Aboriginal people of Trouwunna were, and are, a people formed by a religious worldview. In order to understand the ways in which Aboriginal people engaged with the Christian religion brought by the colonists, one needs to appreciate that they already lived in a world imbued with religious significance both in meaning and ritualised interaction. This shaped their engagement with, and interpretation of, the Christian stories and rituals to which they were exposed and which some incorporated into their own lives.
In this first chapter I attempt to identify a number of features of what is known of the pre-existing religious life of the Aboriginal people of Trouwunna. This is both to demonstrate the existence and complexity of people’s religious life and the lens through which they engaged Christian faith in the first generation of the colony of Van Diemen’s Land. I do so cognizant that all that is known of such practices and beliefs was gleaned through colonial contact. I intentionally avoid importing Aboriginal religious beliefs and practices from other parts of Australia as a superior or legitimising comparison.
During the nineteenth century when the British established their colony in Van Diemen’s Land, it was widely believed by colonists that the Aboriginal people lived without a religious or sacred relationship with each other or creation. Later occasional individuals such as Robinson described, though in somewhat
disparaging ways, some of their religious beliefs. Nonetheless the more dominant view was that the Aboriginal peoples’ spirit was a vacuous place, a void, and an uncultivated ‘land’ of the spirit. James Bonwick wrote in the 1880s that
the laws of the universe would at times plough up the fallow ground of their sterile souls; but there was no sower to drop a seed of spiritual truth into the gaping furrow.1
The sower image used by Bonwick alludes to the ‘Parable of the Sower’ in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 13, in the Christian Bible’s New Testament. The different soils represent different capacities and responses to the seed of the word of God being planted by the sower, who in the parable is identified as Jesus. While acknowledging the existence of a soul within an Aboriginal person was a somewhat progressive thought compared to those who regarded the Aboriginal people as less than human, there is, however, a double-edged fateful inevitability. In this ‘fallow ground’ there is both no internal existence of spiritual truth or potentiality for spiritual fruitfulness, nor an external agent necessary to impregnate their souls.
For many years among historians,2 archaeologists3 and anthropologists, there has been a prevailing belief that earlier so-called pre-colonial Trouwunna Aboriginal society was somehow derived from what occurred in other parts of Australia, but in diminished or atrophied form.Several writers remark on the lack of evidence of the Aboriginal people’s cultic life and yet make categorical
statements about its paucity and inferior quality.4 For example, their dances were often described superficially as ‘bounding and prancing’ while they ‘yelled and
1 Bonwick, J., 1884, The Lost Tasmanian Race. London; Sampson Low, Marston Searle and
Rivington, p. 2.
2 Clark, J., 1988, ‘Devils and Horses: Religious and Creative Life in Tasmanian Aboriginal
Society’, in Roe, M., (ed.), The Flow of Cultures. Canberra; Australian Academy of the Humanities, pp. 50 – 72.
3 Jones, R., 1977, ‘The Tasmanian Paradox’, in Wright, R. V. S., Stone Tools as Cultural Markers:
Change, Evolution and Complexity. Canberra; Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, pp. 189 – 204.
shrieked’ around a fire5 with little consideration being given to the existence of a cosmology, let alone its possible complexity.
Others6 have responded by discussing the complex religious systems elsewhere in Australia and invoked that complexity as present in Trouwunna, but these views still presume the defining quality exists elsewhere, away from
Trouwunna. While comparative studies of Yolgnu, Wurundjeri, or Pitjantjatjara or other clans within and beyond Australia may reveal commonalities, it is important to also consider them in their own contexts, languages, histories, and cultural and colonial adaptations.
Rhys Jones, in ‘The Tasmanian Paradox,’7 took for granted the inferiority in Aboriginal people’s religious life in the parallel he made between technological and religious complexity. The technology of Aboriginal clans in other parts of Australia was regarded as more complex and therefore superior to those in Trouwunna. The ‘richness of life’, those ‘large scale religious events such as are described for mainland society, were not’, according to Jones, ‘part of Tasmanian cultural behaviour’.8
These double-charged criticisms, that Trouwunna Aboriginal people possessed both a simpler technology and a rudimentary religion when compared with Aboriginal people in other parts of Australia, have not been based on close engagement with the people or examination of their practices. As the variety of Christian and many other religious beliefs and expressions that abound throughout the world demonstrate, simplicity of form does not necessarily indicate simplicity of religious belief.
5 Clark, 1988, p. 50.
6 Kidd, M. J., 2006, The Sacred Wound of Australia. Nimbin; Ohlah Publishing; Miller, L., 2006,
‘Isness, the Terrain of Aboriginal Being’, School of Philosophy Thesis; University of Tasmania.
7 Jones, 1977, pp.189 - 204.
One response to these assumptions is expressed by archaeologist and writer David Horton when he warned against glib assumptions as to the inferiority of Aboriginal people or making a ‘value judgment as to the relative importance of various cultural and economic traits’.9 He proposed that the very simplicity of the Aboriginal peoples’ technological tool kit might in fact have achieved the same results as the supposedly more elaborate technologies used elsewhere. The time gained through simpler and easier-to-make tools and weapons may then have been used for matters of ‘the ego, the mind and the soul’.10
While we may take issue with the culturally conditioned cosmology implicit in a focus on ‘ego, mind and soul’, nevertheless Horton argues that ‘it is quite clear that some evidence for communal religious activity is indeed present in Robinson’s journals’.11 Robinson’s journals contain most of the available
descriptions of Aboriginal religious life that he noted as he travelled with a range of Tasmanian Aboriginal people in the late 1820s and early 1830s. A more regional focus to Aboriginal people’s beliefs and practices is evident in the recent contributions from Cameron12 regarding the north-east, and MacFarlane13
regarding the north-west.
Ryan, in her important work The Aboriginal Tasmanians briefly notes some of the misguided expectations when she wrote ‘… their religious beliefs were recorded by people who expected the Tasmanians to conform to notions of nationalistic animalism.’14 In her overview of the religious beliefs and practices of the Aboriginal people across the island she wrote:
9 Horton, D., 1979, ‘Tasmanian Adaptation’, Mankind, 12, pp. 28-34. 10 Ibid.
11 Ibid. p. 32.
12 Cameron, P., 2011, Grease and Ochre. Launceston; Fullers Bookshop. 13 MacFarlane, I., 2008, Beyond Awakening. Launceston; Fullers Bookshop. 14 Ryan, L., 2001, The Aboriginal Tasmanians. Sydney; Allen & Unwin, p. 11.
Thus the men were associated with the sun spirit and the women with the moon. Their religion was thought to be based upon “star gods” and good and bad spirits that could be compared to classical European mythology. Their spiritual practices were apparently based upon the idea of a good spirit (Moiheener or Parledee), who governed the day, and the bad spirit (Wrageowrapper), who governed the night. These and other spirits were associated with the creation, fire, river, trees, and the dead. As an uncircumcised people they can be compared with the “older” uncircumcised tribes of mainland Australia.15
Despite comparing Aboriginal people with those of ‘mainland Australia’, Ryan avoids the hierarchical rankings that other writers portray. This summary by Ryan suggests a common religious worldview and consistent cultic practice among all of the Aboriginal clans on this island, without considering possible variations among them. However, regional variations in religious beliefs and practices did exist. Moiheener and Parledee (good spirit) did not necessarily have identical meanings in their different religious or linguistic locales. McFarlane describes cultural traits specific to clans in the north-west that included ‘cicatrice body patterns, dances, language, songs, sacred trees, myths, astronomy, [and] different “deities” ’16 and he helpfully notes:
the idea of a Tasmanian Aborigine is, of course, a European construct, blind to the rich cultural diversity to be found in the patchwork of mini-states that made up pre-contact society.17
Possible regional variations will be clarified in the forthcoming pages.
15 Ryan, 2001, p. 11. 16 MacFarlane, 2008, p. 2. 17 Ibid., p. 3.
In his book Fate of a Free People, 18 Reynolds brought more focus than hitherto recognised on Aboriginal people as thinking subjects, political activists and negotiators with the colonial authorities of Van Diemen’s Land. His work alerted people to the ‘agency’ of Aboriginal people yet Reynolds did not consider the Aboriginal people’s religious perspectives as a factor in their behaviour, particularly as part of their negotiations and ‘agreement’ with the colonial
authorities. But in this thesis, Aboriginal people’s engagement with the Christian faith will be seen to have been that of active subjects exercising their own agency. Their religious world was contributing to their political behaviour and to their interpretations of Christian faith.
This question of the role of the Aboriginal peoples’ religious life in their interactions with the colonisers has been raised by Greg Lehman in his Honours thesis, ‘Narrative and Identity’19 and by James Boyce in ‘God’s Own Country?’20 Lehman sought to contribute what he called an intentional partisan Palawa perspective to the conversation in response to
the few, if any, explicit accounts of the nature and meaning of relationships between Aboriginal people and their land (emphasis in original).
He argues that ‘little has been written about the way Tasmanian Aboriginal people see the world’.21
Boyce, writing of the history of the Anglican Church’s relationships with Aboriginal people, raises the question of religious beliefs as a motivating factor in
18 Reynolds, H., 1995, Fate of a Free People. Ringwood; Penguin.
19 Lehman, G., 1998, ‘Narrative and Identity’, Unpublished Honours Thesis, Hobart; University of
Tasmania.
20 Boyce, J., 2001, God's Own Country? Hobart; ISW. 21 Lehman, 1998, pp. 16, 18.
the behaviour of a number of Aboriginal people in their interactions with colonists. An example from the 1830s of one Christian Aboriginal leader is Walter Arthur, who was involved in preaching and writing Christian exhortations at the Wybalenna settlement on Flinders Island and who had a key role in framing a petition to the colonial authorities. While Arthur was the leading petitioner, Boyce does not explore the detail of Arthur’s Christian faith, or that of the other petitioners, since the focus of his book was on the role of the Anglican Church. The writings of Aboriginal people at Wybalenna will be examined in Chapters Four and Five.