In 2019 at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) my cousin, Trawlwoolway artist Julie Gough, exhibited Tense Past, the first major survey of her practice. In addition to 20 years’ worth of sculpture, video, photography and print, Julie installed a collection of documents and objects she had requested from TMAG and other state government archives. Some of these materials were letters and other written records that represented our shared family history as descendants of the Hearps/Briggs/Johnson line. It was the first time I had seen these documents sharing public space together.
Talking to Julie and revisiting the exhibition several times, I formed a small but profound relationship with these archival materials. I wondered what would happen next to these materials, according to government policy. These narrative vessels told our ancestors’ stories of struggle against the colony’s violent administration. The current government administrators, direct benefactors of the colony, had made these stories virtually inaccessible to the public. That day when Julie walked me through the rooms of the exhibition, many people came up to her, black and white, to share how much they were being affected.
I felt strongly that the conversations the materials’ public display was making possible should continue after the exhibition ended. I didn’t want these stories to go back to being stored behind layers of red tape. I began conceptualising a writing practice as a tool that, through publishing, could bring forth family letters and colonial records of our people in a more public and permanent capacity. I wanted to use writing as a justification and method for smuggling our First Nations’ stories out of the archives and into the creative realm.
I wanted to use writing as a justification and method for smuggling our First Nations’ stories out of the archives and into the creative realm.
I use the term ‘smuggling’ not because I am lifting our Palawa voices in secret or by stealth. Instead, I refer to the act itself: of moving our voices out and away from their violent holding place. When these voices come with me, they enter a new territory, one that hopefully has fewer terrifying neighbours. In letting them breathe, they might take up a life different from the one the colonist’s record and archival practice had dictated.
Julie’s installation practice established my interest in the colonial archive as a container and creative source in and of itself. But it didn’t take long to also understand its presence as an archetypal voice of deficit and extinction discourse.
To search for Aboriginal people in Tasmania’s colonial archives is to encounter a world of fractured narratives and missing pieces. Stringing these stories together is an administration essentially uninterested in the lives of my Aboriginal ancestors, beyond their own perception of deficit, subsequent discipline and elaborate extinction mythology. I don’t want to spend too much time on the extinction mythology; my elders have long critiqued its devastation. But who knows who will pick up this book and read about us Palawa for the first or second time.
Compared to other stories from Palawa history, the myth that, with the passing of Nuenonne woman Truganini in 1876, we as a people also ceased to exist is extremely well known. We have lived for a very long time with this skewed and limited recognition. According to the story of extinction, we were, somehow, a tragic race, doomed by such a great inability to adapt to the modern world that we simply failed to survive. This myth was repeated—actively encouraged—by the colonial administration. It conveniently ignored our many families living after Truganini’s death, on both the main island of Lutruwita and across the Furneaux islands.
This myth was still considered common knowledge 100 years later in the late 1970s. It roamed the Tasmanian schoolyard as I was growing up in the 1990s. It is here in Narrm/Melbourne, on Kulin Country, where I live today. A few years ago, I was visiting an osteopath clinic. On gleaning I was Trawlwoolway, the osteo excitedly exclaimed, ‘Oh, but I thought we wiped all of you out!’, before cracking my back in four places.
In Narrm I am still surprised to find that in conversations with both white and First Nations mainlanders, people often engage with me on a cultural level that is based on a false idea of the past. People impulsively approach my being in proximity to the extinction mythology of Tasmanian Aboriginal people. This myth is pervasive and perverse—people’s minds seem to go to it even when they know they shouldn’t. It’s an odd experience to be constantly on the receiving end of this cognitive dissonance. To be fetishised as subject of these colonial fixations. The narrative tension between the undeniable truth of our enduring reality and that of settler mythology is stark.
The narrative tension between the undeniable truth of our enduring reality and that of settler mythology is stark.
The colonial archives are full of such distractions. It can be a challenge to feel overwhelmed or even roadblocked by the colonial archive’s racism. I remind myself I’m not in the archives looking for further evidence of a history of violence that catches me up to today. Foucault is right that if I read these archives the way the colony intended it, history is little more than a register of my ancestors’ encounters with power. Utterly boring! If I can only expect that flattening render of the past, what joy can I expect from the future? I found the answer inadvertently addressed in one of Julie’s artworks in the Tense Past exhibition.
‘Escape 1 (diptych)’ is two small and identical square frames. The first frame is covered in red wool with difficult to make out bull-kelp words stitched into the centre. In the second, the timber frame is exposed, pinning down a tense canvas of fly wire. Red wool stitching at the centre repeats the same body of text you have to lean close to the art to read. It spells: ‘Early this morn the little native girl which was brought into Hobart Town made her escape out of the window at Wiggins, a Marine, wit whom she livd.’
This small record is taken from the 1804 diary of notorious drunk Reverend Robert Knopwood at the Risdon house of colonists Mr and Mrs Wiggins. The girl in the journal enters as she leaves. I stare at the red wool longer. Time passes, and further details emerge in my mind. On the outskirts of a recently settled Hobart Town, the same year and location as Australia’s first recorded massacre, a nameless, young Aboriginal girl escaped out the window of her master’s house. Whether motivated by defiance or simply fear, the girl exits the scene and removes herself from the colonial archive. She lives in my head now.
Her escape and all that will be written into the world, through her skin and that of the people who would come to know her, is a journey whose structure is influenced not by the master’s record, but by my imagination. By leaving out the window of the colony’s rigid and limited possible narratives, she does not ask but tasks me nonetheless with imagining her journey through the streets of Old Hobart Town. The defiant child of imagination, she refuses containment in any sense, let alone within the exclusive routes of colonial representation. She answers my intellectual and existential problem for how to imagine the future, by escaping out a window 220-odd years before I would find myself standing in a museum at my cousin’s exhibition.
In one world, the little girl goes down to the coastline and walks until she hears older women speaking a language more familiar to her ear than what was in the house. In another, she is found the next morning and taken back to the house, or perhaps to an orphanage. In another, she dies feebly just an hour after her escape, tripping and falling on a damp winter rock, the body not discovered until several days later.
The truth is that I cannot know if she reappears on record, because I didn’t go searching for her. I’m too reluctant to follow the narratives that might be available for her in the colonial archive, in this particular narrative universe. I would rather ask what else might be possible for her.
Her story is twofold in my mind like Julie’s twin canvases. In the first, there is a perfect image of a young girl’s escape out the window that ends as it begins. In the second, her escape into my murky, untold imagination is more complicated. I want to protect her, she is a child after all, but it is another kind of containment in my mind. An uninvited patronage tempered by my good plans for her: a warm she-oak bed, the murmur of her mother in a light and charming mood. She—and is it I?—retreat to the allure of the imagination’s endless possibilities. She reminds me of what writing makes possible for First Nations life, in spite of enduring colonial violence.
This is an extract from Shapeshifting, edited by Jeanine Leane and Ellen van Neervan (UQP), available now at your local independent bookseller.
