Abstract
In May 2001, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people met at Risdon Cove on the banks of the Derwent River in Hobart as part of National Sorry Day commemorations (Figure 26). The event was organized by various reconciliation and church groups, and attended also by school children. As Aboriginal Elder Aunt Brenda Hodge recalls, there were nearly 150 people present at the commemoration. ‘We all walked together through the pyramid structure on the site, and everyone was given a piece of black twine and white twine to represent black and white people coming together. We then walked slowly over a bridge together and up to the slope where the violence had occurred. We then came back to form a large reconciliation circle.’1
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Notes
Various accounts exist of the number of Oyster Bay people killed, and this continues to be debated. In Collins’s despatch to Governor King in Sydney on 15 May, he wrote that three Aboriginal people had been killed. Later, alter an enquiry, some testified that five or six had been killed, while a following report stated that 40 or 50 Aboriginal people were killed. See Lyndall Ryan, ‘Risdon Cove and the Massacre of 3 May 1804: Their Place in Tasmanian History’, Tasmanian Historical Studies 9 (2004): 107–3.
See Ann Curthoys, ‘Genocide in Tasmania: The History of an Idea’, in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, ed. Dirk Moses (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010), 229–52;
Tony Barta, ‘Relations of Genocide: Land and Lives in the Colonization of Australia’, in Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death, ed. Isidor Wallimann and Michael N. Dobkowski (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987), 237–51;
Henry Reynolds, An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia’s History (Melbourne: Viking, 2001);
John Docker, ‘A Plethora of Intentions: Genocide, Settler Colonialism and Historical Consciousness in Australia and Britain’, The International Journal of Human Rights 19.1 (2015): 74–89.
Tom Lawson, The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), xviii.
Lyndall Ryan, ‘The Black Line in Van Diemen’s Land: Success or Failure?’, Journal of Australian Studies 37.1 (2013): 3–18.
See Eleanor Bright Fleming, ‘When Sorry is Enough: The Possibility of a National Apology for Slavery’, in The Age of Apology: Facing Up to the Past, ed. Mark Gibney (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 102;
Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (Sydney: HREOC, 1997), https://www.humanrights.gov.au/publications/bringing-them-home-appendix-9-recommendations.
HREOC, ‘Appendix 3: Text of Sorry Day Statement’, in Social Justice Report (Sydney: HREOC, 1999), https://www.humanrights.gov.au/publications/social-justice-report-1998-appendix-3-text-sorry-day-statement.
Damien Short, Reconciliation and Colonial Power: Indigenous Rights in Australia, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 115–16.
Peter Read, ‘Reconciliation without History: State Crime and State Punishment in Chile and Australia’, in Passionate Histories: Myth, Memory and Indigenous Australia, ed. Frances Peters-Little, Ann Curthoys and John Docker (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2010).
Heidi Norman, ‘An Examination of the Limitations of Reconciliation as a Framework for Aboriginal Social Policy Development’, Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues 5.2 (2002): 10–17. Also cited in Read, ‘Reconciliation without History’.
Michael Mullins, ‘Paul Keating and Sorry Day’s Indulgence with a Purpose’, Eureka Street 23.10 (2013): 20–1.
Alison Alexander, ‘Aboriginal Land Rights’, in The Companion to Tasmanian History, ed. Alison Alexander, 2006, http://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/A/Aboriginal%201and%20rights.htm. Parcels of land returned included those in Risdon Cove, site of the 1804 massacre, and Oyster Cove, to which the 47 surviving Aborigines of the failed Wybalenna settlement in Flinders Island were transferred in 1847. The Act passed ownership and management of the lands to the Aboriginal Land Council.
Annalise Acorn, Compulsory Compassion: A Critique of Restorative Justice (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004).
Acorn, paraphrased in John Braithwaite, ‘Narrative and “Compulsory Compassion”’, Law & Social Inquiry 31.2 (2006): 425.
Roxana Waterson, ‘Reconciliation as Ritual: Comparative Perspectives on Innovation and Performance in Processes of Reconciliation’, Humanities Research 15.3 (2009): 27–47.
Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 2014), 1–24;
Pauline Wakeham, ‘Reconciling “Terror”: Managing Indigenous Resistance in the Age of Apology’, American Indian Quarterly 36.1 (2012): 12.
Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (New York: Routledge, 2000), 167, 168.
Carole Pateman and Charles W. Mills, Contract and Domination (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 35–78.
Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines: A History since 1803 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2012), 14;
Norman James Brian Plomley, The Aboriginal/Settler Clash in Van Diemen’s Land, 1803–1831 (Hobart: Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in association with the Centre for Tasmanian Historical Studies, University of Tasmania, 1992), 10.
John Connor, ‘British Frontier Warfare Logistics and the “Black Line”, Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), 1830’, War in History 9.2 (2002): 146;
Vivienne Rae-Ellis, Black Robinson, Protector of the Aborigines (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1988), 21.
Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, 87–105; Henry Reynolds, Fate of a Free People: The Classic Account of the Tasmanian Wars (Melbourne: Penguin, 2004).
Penelope Edmonds, ‘“Failing in Every Endeavour to Conciliate”: Governor Arthur’s Proclamation Boards to the Aborigines, Australian Conciliation Narratives and their Transnational Connections’, Journal of Australian Studies 35.2 (2011): 201–18.
See also Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds, ‘Indigenous and Settler Relations’, in The Cambridge History of Australia, vol. 2, ed. Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 342–66.
For example, in the early colony of New South Wales, Governor Phillip was so desperate to effect communication with local Aboriginal people around the Sydney Cove area that in 1788 he ordered the kidnap of the Aboriginal man Arabanoo, who later died of smallpox. A year later Governor Macquarie’s military captured the Aboriginal men Bennelong and Colbey in an effort to exchange languages with them. Rob Amery and Peter Mülhäusler, ‘Pidgin English in New South Wales’, in Atlas of Languages of Intercultural Communication in the Pacific, Asia and the Americas, ed. Stephen A. Wurm, Peter Mülhäusler and Darrell T. Tryon (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1996), 33–4.
Joan Kerr, ‘Early Effort — Art in Australia’, in Tasmanian Insights: Essays in Honour of Geoffrey Thomas Stilwell, ed. Gillian Winter (Hobart: State Library of Tasmania, 1992), 104.
Desmond Manderson, ‘Not Yet: Aboriginal People and the Deferral of the Rule of Law’, Arena Journal 29/30 (2008): 219–72.
By the 1820s and 1830s a distinction between free and convict was increasingly called for as penal settlements became colonial societies. As Margaret Maynard notes, in 1826 Governor Arthur instituted seven classes of male prisoner in Van Diemen’s Land. Traditionally, in Europe, blue signified the working classes, while yellow was the ‘colour of disgrace’. Rough yellow cloth ‘became synonymous with Australian convicts in the 1820s and 1830s’. Combinations of blue or grey jackets and yellow trousers thus signified convictism. See Margaret Maynard, Fashioned from Penury: Dress as Cultural Practice in Colonial Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 20–1.
Norman James Brian Plomley ed., Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829–1834 (Hobart: Tasmanian Historical Research Association, 1966).
Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2006), 114.
See Connor, ‘British Frontier Warfare Logistics’, 151–2. Connor cites Scott’s annotation on Letter from Gilbert Robertson, Chief Constable, Richmond, to Scott, 19 October 1830, SLNSW ML A1055, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney. Frankland’s field plan is held in the State Library of Tasmania. See George Frankland, Military Operations against the Aboriginal Inhabitants of Van Diemen’s Land No. 9, Field Plan of Movements of the Military (Hobart: Tasmanian Historical Research Association, 1971).
Ida West, Pride against Prejudice: Reminiscences of a Tasmanian Aborigine (Hobart: Montpelier Press, 2004); ‘Aunty Ida West: Tasmanian Aboriginal Elder’, Splash, ABC, 1 November 1995, http://splash.abc.net.au/home#!/media/153584/aunty-ida-west-tasmanian-aboriginal-elder-1995.
Katrina Schlunke, ‘More than Memory: Performing Place and Postcoloniality at the Myall Creek Massacre Memorial’, in Unstable Ground: Performance and the Politics of Place, ed. Gay McAuley (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2006), 182, 183.
Polly O. Walker, ‘Creating a New Story: Ritual, Ceremony and Conflict Transformation between Indigenous and Settler Peoples’, in Acting Together: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict. Volume 1: Resistance and Reconciliation in Regions of Violence, ed. Cynthia E. Cohen, Roberto Gutierrez Varea and Polly O. Walker (Oakland: New Village Press, 2011), 225, 240.
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© 2016 Penelope Edmonds
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Edmonds, P. (2016). ‘Our history is not the last word’: Sorry Day at Risdon Cove and ‘Black Line’ Survival Ceremony, Tasmania. In: Settler Colonialism and (Re)conciliation. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137304544_5
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