Tasmanian Time, or, One Hundred Years of Melancholy
P A R T 3
T a s m a n i a n T i m e , o r ,
O n e H u n d r e d Y e a r s o f
M e l a n c h o l y
1 8 7 6 – 1 9 7 8
C H A P T E R 8
Trans-civilisational Depopulation Anxiety
I’ve been to a minor place/ And I can say I like its space/ If I am gone and with no trace/
I will be in a minor place
(Will Oldham, 2000)
I, in opposition to these views, am prepared to assert that race is everything in human history; that the races of men are not the result of accident; that they are not convertible into each other by any contrivance whatever.
(Robert Knox, 1850)
This chapter is the site of a writing that is radically subjective. It moves from the proposition that situatedness takes the place of the economic base in Althusser’s famous formulation whereby ideological enunciations are determined in the final instance by a productive infrastructure even though that final, eschatological moment never actually arrives.[i] It supposes also that the subjectivity that is writing here, my subjectivity, is constituted by cultural theoretical discourses that are made to resonate in a singular way through being taken up in a local context. The faltering first encounters with theoretical formulations, the initial tentative attempts at disciplined academic thinking, speaking and writing don’t take place in a vacuum. We acquire these capacities within a specific institutional context which is itself part of a larger concrete, practico-inert community. While it would be naive to suggest that the attributes of location exert the preponderant influence on the process of familiarisation and apprenticeship in question — a process that Deleuzians might call a becoming-theoretical — it would probably be a less excusable faux pas to ignore their impact altogether.
In this chapter, I delve further into the amateur aporetics that have been operating in a latent way throughout this book. I write about place in a personal way, while remaining fully aware that writing the personal in this context is a double impossibility. First of all, despite a number of recent and not-so recent developments in the new, new humanities — fictocriticism, para-literature, confessional and other hybrid theoretical forms — the purely subjective still fails to qualify as acceptable academic writing. Second, no matter how partial and inadequate it might be, the always already academic character of the putative graduate student subjectivity that has been force-feeding itself theory on and off for much of its adult life, is barred, from the full plenitude, the surplus enjoyment, the lack of a lack that might have been the opportunity cost of preserving an untouched, pristine, and in the Lacanian sense “real”, self.
As Dipesh Chakrabarty makes clear in Provincializing Europe, the private side of the split subject of modernity is both reflected in, and produced through, particular types of writing: the diary, the intimate correspondence, the autobiographical novel.[ii] We might be seen to be affirming certain postmodernist critiques of interiority in arguing that this distinction is now eroded, if not for the fact that Chakrabarty himself shows us that the particular experience of modernity in Bengal produced subjects for which this internal, non-social dimension was also conspicuously absent.[iii] Different modernities, we are told, produce different modern subjects.[iv] The impossibility of separating the purely academic layers of my subjectivity from the untouched kernel to which, in “weaker” humanist moments, I imagine they have attached themselves, is thus shown to be neither a spatially nor an historically specific phenomenon. In directing my unsteady, authorial gaze towards the place where I live, the place in which I grew up, the place in which I became familiar with this mode of writing, I am setting in motion a complex epistemological constellation, that is not for all that, worthy of contemplation in its own right.
This chapter is an inquiry into the uses of history in a minor place. Its immediate jurisdiction is Tasmania, but its implications and observations are intended to cross from the particular to the general through the trope of instantiation. It turns then, around a number of questions: how do the historical narratives that circulate in a given community impact upon the lives, both collective and individual, of the members of that community? How are these multifarious narratives taken up, resisted, repudiated and ignored? How do these stories of the past unfold into projections of what will be? How is imagined futurity bound up with a lived relationship to the discourses that construct the past? How are local histories, personal histories, connected to more generalised communal narratives of belonging?
With this string of queries, I will attempt a provisional unraveling of an historiographical strand that plays an especially important role in the structuration of the Tasmanian archive, a strand that threads itself around the decimation and displacement of the indigenous Palawa people that took place here from 1803 onward. My intention here is not to consider the genocidal logic of the Tasmanian invasion in its own right so much as, to paraphrase Stephen Greenblatt, trace the circulation of archival energies set in motion by the enunciations which give it form in the present.[v]
In this chapter, I connect the legacy of story and memory built up around the traces of the “vanquished” race of the Aboriginal Tasmanians with other discursive threads that engage the question of human settlement in Tasmania. How have the stories which documented the wholesale disappearance of the human inhabitants of Tasmania transmutated into, and been overtaken by, accounts which emphasise a diffuse continuity of culture spreading out from the narrow focal point of the Furneaux Islands settlements to the state more generally? How does this narrative configuration both overlap with and underpin contemporary anxieties about the demographic disaster that academics like Natalie Jackson foresee befalling the modern population? How do we sustain and suspend the proposition that there is something peculiarly misanthropic about the landmass that we call Tasmania without lapsing into an intractable mysticism?
The last of these queries responds to Jim Davidson’s claim that Tom Haydon’s infamous documentary film of 1978, The Last Tasmanian, contained a subplot in which it was intimated that for whatever quasi-metaphysical reason, the modern population of the island was destined to follow its indigenous predecessors into oblivion:
Implicit in Haydon’s film, with its opening section showing how isolation led the Tasmanian Aborigines to regress — so that they ended up with simpler technology than they possessed a few thousand years earlier — was the suggestion that a gentler version of the same fate may well overtake the usurping whites. The shambling gait and inarticulateness of one or two of the interviewees reminds us that Tasmanian gothic does not mean merely picturesqueness, or a pleasing aesthetic treatment of past sorrows, but also a great deal of continuing pain, muddles and sense of defeat.[vi]
The threshold separating the cultural epochs of indigenous and non-indigenous Tasmania was given definitive form by an abrupt narrative closure sutured onto the race history of the former by a loose affiliation of historians and administrators aligned with the latter. In occluding the brief period of acknowledged co-presence spanning from 1803 to Trukanini’s death in 1876 — the event that inaugurates the one hundred years of melancholy — the trope of total annihilation informed a discursive topography split into two parts. The autochthonous, nature-encoded ahistoricism of the indigenous culture was pushed to one side of this topography — in Freudian terms, the unconscious side — while the side of self-presence was filled out with the tentative instantiation of settler modernity installed by the displaced Europeans. The problem of race relations and narrative history in Tasmania was thus set up from the get-go as a re-run of the old Freudian saw: “Where Id was [...] there Ego shall be.”
The definitive splitting enacted by the texts which smuggled the civilisational clean break into this historiographical field is complicated by the fact that they were forced to deal with the very interstitial period whose termination they announced. Even though it was not until the publication of Lyndall Ryan’s The Aboriginal Tasmanians that the break between the periods of indigenous and non-indigenous inhabitation of the island was finally confirmed as anything other than clean and final, the authors responsible for erecting the line dividing these two epochs had by necessity to direct their focus toward its constitutive outside: the interval of co-presence. That this necessity produced a resistance should not surprise us, when we consider that the period of dual occupation was itself experienced across various institutional fields as the opposite of what Chakrabarty calls the “not-yet” of imperial historicist time. The imaginary waiting room of history into which non-Western peoples with a claim to political modernity were ushered by their colonial administrators, was replaced in the Tasmanian case with a windswept island and a distended stay of execution. This was a time, in other words, that an entire phalanx of powerful people could not be rid of quickly enough.
Which is not to say that it doesn’t serve also, as the locus of some of the most influential historical writings on the frontier experience in Tasmania. The imposing textual edifice built around the life of George Augustus Robinson, for instance, is set within a temporal horizon defined by co-presence. In spite of the layers of instability that problematise their truth-status, Robinson’s field diaries remain an indispensable point of access into a diachrony of dual possession in Tasmania. Perhaps more accurately, they serve as a site of witness to a slow replacement of indigenous temporality with a utilitarian, goal-orientated time. Umarrah’s transformation of Robinson’s pursuit of the Big River Tribe into a tragi-comic wild goose chase, for instance, is read by some historians as a cunning attempt on the part of the Aboriginal chief to impede the completion of the Friendly Mission and thus delay the concomitant inevitability of exile to the Furneaux Islands.[vii] The infamous twitching breast which Robinson so grudgingly allows dictate the party’s course, however, might also be taken as a somatic memento mori of a non-linear temporality, a languid non-quantifiable time whose own time was almost up.[viii]
The cleft that separates the two sides of this discursive topography is narrowed, and perhaps even closed up entirely, I suggest, by the overlaying of the colonial extermination with what is constructed as a statistically inexorable post-colonial decline of the superimposed culture. From the angle I take here, the tendency to represent the transition between the pre-modern and the modern in Tasmania as a clean break looks to be motivated by something other than a loyalty to the disciplinary protocols of what Dominick LaCapra calls the self-sufficient research paradigm of empiricist historiography.[ix] In retrospect, the accepted wisdom that the Aborigines were destroyed entirely takes on the form of a coping mechanism designed to shut down the operations of a volatile moral and social dilemma. In its basic linguistic form, the constative declaration — “There are no Aborigines left in Tasmania” — functions as an anxiety-reducing lexia, not dissimilar to the kind of polarising statements that Kleinian theorists identify with the paranoid/schizoid state.[x]
In what follows, I elaborate on the overturning of the thesis of complete annihilation and conduct a survey into what I term “complementary expressions of concern” about the depopulation of Tasmania. These statements are drawn, on the one hand, from historical sources recording testimony gathered by witnesses to the genocide of the Aboriginal Tasmanians, colonial subjects without direct relationships with the indigenous inhabitants and administrators even further removed from the cut and thrust of frontier interaction; and on the other, from contemporary, 21st-century academic work on demographic projections. The symmetries that unite these speech acts, scrunch together the historical interval between their variegated moments of issue and testify in an allegorical fashion to the contrivance built in to the civilisational clean break. The thesis of complete annihilation has been shown up as a frail fiction by the performative voicing of Aboriginal identity, and with that exposure, the sun-clear binarisation of cultural occupancy proposed by the extinctionists has also been eclipsed. The epochs of indigenous and modern Tasmania cannot be cleaved down the middle and there is no unbridgeable chasm that divides them. The mutual subjection to depopulation anxiety is just one motif that can be put into circulation to demonstrate this.
The first set of utterances I examine here take the Aboriginal population as their object and can be divided into internally and externally situated remarks. On the one hand, historical sources like Robinson’s field diaries, described by Ryan as the bible of Tasmanian Aboriginal culture, provide us with first hand descriptions of expressions attributed to members of a number of different indigenous tribes that alternatively bewail, protest and mourn the reduction in numbers caused by the arrival of the colonisers.[xi] These present tense responses to a cultural trauma unfolding in an anterior “now” are buttressed on either side by remembered accounts of earlier violations and anticipations of future calamity. Take the following accounts recorded by Robinson at the Bruny Island station where he served as storekeeper from April, 1829: