K Harman

‘Impossible to detain … without chains’? The use of restraints on Aboriginal people in policing and prisons

The use of restraints on Australian Aboriginal people had its inception in the early colonial period and continued well into the twentieth century. Despite condemnation in England, local opinion as to the desirability and efficacy of this practice was divided. This article explores the materiality of these restraints. It argues that chaining Aboriginal people was predicated not only on their presenting a bigger ‘flight risk’ than other prisoners, but that wider economic considerations provide an explanatory framework for understanding the delay between the denunciation of chaining practices and their eventual discontinuation. This article has been peer-reviewed.

Protecting Tasmanian Aborigines: American and Queensland Influences on the Cape Barren Island Reserve Act, 1912

Early twentieth-century Tasmanian discourses about racial difference reflected trans-imperial connections between England, its colonies, and the United States. This globalised discourse and ideological interconnectedness in turn produced recognisably and intentionally similar policies, although historians bounded by the interests of later nation-states have tended to overlook this. Tasmanias Cape Barren Island Reserve Act 1912 exemplifies how a particular colonys ideology and policy, while attuned to local conditions and particularities, was nonetheless a product of an international framework for regulating the colonised. This legislation was demonstrably modelled on Aboriginal protection legislation passed in the Australian state of Queensland in 1897 and has significant commonalities with the Dawes Act passed in the United States in 1887 to provide for the subdivision of Indian reservations. In Australian historiography, the fact that Tasmania had an Aboriginal reserve and enacted Aboriginal protection legislation has been under-appreciated and even denied. This article redresses these omissions. It also contributes towards redressing the myopic focus on nation and/or colony that has, until recent years, left Australian historiography devoid of a full appreciation of colonial dependence on, and contributions to, a global discourse of race.

Inventing a colonial dark tourism site: The Derby boab 'prison tree'

A large hollow boab known as the “prison tree” just outside the small town of Derby in Western Australia is a major tourist attraction, visited by thousands of people annually. It is represented as a historic site, where Aboriginal people were incarcerated for opposing “heroic” European pastoralists attempting to found a modern Australia. To understand the “prison tree”, it is vital to comprehend the impact on the Aboriginal traditional owners of the expansion of pastoralism to the Kimberley region in the 1880s and 1890s. Within European concepts of exclusive use of land, Aboriginal people were driven from their lands, forced to work on the newly established stations, incarcerated or killed Aboriginal people resisted pastoral settlement by burning pastures and livestock and by making spearheads of glass and iron to fight police and pastoralists.

Into the Heart of Tasmania: A Search for Human Antiquity

The intriguing image of an early twentieth-century English gentleman bicycling around Tasmania with his tent to collect Aboriginal stone tools and interview descendants of the island’s first people will likely capture readers’ imaginations.

Other picture boards in Van Diemen’s Land: The recovery of lost illustrations of frontier violence and relationships

Art history is replete with works whose prior existence is affirmed only by text, most commonly through titles and descriptions in catalogues, but also by passing mentions in other sources. A significant Australian colonial illustration of this phenomenon of textually surviving lost art concerns ‘Several Paintings on Panel’, described in detail by a colonial witness, which depict scenes intended to convey government messages to Indigenous Tasmanians during the Vandemonian War. These descriptions do not match the better known and frequently reproduced Tasmanian Picture Boards, typified in Figure 1, which survive in several archives around the world and have been the subject of considerable study and commentary. Their iconographical recovery is, we argue, an important correction to the imagery of frontier relations in 1820s and 1830s Van Diemen’s Land specifically and colonial Australia more generally.

Tangata Whenua: An Illustrated History

vexed question of frontier massacre in the Black War, but in contrary fashion, where they rely on their own research on Aborigines in north-west Tasmania, they attempt to make a case for genocide by the Van Diemen’s Land Company without defining what it means and how it was carried out. In the case of G. A. Robinson, they simply ignore all other recent assessments of the man to uncritically accept Rae-Ellis’ view in 1988, that he was selfserving, which in turn leads them to make the false claim that his Europeanising the names of Aboriginal survivors on Flinders Island was based on slavery discourse even though they acknowledge that he was an ardent abolitionist. These examples attest to the simplistic approach the authors apply to the debates. Nor, in promoting the book as an ‘Aboriginal history’, do they attempt to explain their preferred use of outdated terms like ‘Aboriginal people’ or ‘Tasmanians’ in the text, rather than ‘Tasmanian Aborigines’ which is the official term used by the Tasmanian Aboriginal community today. Nor do they account for the virtual absence of Aborigines as historical actors. For example they simply overlook the vital roles played by leading warrior chiefs from western Tasmania such as Heedeek and Wymurrah in contesting the forced removal from their ‘homelands’ even though this important story is the only part of the book that is based on their original research. Nor do they consider Aboriginal women such as Tarenootairrer and Walyer as political activists and they disparage Indigenous historians such as Patsy Cameron for her allegedly romanticised account of the origins of the Islander community in the nineteenth century and Greg Lehman for daring to argue that the Risdon Covemassacre is a major event in Tasmanian history. In shutting down key debates and largely dismissing Aboriginal activism and the work of Indigenous historians, and in failing to engage with recent contributions from leading non-Indigenous historians, the authors have left themselves open to the charge of producing what could best be described as an archaic history of Aboriginal Tasmania. I expected far more from the book than it delivers.

Lives twisted out of shape! Tasmanian Aboriginal soldiers and the aftermath of the First World War

In this article we consider how Tasmanian soldiers of Aboriginal descent experienced the aftermath of the First World War, drawing on and supplementing several case studies from a wider body of research Andrea Gerrard has undertaken into the recruitment and front line experiences of these men. Our particular focus here is to examine how the Repatriation (hereafter ‘the Repat’) Commission responded to these men post-war.1 War changed these men both physically and mentally; literally their lives were twisted out of shape in ways that would have been unimaginable when they initially volunteered. We are particularly interested in interrogating whether the Tasmanian servicemen of Aboriginal descent and their families received treatment equal to that being meted out to other Tasmanian returned servicemen. We unsettle notions that returned Aboriginal servicemen continued to suffer significant discrimination with regard to repatriation benefits in post-war Tasmania, while acknowledging that their particular circumstances may have made the requisite application process more difficult than it was for other Tasmanian returned servicemen. As the Repat records have only recently been made available to researchers, it remains to be seen whether such experiences were distinctly Tasmanian or were emulated across mainland Australia