise and apprehension. Brodie retells the story of the extermination and displacement of the Aboriginal Tasmanians in the wake of British settlement in 1803–04, focusing on the period between April 1828 and October 1831. He delves into the administrative records of Lieutenant Governor George Arthur, held by the Tasmanian Record Office in Hobart, and follows the inand outgoing paper trail connected to what the administration saw as “Aboriginal affairs.” So far, no author has inspected these records as meticulously as Brodie does in his description of the Vandemonian War. As such, his detailed account can be considered an achievement in its own right. However, contrary to Brodie’s boastful claims (2), many other scholars, who combined them with other primary material, have examined these records. In addition, Aboriginal artist, writer, and curator Julie Gough started a transcription project in 2012 that aims at opening up the government’s records to the public. Unlike Brodie’s study, her website, “Black War ∼ Van Diemen’s Land CSO 7578,” adopts a longer perspective (1824–36) and complements the Tasmanian material with additional archival sources (newspapers, governmental records of other origin). Similarly, the history of the Tasmanian genocide is far from “deliberately hidden” in some kind of “archival darkness” (4). During the so-called “history wars,” the fate of the Tasmanian clans stood at the centre of political and historiographical debates. It has been the topic of

Experiences, actors, spaces: dimensions of settler colonialism in transnational perspective

Historians, according to Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, are either truffle hunters or parachutists. The former concentrate on detail, dig industriously through documents, and build their arguments on a s...

Arms & amelioration: negotiating Quaker peace testimony and settler violence in 1830s Van Diemen's Land

ABSTRACT Members of the Religious Society of Friends had been among white settlers from the beginning of the colonial project in Australia. As such, voluntarily or involuntarily, their everyday actions contributed to the network of practices which slowly but continuously displaced and annihilated Indigenous communities. Simultaneously, early-nineteenth-century Quakers were members of a community characterized by pacifism and the activism of its members in transnational humanitarian efforts, namely the abolitionist and the prison reform movements. This chapter focusses on how Quaker settlers negotiated universal humanitarian ideals on the one hand and their local involvement in settlement politics on the other. In form of a case study, it investigates the daily life and experiences of one Quaker family, that of Francis Cotton and his wife Anna Maria, during the early 1830s in colonial Tasmania (Van Diemens Land). It draws on the familys private letters and journals, as well as documents of the colonial administration to explore this particular dimension of Quaker settler life. It is the aim of this essay to find an answer to one core question: How did the Cottons, considering Quaker peace testimony and the Societys collective memory of its North American history of collaborative relationships with Indigenous peoples, negotiate the violence of the Tasmanian frontier?

Deutscher Kolonialismus – Fragmente seiner Geschichte und Gegenwart/German Colonialism – Fragments Past and Present

Deutscher Kolonialismus – Fragmente seiner Geschichte und Gegenwart/ German Colonialism – Fragments Past and Present, Heike Hartmann and Sebastian Gottschalk, curators, in collaboration with curators-in-residence Manase Msuy (Tanzania) and Memory Biwa (Namibia), Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin/German Historical Museum Berlin, 14 October 2016–14 May 2017, admission free up to 18 years, 8 Euros, reduced 4 Euros.