“Tahwattya (Hello)”: Remembering Tasmania’s Indigenous History Through Blak Books

As a writer it sickens me to know that the 12 Indigenous languages that existed here in Tasmania have been completely annihilated.

The surviving Palawa Kani language (literal translation meaning ‘Aboriginal Tasmanian people speak’) is a composite one, reconstructed by the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre from sections of the lost languages documented from and once spoken by eastern Tasmanian Aboriginals.

Thinking of this, one day I went into my local bookstore and bought four books on Tasmanian Indigenous culture and asked the clerk to wrap them in brown paper and give them away to anybody that came in enquiring about Indigenous books.

I returned a few days later to discover that it was a roaring success.

I went to every bookstore in Hobart over the next week and replicated the event — this time taking them into other stores or public places I knew received traffic and conversation.

A small crew of people are recreating my actions and we’re slowly galvanising a collective. A book exchange/club/bla(c)k voices revolution. We’ve shifted hundreds of titles now.

It sounds naïve saying change comes from reading books but I find faith in my own project.

“there is much sadness in our hearts as we mourn our dead.”

“takila-mana-mapali wingani payintrika waranta tangara pakana mana-mapali  krakapaka. waranta tunapri nara-mapali manta manta”.

In palawa kani this means “there is much sadness in our hearts as we mourn our dead. We will always remember them”.

I was alternatively going to title this article ‘The Curious Case of Ignoring Genocide, Stealing Babies and Forcibly Assimilating Aboriginals into Orwellian Breeding Programs and Hiding it, Then Ignoring it Permanently, in the Night Time’.

But I guess ‘tahwattya’ will do.

CW: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are warned that this article contains images of deceased persons.

I’ll spare you the gory details of the long history of racial discrimination in Tasmania, because as previously pointed out —  to many Australians, so long as there are Asians making dumplings on primetime television, all BIPOC should just shut the hell up.

Suffice it to say that Tasmanian Aboriginals were quite literally, royally fucked and continue to be erased today. Here’s a little bit about my history and the small thing I’m doing.

Here in the ancient wilds of beautiful Tasmania, many people — no less policy makers and governing powers — still circulate the dangerous ‘Final Solution’ fallacy. In 1973 the Director of Public Health expressed his belief in the final solution; that Tasmanian Aboriginals were eradicated. Even though the 2016 Census showed there are 23,000 of us here.

It’s truly a tragedy that there are people who look like me — a Pura-milk demigod — are walking around, being laughed at, and getting called “half-caste” every day by the descendants of the people who made us this way. It’s true there are no full-blooded Tasmanian Aboriginals alive today.

This sheer fact alone deserves a memorial. It’s haunting.

My mother was darker-skinned and more ‘Aboriginal looking’ than me, as many people have offensively commented on — and then when I look in the mirror, I see the barbaric success of the Stolen Generation. I see ethnic cleansing in my reflection each morning.

I am directly descended from one of the men in this photo.

Both of my grandparents on my mum’s side were children of the Stolen Generation.

My family spent their lives either living in shame, fear or hiding their Aboriginality. My great grandfather was a ‘blanket baby’; snatched at birth and put into the system and moved around through foster care and institutions.

He was deaf but medically labelled as of a ‘dull intellect’. He was literally given the legal Anglicised name of ‘Australia James Smith’, because they obviously weren’t being cruel enough. His family came from the camps (prisons) on Cape Barren Island; the place where “half-castes” were forced to live and die out, until they produced children to be taken and blended.

My great-grandmother’s clan came from Lunawanna-alonnah (Bruny Island)  and Nibberlin (the Derwent Valley). She was affectionately called ‘Black Mable’.

She never got to meet her father who was so dark-skinned he abandoned her, so she could try and “pass”. My own grandmother didn’t meet him until her mother’s funeral.

Mable’s brother was taken from birth to a home in Launceston where he was genitally mutilated twice. A practice of double circumcision of Indigenous boys was a common clinical practice for punishment, and to prevent sexual advancement.

Why I Try To Remember Tasmanian Indigenous Voices Through Blak Books

One of my Indigenous immediate family members was not revealed to me until much later in my life.

Learning about deeper Indigenous progeny, I was shocked when I made connections with relatives and learned how unique forced ethnic assimilation can be. Many people are deeply impacted by hidden ancestry but not surprised by the pain it can cause. Finding your family secret can be harder in ways you weren’t expecting. Even mentioning it can impact inherited traumas.

This is why sharing Indigenous voices does more than tell a story. It broadcasts hard truths.

So many books by BIPOC have changed the narrative of the world, and so while I know that many of these are popular, praised, and in circulation, the one failure I see on a zeitgeist scale is the absence of Indigenous and especially Indigenous Tasmanian voices.

Before my mum died, she begged me to not ignore my cultural legacy.

An enduring memory of mum was the little poems she’d hide for me that were written in what I thought was Klingon at the time: beautiful relics of Palawa Kani. We were camping one year when she was sick, and an elder sang to my brother and I to help us off to sleep.

We couldn’t make out the dialect but he told us it was a happy goodbye story about a wallaby and its joey parting ways in the bush.

Wulika (goodbye).

In that spirit, here are four blak books that we shuffled through stores today, which I highly recommend. Please think about going out and purchasing them:

Into The Heart Of Tasmania — Rebe Taylor

Tasmanian Aborigines: A History Since 1803 — Lyndall Ryan

The Black War — Nicholas Clements

Van Diemen’s Land — James Boyce

*Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

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Jie Eccles is a Pakana writer from lutruwita. He writes about Aboriginality, mental health, queerness and pop culture. He also spams Instagram with photos of his pet cow, Charlie.