The Advertiser
December 13, 2002, Friday
SECTION: OPINION; Pg. 19
HEADLINE: COLONIAL HISTORY; In the beginning
BYLINE: TONY LOVE
BODY:
South Australians are idealising their origins as convict-free and sophisticated, according to the revelations of a historian who says the state was started by more unsavoury characters. TONY LOVE reports.
SOUTH Australians have long prided themselves on their earliest days of white settlement being vastly different to the rough convict roots of the eastern states.
Our conventional history celebrates a colony created by free settlers and liberated utopians seeking a brave new world without crass convict associations. But a new book, based on a decade of research by PhD student Rebe Taylor, has completely recast the first years of SA's white settlement.
Taylor's extensive study has revealed that long before 1836 - the year accepted generally as when the first white colonists landed here to stay - a community had been set up on Kangaroo Island by renegade sealers who had taken Aboriginal women from Tasmania and mainland SA.
While the sealers' existence was cursorily noted by the first wave of settlers, and has always been a sidebar to Colonel Light's arrival at Holdfast Bay, Taylor's work shows the island has been denied its proper place in the state's history.
It reveals an unsavoury era that was perhaps cast aside in favour of a more satisfactory - and heroic - version of white settlement on the mainland.
The new colony's brokers, we have been schooled, provided a positive foundation on which our historians have emptied their pens and the jingoistic waved their flags.
But Taylor's history tells of the appropriation of Aboriginal women from their homelands by a group of rough-and-tumble white sailor-sealers who "went bush" on Kangaroo Island.
They virtually stopped speaking English, became lawless and essentially stateless to the extent that some called them "worse than savages".
This was the "unofficial" start to our white history, says Taylor.
Her discoveries have shattered what SA Museum senior anthropologist Philip Jones says is the myth of our foundation, which we celebrate as Proclamation Day every December 28.
"Rebe (Taylor) has suggested that our first SA family was composed of a ne'er-do-well who might well have been a convict, and an Aboriginal woman from Tasmania," says Dr Jones.
That sealer was Nathaniel Thomas; the woman named Betty, most likely from northern Tasmania. She was, with many other women, traded or abducted, affecting the future of many Tasmanian tribes.
Nat took Betty in the mid-1820s and sailed to Kangaroo Island, where they joined a rag-tag group of buccaneers and bushmen.
The community, in Taylor's terms our first white settlers, included our first farmers and built our first stone house.
"It was our unofficial frontier," says Taylor.
"But the initial indigenous-white contact was nothing to do with what the government of the day had hoped for."
Nat Thomas had a good education, a good farm and produced strong progeny, and should have been regarded famously as our first white colonial settler.
But because of his chosen location and lifestyle, history has abandoned him; his story edited to lose its authenticity.
The sealers in general were more organised, more capable and more adaptable to Australia's conditions than the official white settlers, Taylor says.
They had the best land, they set up farms, they knew how to find food, they knew the treacherous island coastline and where the River Murray was on the mainland.
They were a help to Colonel Light and assisted his fleet on Kangaroo Island, but in the end they were bought cheaply off the land and treated shamefully by the new English settlers.
That shame riddled the history of our first community with holes.
PRESENT-DAY Kangaroo Islanders, who hold their history dear, have forgotten whether Thomas was white or Aboriginal, Taylor reveals.
The historian's research also uncovered - through official archives, oral statements, written genealogies and popular island narratives - pointers that Betty and the other abducted women left a group of descendants, many still living in mainland South Australia, and one family still residing on the island.
Taylor's discoveries were also the unveiling of a black heritage for some of that sixth generation of those original Tasmanian Aborigines.
"Terri Sanderson", a public servant who was brought up in Peterborough, is one of them. Preferring not to use her real name because her extended family has yet to be consulted, she found the discovery confusing at first.
"It was a bit of a shock," she recalls. "It was a bit of yourself you'd never known was there.
"Once I did know I had Aboriginal heritage I felt quite proud in a way. I felt like a true Australian, combined with my other heritage which is English, Irish and Scottish."
Ms Sanderson says she ticked the Australian Census question asking if respondents had Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander heritage, but still doesn't identify herself as wholly indigenous.
"I don't have any of those strong family or spiritual connections that Aboriginal people normally have," she says.
Ms Sanderson intends to find out more about her roots, planning a trip to Kangaroo Island this summer while remaining aware that hers will not be a short journey.
Her biggest hurdle, she admits sadly, is the public's perception of Aboriginal people.
"It's a fear of people's attitudes changing towards me, and whether they would see me differently," she says.
That concern is part of a larger question being posed by academic Keith Windschuttle of the recording of Australian frontier history.
He claims that the oral research of Aboriginal descendants can lead to a version of history unsubstantiated by normal academic sources such as written records.
Rebe Taylor's revelations, which have come from 10 years of oral and written study, find themselves in the public spotlight right when the truth of the first white and black Australian contact is being queried.
Her unearthing of an entirely new version of South Australia's earliest colonial days, however, has been hailed by the historical community as a major breakthrough.
"It's original and important," says Dr Jones.
by Editor on December 17, 2002 at 8:52 PM