Abstract
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Somewhat serendipitously a 1969 copy of John Reynolds’ “Launceston; history of an Australian city” landed again in 2015 to tell us about how “Ponrabbel” was understood in 1969. Just looking at sentence one, paragraph one in Chapter One, entitled as it is, “Ponrabbel”, it shines a light on a set of sensibilities that would be fiercely contested in so many ways in a 21st C context.
Meaning is always invested in the context. So, it needs to be said that John Reynolds was writing from an ‘adult education’ perspective and in chapter one, addressing the Tasmanian Aboriginal issue. Intriguingly, Reynolds was writing as a historian and a Hobartian. He was nonetheless informed from within, writing from within and somehow centered within, ‘Launceston society’. Nevertheless, the Hobart, Launceston rivalry evident at the time, and still there today, draws the critique that Reynolds comes with ‘Hobartian baggage’. It also needs to be said that John Reynolds had a background as a metallurgist and thus mining and industry also.
Meaning is always invested in the context. So, it needs to be said that John Reynolds was writing from an ‘adult education’ perspective and in chapter one, addressing the Tasmanian Aboriginal issue. Intriguingly, Reynolds was writing as a historian and a Hobartian. He was nonetheless informed from within, writing from within and somehow centered within, ‘Launceston society’. Nevertheless, the Hobart, Launceston rivalry evident at the time, and still there today, draws the critique that Reynolds comes with ‘Hobartian baggage’. It also needs to be said that John Reynolds had a background as a metallurgist and thus mining and industry also.
Hobart being Tasmania's capital its the place where decision making goes on. On the other hand Launceston is/was at the State's economic centre, and the place where all the money was/is actually made. Well that's the argument.
Given the sociopolitical cum cultural tensions between Launceston and Hobart it is interesting that with Reynolds’ Hobartian identity he was seemingly taken into the confidence of his Launcestonian sources. Speculatively, this might have been to do with it being imagined that he was unlikely to open doors on unwelcome and uncomfortable narratives – imaginings best left alone.
For a historian’s view of Reynold’s history, Tom Dunning sees Reynolds' book’s significance in what it tells us about the significant men in Launceston’s past. He also sees Reynolds a man of his time and with a viewpoint that is essentially sympathetic towards Aboriginal people.
Tasmanian sensibilities and the cultural perceptions of Reynolds’ time are clearly in evidence throughout his history of Launceston. However, comparing his first chapter with current understandings and cultural discourses it’s possible to see something of a seismic shift in perceptions albeit that postcolonial cultural schisms remain in evidence in many community discourses. If one wasn’t alive at the time, it is easy to forget that Australia’s ‘White Australia Policy’ was still in place in 1969.
However in the Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery there is a functioning Guan Di Temple celebrating the Chinese community's contribution to the city of Launceston and Tasmania.
However in the Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery there is a functioning Guan Di Temple celebrating the Chinese community's contribution to the city of Launceston and Tasmania.
Against this background there is almost no ambiguity at all in Reynolds’ opening sentence, paragraph one, chapter one. It is, “Launceston’s earliest known inhabitants were the extinct Tasmanian aborigines.” Today such proclamations are seen as coming loaded with Anglocentric settler cum colonial cultural cargo and signposts. Plus, it needs to be said that it might well do so almost anywhere in Australia in the 1960s.
The ‘sentence’ is loaded with allusions to cultural sensibilities that in a 21st C context is somewhat eyebrow raising. The words “extinct” and 'Stone Age" in Tasmania has a kind of racist resonance in the 21st C and a lower case “aborigine/aboriginal” is no longer considered either respectful or appropriate. Tasmania’s other ‘extinction', the Thylocene, resonates here along with the unfolding and contested ‘Truganini story.’ But it does need to be said that acknowledging prior Aboriginal presence at all in a local history of Reynolds' time is remarkable.
Our histories are our memories yet as Friedrich Nietzsche said “Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.”
Our histories are our memories yet as Friedrich Nietzsche said “Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.”
Backgrounding all this, it needs to be remembered that in May 1967 the then Holt Government, put up a referendum to approve two amendments to the Australian constitution relating to Indigenous Australians. It won over 90% of Australians approval but the social outcomes since the referendum for Aboriginal people have been less than conciliatory despite changing perceptions to do with Aboriginal land rights and cultural sensibilities.
With the election of the Whitlam Government in 1972 these issues were beginning to be discussed more openly – and more often in polite company.
Looking back with privileged hindsight it is possible to imagine that many Tasmanians might well have voted in this now famous 1967 referendum thinking that it really had very little to with them. Tasmania was not like the rest of Australia …. really. Tasmanians imagine that their and mainland histories are different. They are right! Its especial so when it comes to Aboriginal narratives. And so on.
More than interestingly Reynolds seems to lament the paucity of scholarship relative to Tasmania’s Aboriginal people. Against this it was said anecdotally that there was little or nothing to know asTasmanian Aboriginal people were in decline, loosing culture andignoble in their savagery. Unsurprisingly in writing this relatively short chapter Reynolds relies quite heavily on George Augustus Robinson’s journals. Whatever else that might be said about Robinson, he leaves us with the most expansive documentation of a first hand colonial experience of Tasmanian Aboriginal culture.
This chapter of Reybolds’, “Ponrabbel”, in the scheme of things in a small way is proof positive that histories, and their narratives, matter. They matter because they tell us about what we live with now and the context within which we do it. Our histories help us ‘divine’and contemplate who we are. Thinking about this, Reynolds’ history writing is a poignant backdrop for such musings. In the context of the ‘placescaping’ of Launceston this chapter of John Reynolds’ provides some useful insights.
Comparing and contrasting the Launcestonian cultural landscape; Aboriginal and colonial cum ‘industrial’ placescaping relative to 1969; precolonial era placescaping in a 21st C context; there are significant narratives to be gleaned. All that Reynolds speculated upon in 1969, by inference, is far from irrelevant in the 21st C. Currently all this is imagined as “heritage.”
On the evidence, there is little doubt that Reynolds was a critical thinker. He is also an exemplar of our collective adherences to our placedness. The prevailing ‘wisdom’ of his time and the cultural cum social imperatives of the time we now live in shape our placedness. It’s so albeit that as critical thinkers we should not be accepting of anything as a given.
We have what we have until we discover more – and there is always more.
Reynolds’ observations in his chapter, and drawn as they are from what information there was within his reach, are edifying. To some extent Reynolds exhibits a predilection towards a kind of Anglocentric cultural anthropomorphism to be found in GA Robinson’s writing on Tasmanian Aboriginality – documented and rdited in NJB Plomley's' 'Friendly Mission' in particular. Clearly Robinson informed Reynolds’ perceptions of a culture of which so little was known. Speculatively, Robinson’s information as likely as not came to Reynolds in part via NJB Plomley’s writing – and possibly more personal communications.
G A Robinson was not an anthropologist. In Robinson’s time what we now understand as the discipline of anthropologyhad not yet emerged in any substantial way from the age of enlightenment. In spite of this, Robinson is arguably one of the closest observers of Tasmanian Aboriginal culture and he remains an important reference.
Moreover, Robinson’s first hand experiences of, and observations of, Tasmanian Aboriginal cultural realities continue to inform scholars in the field of anthropology and Tasmanian histories. For Reynolds, who else was there? What was available to him for contrast and comparison? Reynolds clearly concedes the paucity of colonial scholarship relative to Tasmanian Aboriginality.
Even so, a colonial backwash is quite perceptible in Reynolds’ lexicon and imaginings of Tasmanian Aboriginality. Colonial assumptions and related discourses linger on in not only Reynolds’ reflective imaginings and musings but also in the visualisations that many Tasmanians harbour today. Relative to Tasmanian Aboriginal cultural identity in all its emerging complexities these musings go on, and are bound to in the 21st C .
Interestingly, Prof.Henry Reynolds, John Reynolds’ son, as it turns out has been a key figure in the so-called “History Wars’' that bump up so heavily upon contemporary perceptions of Aboriginality in Australia. Henry Reynolds has been a key player in the critical reimaging of, and the accommodation of, Aboriginal cultural realities. His opposition in the wars’, one Keith Windschuttle, argues for more benign, more lenient and more amenable imaginings of the apparent excesses in Australia’s colonial histories.
Dr. David Hansen, Centre for Art History and Art Theory ANU School of Art, recalls Prof. Henry Reynolds’ in the 1990s delivering an opening speech at the Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts in Hobart. Prof. Henry recalled that in his boyhood being in the Allport with his father and listening in on vigorous discussions with sundry local antiquarians to do with Tasmanian histories. This tells us something about how history mattered to ‘the Reynolds’.
Effectively the history wars in which Prof. Henry Reynolds is a ‘player’ are ongoing. They are basically a cultural wrangle involving sometimes contentious struggles over the characterisation of, the imagining of, and the interpretation of, the histories relative to British colonisation in Australia. The development of contemporary, and more overt Australian sensibilities, particularly those relevant to Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders, are at the heart of the matter. Unsurprisingly, it all has resonances in the contentiousness and debates played out in other colonised places.
Anecdotally, ‘old Launcestonians’ to this day will tell you that “Ponrabbel was the Aboriginal name for the Tamar”. However, in 1969 John Reynolds had deduced differently and his speculation (assessment?) that ponrabbel spoke loudly of place, or rather of a placescape, a cultural landscape, (not Reynolds words) rather than any geographical feature such as a“river” – that, for its time was insightful.
In his last sentence in his Chapter 'Ponrabbel' Reynolds reminds us that "the word Ponrabble is not forgotten because for many years the Marine Board of Launceston have followed the commendable practice of bestowing it upon one of their port maintenance vessels." Since then the Tasmanian Aboriginal people have embarked upon the heroic project of cultural reconstruction. Part of all this is the palawa-kani project that focuses upon language. Inpalawa-kani the dual name for the Tamar River is now understood to be kanamaluka.
Contemporary understandings of our cultural geographies are more inclined to accommodated different cultural perceptions relative to, and the shaping of, place. A typical example of this is the current acknowledgement that pre-colonial Australian landscapes, including Tasmania’s, were shaped by deliberate, and complex, Aboriginal interventions such as ‘firestick farming’.
Looking at Aboriginal placescaping with the colonial imperative, and the terra nullius idea, in mind, these things are evident in the documentation of Governor Lachlan Macquarie 1811 inspection of the Van Diemen’s Land colony. He clearly overlooked Aboriginal presence in the landscape despite reporting seeing the smoke from their fires. Rather, he charactorised ‘place’ in his diary in an Anglocentric pastoral context reminiscent of ‘home’. To quote selectively from him, “Saturday 7th. Decr. 1811 …travelling for Ten miles through Epping Forest, which is all very poor bad soil, to the open Plains; which I have named Henrietta Plains …… These Plains are by far the richest and most beautiful we have yet seen in Van Diemen's Land; forming a grand, and interesting fine Landscape, and having a fine noble view of Ben-Lomond …… South Esk, meandering in a beautiful manner through the Plains, making the Landscape complete …… The Soil and Herbage of Henrietta Plains far excel anything of the kind we have yet seen … for 2 1/2 miles through this wood (which is generally good Soil with tolerable …… Sunday 8th. Decr. 1811 …… Travelled the first 3 miles over beautiful Verdant Hills and Vallies alternately; thence three miles through rich winding Vallies to the Sugar Loaf Hill, situated in the middle of Camden Valley, and close to which is the Government Stock-Yard …… we proceed to the Top of the Sugar Loaf on Horseback, from whence we had a very fine view of the Valley below and the adjoining Hills & distant mountains …… for about two miles; thence along fine verdant Hills and open wooded Country for 4 1/2 miles to the Town or rather Village of Launceston, situated at the Confluence of the North & South Esk Rivers, which together form here the Great River Tamer,[sic] or Port Dalrymple.”
Albeit open to conjecture, in these passages Macquarie was writing about a part of a ‘placescape’ that Tasmanian Aboriginal people arguably understood, and knew as, ‘ponrabbel’. This placescape in part is currently shaped by be the city of Launceston with its streets, wharves, warehouses etc. There is a cultural paradigm shift clealy in evidence.
At the time Macquarie was assessing it, this placescape was in transition from being a life sustaining, closed loop and managed Aboriginal ‘place’ to one where the imperative to be open to colonial exploitation for the benefit of ‘elsewhere’ is clearly in evidence.
NJB Plomley’s 'Friendly Mission' was published in Hobart in1966. John Reynolds clearly relied upon Plomley for his insights into Tasmanian Aboriginal cultural realities as reported on by GA Robinson in his diaries. In a 21st C context Robinson’s 19th C observations via Plomley’s work has given rise to more intense interrogations of place and what his observations and other anthropologies reveal.
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Interestingly John Reynolds makes no mention of these people in his Ponrabbel Chapter nor their relationships with Launceston and the regional businesses operated from the city that traded with Tasmanian Aboriginal people. Tasmanian Aboriginal people in the imaginings of the time were after all, “extinct” – and widely reported as being so via the Truganini myth and Plomley's 'Hybridity Thesis'. While Aboriginal people’s presence was known, and talked about, the people’s ongoing presence was hardly visible – indeed imagined as something of an impossibility.
This is somewhat reflected in Reynolds opening sentence employing the “extinction” word as it does. Here his ‘history’ seems to mirror Launcestonian colonial perceptions of itself somewhat poignantly. To some extent uncomfortably, they are perceptions that lingered on.
Noticeably, Launceston’s Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery gets but scant mention in Reynolds’ history. Dr. Tom Dunning, Launceston based historian current researching Launceston’s history, has noted that there are “but four mentions [for the QVMAG] … two are in terms of important people, Sutton and Scott et al. Another concerns the fact [that the museum] has the anti transportation flag. The only substantial one notes its role in educating the Launceston public, but this is terms of the work done by the Adult Education Board. the publisher of the book.”
Alongside anecdotal recollections of ‘old Launcestonians’ from ‘middle Launceston’ there are memories of “the museum” but they are somewhat mixed. However, they are consistent in their recollections of “the museum” as being kind of omnipresent in their consciousness.
This didn’t always translate as them being regular visitors. Nonetheless all could recall particular visits or exhibits. Some of these were “the armoury and the guns”, the place being “crowded with narrow passages”, the “Chinese Joss House”, the museum being “a dingy dungeon of a place”, that there were “a few Aboriginal relics” and “the mineral exhibits were quite interesting.
While John Reynolds acknowledges both the prior presence of Tasmania’s Aboriginal people and the paucity of relative anthropology and archaeology, Launceston’s Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery (QVMAG), on the evidence, has given scant attention to interrogating Aboriginal cultural production, or indeed Tasmanian Aboriginality. This is so albeit that the institution holds a rather large collection of Tasmanian stone tools, an important collection of shell necklaces and other cultural material.
Notably, almost on the eve of theInternational Year of the World's Indigenous People, 1993, the rather meagre, arguably tokenistic, Aboriginal component of the museum’s ‘Treasures Gallery’ at Royal Park was removed. Given that this was at a time when internationally, the United Nations was seeking to deal with the problems faced by indigenous communities in retrospect it seems somewhat insensitive. The action, upon reflection, has certain poignancy. When the UN was encouraging the world to focus on concerns such as human rights, the environment, development, education and health. Likewise, there was a focus on recognising the value and the diversity of indigenous cultures and the forms of their social organisation, subliminally at least, removing this exhibit at this time is pregnant with meaning and innuendo.
There is a certain pathos in the exhibit being replaced by a mining and mineral exhibit and especially so in Tasmania – indeed Launceston with the city links to the mining industry. Ironically, what was imagined as a ‘treasure’ seemed to have changed or was being spoken of out loud.
Interestingly, NJB Plomley was operating out of the QVMAG as an honorary research associate at the time the exhibit was removed. His championed concept of “hybridity” wouldn’t have alerted him to, or flagged any imperative to, any need to alert the institution to the necessity to engage with the Tasmanian Aboriginal community in regard to this action being contemplated. Anecdotally, Tasmania’s Aboriginal community “were making noises” about the appropriateness of the exhibit and anecdotally this was providing some licence to remove the exhibit.NJB Plomley’s imaginings of the history of Tasmanian Aborigines was largely to do with the early encounters between Tasmanian Aborigines and British colonisers and the papers and diaries of colonists such as George Augustus Robinson. More importantly he seems to have overlaid all this with a ‘scientific vision’ of his own imagining. Interestingly, Plomley qualified as an anatomist before embarking upon a varied academic career. Conceivably, Plomley’s career in science allowed him to privilege genetics over culture – hard science over social science, genetic traits over cultural identity.
Ian Anderson in his paper “A People Who Have No History? “ reports on a 1976 Adult Education seminar where NJB Plomley presented a monograph in which he "[discussed] recent research on several aspects of the life of the extinct Tasmanian aborigines’. Within it there was a section headed ‘Hybrids’, where Plomley said: It is not unlikely that the first Tasmanian-European hybrids were conceived in 1793 in intercourse between seamen of D’Entrecasteaux’s expedition and the aboriginal women they met in south-eastern Tasmania. If not, then less than ten years later the unions between the sealers of Bass Strait and Tasmanian native women were producing hybrids …The children by a European father and native mother are really handsome, of a light copper colour, with rosy cheeks, large black eyes (the whites tinged with blue), long dark eyelashes, fine teeth, well-proportioned head, and robust limbs…. While this description applies to first generation hybrids, in subsequent generations the characters of the first parents would be expected to become evident in a haphazard way …" As a subject of NJB Plomley’s ‘hybridity thesis’, Ian Anderson speaks authoritatively from the centre of the conjecture surrounding Plomley’s imaginings of Aboriginality.
Ian Anderson in his paper “A People Who Have No History? “ reports on a 1976 Adult Education seminar where NJB Plomley presented a monograph in which he "[discussed] recent research on several aspects of the life of the extinct Tasmanian aborigines’. Within it there was a section headed ‘Hybrids’, where Plomley said: It is not unlikely that the first Tasmanian-European hybrids were conceived in 1793 in intercourse between seamen of D’Entrecasteaux’s expedition and the aboriginal women they met in south-eastern Tasmania. If not, then less than ten years later the unions between the sealers of Bass Strait and Tasmanian native women were producing hybrids …The children by a European father and native mother are really handsome, of a light copper colour, with rosy cheeks, large black eyes (the whites tinged with blue), long dark eyelashes, fine teeth, well-proportioned head, and robust limbs…. While this description applies to first generation hybrids, in subsequent generations the characters of the first parents would be expected to become evident in a haphazard way …" As a subject of NJB Plomley’s ‘hybridity thesis’, Ian Anderson speaks authoritatively from the centre of the conjecture surrounding Plomley’s imaginings of Aboriginality.
Of NJB Plomley, Ian Anderson observed that “his historical gaze only occasionally strays to consider the lives of those Aboriginal survivors of the early colonial periods and, in fact, he more generally notes this lack of research attention”. Arguably Plomley’s position here is reflected in some way by John Reynolds and furthermore in the QVMAG’s collections policy, programming and research priorities.
All of this seems sufficiently self-evidenced in the 21st C to downplay, if not to discredit, NJB Plomley’s hybridity thesis and the implications he drew from it. Nonetheless, ‘The Plomley Hybridity Thesis’ casts a shadow in the background of Launcestonian cultural imaginings until the present – and arguably evident in QVMAG collection policies and programming.
For the last decade of the 20th C at the QVMAG Tasmanian Aboriginality was virtually invisible until the opening of the refurbished railway workshops as the second ‘museum’ campus for QVMAG.
In 2001 the exhibit ‘Strings Across Time’ opened at the Inveresk campus and presented the Tasmanian Aboriginal people’s iconic shell necklaces. Interestingly, these necklaces earn their iconic status in so much as they provide evidence of the ongoing observance of the people’s Aboriginal cultural realities.
It is of some interest that the exhibit was cast in a social cum ethnographic context and heavily spiked with an exotic otherness. That is often the case with ‘museum’ exhibits and in this instance there are tensions to do with authenticity and especially so with the Plomley hybridity thesis constantly reverberating somewhere in the background. Nonetheless, cultural realities evolve over time and are never static in any cultural context. Ideas are traded, often to and fro, and thus cultural expressions develop, evolve and change – and almost always, significantly.
This is played out in the Tasmanian Aboriginal community just as it is elsewhere. The notion of 'cultural hybridty' in the Tasmanian Aboriginal community was never an issue within it. Ideas and technologies were freely traded, adopted and adapted. Nonetheless, the concept of 'genetic hybridity' washing away Aboriginal identity, connectivity to place and the sense of belonging, was, and is, offensive – highly offensive.
The QVMAG's art gallery collections, and the art imaginings attached to them, were later consolidated on the Royal Park campus without the ‘Strings Across Time’ exhibit. This suggests that the vision of this 'cultural production' was imagined as something other than, perhaps less than, 'art'.
This hierarchical vision seems to be born out by the touring exhibition, 'The Art of Adornment: Contemporary Australian Jewellery', commissioned in 1993 by the Department Foreign Affairs & Trade and produced by the QVMAG under the curatorship of Glenda King – the Strings Across Time curator. The exhibition was commissioned to project 'Austalianness' to Asian audiences via the jewellery coming out the studios of contemporary Australian makers.
Interestingly, in this exhibition's catalogue in its opening paragraph, it acknowledged the complexity and richness of Australian Indigenous cultural production. It also acknowledged the continuity and the reaffirmation of Aboriginal body adornment within Aboriginal ceremonial practices and "art". Jennifer Isaacs was offered as the confirming authority yet the work of Indigenous makers was left out of the exhibition. Nonetheless the Aboriginal colours – red, black & gold/yellow – were used to 'brand' the exhibition's Australianness – lend it a culturally defined placedness alongside its 'internationalist' sensibilities.
Speculatively, 'leaving out' Aboriginal makers might have been because their work was not considered as being either 'jewellery enough' or 'contemporary enough' – a theoretically contentious assertion even for its time, 1993. Yet the 22 non-Indigenous makers included were all seeking to find the kind of cultural relevance, an Australianness if you like, plus the cultural and personal identity in their work that was acknowledged as being celebrated in Aboriginal body adornment. While these cultural tension were being interrogated in international forums at the time in Tasmania, Launceston in particular, it seems it was not possible to engage with these discourses – even to a sophisticated international audience.
This is played out in the Tasmanian Aboriginal community just as it is elsewhere. The notion of 'cultural hybridty' in the Tasmanian Aboriginal community was never an issue within it. Ideas and technologies were freely traded, adopted and adapted. Nonetheless, the concept of 'genetic hybridity' washing away Aboriginal identity, connectivity to place and the sense of belonging, was, and is, offensive – highly offensive.
The QVMAG's art gallery collections, and the art imaginings attached to them, were later consolidated on the Royal Park campus without the ‘Strings Across Time’ exhibit. This suggests that the vision of this 'cultural production' was imagined as something other than, perhaps less than, 'art'.
This hierarchical vision seems to be born out by the touring exhibition, 'The Art of Adornment: Contemporary Australian Jewellery', commissioned in 1993 by the Department Foreign Affairs & Trade and produced by the QVMAG under the curatorship of Glenda King – the Strings Across Time curator. The exhibition was commissioned to project 'Austalianness' to Asian audiences via the jewellery coming out the studios of contemporary Australian makers.
Interestingly, in this exhibition's catalogue in its opening paragraph, it acknowledged the complexity and richness of Australian Indigenous cultural production. It also acknowledged the continuity and the reaffirmation of Aboriginal body adornment within Aboriginal ceremonial practices and "art". Jennifer Isaacs was offered as the confirming authority yet the work of Indigenous makers was left out of the exhibition. Nonetheless the Aboriginal colours – red, black & gold/yellow – were used to 'brand' the exhibition's Australianness – lend it a culturally defined placedness alongside its 'internationalist' sensibilities.
Speculatively, 'leaving out' Aboriginal makers might have been because their work was not considered as being either 'jewellery enough' or 'contemporary enough' – a theoretically contentious assertion even for its time, 1993. Yet the 22 non-Indigenous makers included were all seeking to find the kind of cultural relevance, an Australianness if you like, plus the cultural and personal identity in their work that was acknowledged as being celebrated in Aboriginal body adornment. While these cultural tension were being interrogated in international forums at the time in Tasmania, Launceston in particular, it seems it was not possible to engage with these discourses – even to a sophisticated international audience.
When the two campuses of the QVMAG were rationalised, Inveresk as the museum campus and Royal Park as the art gallery, there was a temporary exhibition in the refurbished art gallery focusing on Tasmanian Aboriginality entitled, “Robinson’s Cup”. Interestingly, the applauded 'Strings Across Time' exhibit was dismantled at that time and was not to be shown at Royal Park. Quite possibly this was because it was imagined as being more to do with ethnography than 'art' and thus not at home in the new setting, this new musing site, this cathedral to the 'art idea'.
On the Inveresk campus a permanent exhibition opened in 2010 called “Tasmanian Connections” [1]. Notably and surprisingly, and yet again, the Tasmanian Aboriginal community remains virtually invisible. Within this exhibit there are two objects that acknowledge Tasmanian Aboriginality's presence in a kind of way – one, Governor Arthur’s Proclamation Board and the other the Bothwell Cup. Both are the cultural production of Van Diemen's Land’s colonists. One, sending out a pictorial message to Tasmania’s Aboriginal people that says in essence, ”we’ll kill you if you kill us”. The other is a trophy cup, a reward to GA Robinson for his efforts in resolving the ‘Aboriginal problem’ in Van Diemen's Land/Tasmania.
If there is, as they say, "an elephant in the room here", well it is to do with the haunting absence of Tasmanian Aboriginality in the celebration of Tasmanian placedness, the assertion of Tasmanian identity and in the midst of the Tasmanian storytelling.
If there is, as they say, "an elephant in the room here", well it is to do with the haunting absence of Tasmanian Aboriginality in the celebration of Tasmanian placedness, the assertion of Tasmanian identity and in the midst of the Tasmanian storytelling.
The institution’s apparent inability to read the poignancy and the underlying frictions in the exhibit in its research phases is somewhat revealing. This exhibit in its juxtaposition with other exhibits speaks quite loudly of the institution’s ‘world view’. By extension, it speaks of a kind of Anglocentric monocultural appropriated placedness, albeit something that its something that cannot be sustained in reality in a 21st C context in Launceston.
An attempt was made to move the discourse on when at the refurbished Royal Parkcampus. The ‘Robinson Cup’ exhibition put its stamp on the reopening of the Royal Park campus via Robinson’s trophy cup – the engraved sterling silver Bothwell cup, made in 1835 by David Barclay in Hobart for Bothwell’s ‘settlers’.
This temporary exhibition put on a display, and interrogated, the current work of Tasmanian Aboriginal artists and their responses to, their musings upon, this museum artifact – Robinson's Cup. This silver cup presented to Mr GA Robinson by the inhabitants of the District of Bothwell in 1836 in thanks for his 'successful conciliation of the Aborigines of the Island elected by him' carries haunting stories still.
It seemed that at last Launceston was beginning to acknowledge its, and Tasmania’s, histories along with the tensions, social and cultural, within it. Interestingly, despite all that was invested in this exhibition it did not travel beyond Launceston. Launceston, it seems, only wanted to talk to itself – and then only briefly in order to lay a ghost. Curiously, for such a fanfared event the opening of this exhibition has left no trace of itself on the Internet via the local press or any other source. Nonetheless, the ghost has not been been laid to rest.
Also, the Robinson Cup exhibition epitomised the lowest common denominator traits of 20thC top down, ‘white box’ cum ‘one-view-trumps-all’ exhibition presentation. The imperative to “get it right” is fundamentally flawed – fatally even. Why? Well, its actually not there to be had even if it was once imagine that it was.
Curiously, the so-called new technologies didn’t find their way into the refurbishment of, and the imagining of, the Royal Park campus. If it had, and the decision to do so had influenced programming in a 21st C context, it is reasonable to imagine some paradigm shifts in the institution’s cultural imaginings. The elements might have been put in place for such a shift in imagining cultural discourses and especially those going on around Tasmanian Aboriginality. These conversations need to linger longer and more widely. Digitally those opportunities are eminently available.
Once the Robinson’s Cup exhibition closed, and the white box made ready for a new/another idea, less than 10 objects of Tasmania Aboriginal cultural production remained on exhibition at the QVMAG. Furthermore, they appear in a colonial context in the “Colonial Gallery” and by extension as a kind of subliminal reinforcement of the ‘Truganini Myth’ widely abroad in Tasmania and the ‘Plomley Hybridity Thesis’ largely promulgated from within the institution. It is certainly problematic that in 2015 Launceston’s premier cultural institution fails so overtly to celebrate the region’s layered cultural realities by largely leaving out, and is seemingly disengaged with, Tasmanian Aboriginal musings.
Set against all this, Launceston histories include rich Aboriginal stories of cultural survival and vibrancy. There are powerful stories to be told but it seems are muffled by a city’s apparent predisposition for ’staying stum’, to go unjudged, and against whatever else, maintain the status quo.
Lola Greeno, a Tasmanian Aboriginal women, and a woman who is a member of the community that NJB Plomley identified as “hybrids”, had her Aboriginal cultural identity celebrated in 2014 in the QVMAG and nationwide.
Lola Greeno is Object’s, the Australian Design centre, eighth ‘Living Treasure’ and her celebratory exhibition opened in Launceston, her current home, and at the QVMAG. More to the point Lola Greeno is being acknowledged as a part of, and also as evidence of, the continuum of Tasmanian Aboriginality. But most of all, Lola Greeno has been acknowledged for her contribution to Australia’s increasingly inclusive multi-cultural, multi-dimensional, multi-faceted, cultural realities. Arguably, most of all its Lola's celebration of her belonging to place that is being acknowledged and treasured.
Somewhat extraordinarily, the living treasure award was not a QVMAG initiative and it might have been. Rather it was part of a national enterprise that was initiated by the Sydney based‘Object Design’ operation.
Notably the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre is headquartered in Launceston so any rationale that Launceston might be geographically removed from the centre of the Aboriginal discourse falls over in this circumstance.
Within the QVMAG’s collections there are two objects of interest to Tasmanians who muse upon their histories – their own and the objects’. They are the Benjamin Law busts portraying Truganini and Woureddy and they now have enormous symbolisms invested in them. They are currently languish in the QVMAG's reserve yet in a kind of way they once stood in ‘the museum’ as sentinels of a kind. All the while they were quietly telling different stories to different people who happened to muse upon them – and it was like that for rather a long time. However,the status of these objects has been contested in a contemporaneous context
Against the background of these busts once being somewhat omnipresent in the QVMAG Dr David Hansen says, “at the Tasmanian Museum (and I imagine also at the QVMAG) the Law portraits of Truganini and Woureddy were shown primarily as sculpture, as art (as their display in the institutions’ dedicated art galleries clearly implied), indeed, as arguably the finest portrait busts made in Australia during the first half of the C19th, and not as historical or ethnographic artefacts. As an art historian closely engaged with settler art images of Aborigines, I maintain that these sculptures (and their pendant, the Robinson portrait recently rediscovered by Gareth Knapman in the State Library of Victoria collection) were conceived as celebrity portraits of key figures in the most important issue in 1830s Vandiemonian current affairs, the Black War amnesty. Notwithstanding the horrors both previously and subsequently inflicted on the Palawa peoples, Law’s busts were notdesigned (nor I believe have they been used since) as triumphalist proclamations of the British ascendancy.” And, Hansen’s case is strong and evidence based. Unquestionably, Hansen has carried out what is the most extensive research relevant to these busts and how they may be imagined.
Yet when copies of these two busts, two of the 30 or so copies known internationally,were put up for sale at Sotheby’s a contentious filled ruckus broke out involving the artworld and cultural commentators all over Australia. At the QVMAG, Launceston’s copies were quietly put away after members of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community attempted to rest the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery’s copies from the museum.
Contention raged and the Hobart Mercury’s reporting of events gives some insights into the “Aboriginal art wrangle” – Sally Glaetzer, The Mercury, August 26, 2009 – “Academics have defended opposition to the sale of two art works, rejecting claims of political correctness gone mad … The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre opposed the planned auction of the busts of famous Tasmanian Aborigines Truganini and Woureddy on the basis of cultural sensitivity … The busts, which were expected to fetch up to $700,000, were withdrawn from sale just hours before Monday night's auction at Sotheby's in Melbourne … The busts, sculpted by Benjamin Law in the 1830s, are owned by a New South Wales family … The TAC's protest against the sale attracted scathing criticism from Mercury readers, who described it as "ridiculous" and "political correctness gone wrong ……….".
That these two busts might take on multifaceted symbolisms in multiple contexts is not without its ironies. The QVMAG reports that it is planning to return them to public view, paraphrased, “in the proposed Aboriginal Gallery.” This gallery has been in prospect and talked about for many years now but there has been no urgency in realising this stated goal. If this is all realised it might well pose a quite new set of questions to be grappled with.
In the effort to right past wrongs; to attend to the now evident need to be a participant in an inclusive discourse; and to finally start the process of the acknowledgement of Tasmanian Aboriginality within an institution that has struggled with the concept; simply placing these busts in an “Aboriginal Gallery” might not be as sensitive as it may first appear.
David Hansen alerts us to an ‘art context’, and an ambiguity, that these portrait busts might be; should be (?); need to be (?) viewed and understood within. Hansen reports from very close quarters in August 2009 that members of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community gathered on Sotheby’s doorstep and shouted ‘Sotheby’s, Sotheby’s, leave them alone! Let us take our ancestors home!’ Given that this is in the cultural memory, placing these busts in an Aboriginal Gallery in a ‘settler focused’ institution with, as they say, “form” … well it is unlikely to advance the discourse all that far.
Hansen’s essay 'Seeing Truganini’, among other things, attempted a reconciliation of a kind. His essay has met with both accolades and disdain. In a kind of a way it lit a fuse on one of the powder kegs that always promised to be taken notice of – eventually. There are others. David Hansen simply found himself somewhere where he had a chance to progress a dialogue and somehow he seemed to have found himself, finally, unable to turn back.
When (if?) the QVMAG, and Launceston, comes to such a point when there is no turning back what might the outcome be? Whatever it is, John Reynolds’, and Launceston’s, 1969 understanding of Tasmanian Aboriginality, and extinction, will almost certainly play no part at all in it given all that has happen since Reynolds wrote that opening sentence on Launceston’s history.
The Buddha tells us that "Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth" ... and then Galileo Galilei tells us ... "All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them."
Some things remain pretty much the same no matter how much places change, no matter what ideas are traded, no matter how the ownerships of places are variously understood. In writing a history of Launceston in the context of it being an "Australian city" John Reynolds unavoidably bumped up against its Tasmanian placedness. With the QVMAG, a Launcestonian institution, currently attempting to reinvent itself, it is burdened with its histories, Launceston's changing placedness and Tasmanian narratives of all kinds. While ever there is an imperative to 'own' places the ways they are placescaped will, as ever, be contested.
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| “The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.” William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar |
Ray Norman 2015 ... Click here to go to source
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