Jennifer Bird review of Joel Stephen Birnie, My People’s Songs: How an Indigenous Family Survived Colonial Tasmania

(Clayton: Monash University Publishing, 2022), 233 pp., PB $34.95, ISBN 9781922633187

*WARNING: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are advised that this article contains sensitive material.

Colonisation has disrupted Indigenous communities’ traditional cultural practices across the globe. It has changed how Indigenous peoples have engaged with the world and imposed Western ideals upon them. Their languages were restricted or banned, and many were physically removed from their culture and all it represented. Contemplating the process of colonisation over hundreds of years in Australia and systematic government-enforced child removal practices brings into question what constitutes family for Indigenous communities. Why are the genealogies of Australia’s Indigenous peoples expected to be proved by linear bloodline? This proof seeks to legitimise or delegitimise individuals’ links to their birthright, culture and Country. There is no scope for understanding how these practices may contest Indigenous community cultural beliefs, nor to believe colonial documents may record information in error.

In My People’s Songs: How an Indigenous Family Survived Colonial Tasmania, Joel Stephen Birnie explores three biographies of his family to question the ‘westernised narratives of their lives, cultures and identities’ (p. xv). His goal is to decolonise and re-examine the effects of colonisation on their ‘social, cultural and political history’ and to ‘find the authentic voices within’ (p. xv). He discredits information recorded in colonial documents and repeated by scholars. With a focus on matriarchs, he calls genealogies into question and reimposes them with the information he understands to be true.

Birnie’s book is presented in three parts, focusing on Tarenootairer (c. 1806–1858) and her two surviving daughters, Mary Ann Arthur (c. 1821–1871) and Fanny Cochrane Smith (c. 1832–1905).¹ Part 1, ‘A Weeping Woman’, a title that correlates with the meaning of Tarenootairer’s name, provides a haunting opening to the book. She was likely from the Pinterrairer peoples of the north-eastern coastal plains of the island now known as Tasmania. Her traditional life as a youth was interrupted by being forcibly taken and traded among the colonial sealers who frequented the coast in the early nineteenth century. This form of slavery, Birnie contends, had become a gainful business that depended on Indigenous women and children (p. 7). It was shrouded in degradation, brutality and violence. Around 1819, Tarenootairer was sold to middle-aged Scottish sealer George (Geordy) Robinson, which resulted in the birth of her eldest-known daughter, Mary Ann. Tarenootairer was just thirteen or fourteen years old at the time.

While the Black War in Van Diemen’s Land—attempting to exterminate or round up all remaining Indigenous peoples and relocate them to a new settlement on an outlying island—was an act of violence and dispossession, it also emancipated Tarenootairer and her children from Geordy Robinson. She was to join George Augustus Robinson’s conciliation party and play a pivotal role in succeeding events. She was a skilled tracker, and her knowledge of her homeland was critical to Robinson’s mission. Being relocated to the Aboriginal settlement of Wybalenna on Flinders Island, however, echoes the conditions suffered by many Indigenous peoples across Australia for several generations. Men were engaged in manual labour, while women were involved in domestic duties. Rations were insufficient, European clothing inadequate, housing unhealthy, and Christianity and English lessons were prescribed.

But Tarenootairer’s greatest achievement, as Birnie confirms, was her very survival. In 1847, the forty-six remaining Indigenous people were relocated to a new settlement at Oyster Cove. By 1855, only sixteen were left, including Tarenootairer and her daughter Mary Ann. She had survived dispossession, violence, loss, forced child removal and government-imposed confinement. Were she to rest in peace after her death at around fifty-two years old (reported as sixty-five in a newspaper account), the weeping woman may have been silent. But like fellow former Wybalenna residents, Truganini and several others, her remains were exhumed, examined and exhibited as specimens, replicating the violence and dispossession in death as she experienced in life.

Part 2, ‘A Femme de Chambre’ (meaning chambermaid), examines Mary Ann’s life. Her childhood reflected that of her mother. She, too, was forcibly removed and sent to live with colonists. She worked for George Aylwin, a whale oil merchant and candle manufacturer, and his wife Harriet, a seamstress, in Launceston. Within two years, they placed Mary Ann in the Queen’s Orphan School, and, due to the lack of records, Birnie suggests several scenarios for the move: the Aylwin’s obligation to care for the child was removed upon her biological father’s death; the birth of the Aylwin’s second daughter, who they named Mary Ann; the establishment of Wybalenna where Mary Ann was to go; and the passing of the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act by the British Parliament. All or a combination of these scenarios are entirely plausible.

On Wybalenna, Mary Ann was reunited with Tarenootairer but lived with other girls at the storekeeper’s house. At about fifteen years old, she became the first Indigenous teacher at the settlement, and Tarenootairer, one of the pupils. Birnie reveals this heralded ‘the beginning of Mary Ann’s matriarchal role in the lives of her own family’ (p. 60) and the captive community. Her wedding at age sixteen to fellow Orphan School resident Walter George Arthur marked the first instance of many where she and her marriage were ‘used as tools for the colony’s socio-political agendas’ (p. 62). Although the marriage was abusive, Robinson held the couple up as ‘the premier example of successful colonial appropriation’ (p. 65). In 1839 he took them, along with a few other inhabitants of the settlement, to the Port Phillip District (now known as Victoria), where he had been appointed chief protector of Aborigines. Three years later, being of little use, they were (unwillingly) sent back to Wybalenna.

Having experienced a different way of life in Port Phillip, the returning residents became vocal in their opposition to the authoritarian administration and, as Birnie states, ‘Mary Ann and Walter became the voices of their captive people and … established their own voices in Indigenous Tasmanian history’ (p. 69). They were instrumental in writing a petition to Queen Victoria about the settlement conditions under Superintendent Henry Jeanneret. On another occasion, Mary Ann spoke out about the cruel treatment of the Indigenous children by the catechist Robert Clark and his wife. As a result, her fourteen-year-old sister, Fanny Cochrane, and several other children were placed in her care. These examples, Birnie suggests, signify ‘a new era of Indigenous self-empowerment at Wybalenna’ (p. 71). Mary Ann’s political actions through seeking ‘personal independence from paternalistic governance’ and unwillingness ‘to be a mere “femme de chambre” to the administrators’ households’ solidified her as a ‘matriarch among the Indigenous captives’ (p. 76).

Her role as matriarch continued at Oyster Cove, and while it is not clear whether she birthed children of her own, she established deep maternal bonds with her siblings and the children in her care. The family continued to be an object of curiosity for the colonists, and Mary Ann, the subject of many artworks and photographs. As representations of the ‘last of the Tasmanian Aborigines’, they were depicted as having adopted the colonial lifestyle, yet subservient and diminished. Walter died unexpectedly in 1861, and in 1866 Mary Ann married an Englishman around thirty years her senior. Unfortunately, the cycle of alcohol-fuelled domestic violence continued. Mary Ann’s health deteriorated, and in 1871 she died aged fifty. Sadly, her death was barely acknowledged, and no family members or mourners participated in the funerary proceedings; she was far removed from her matriarchal role and her powerful position in the community.

Part 3 approaches Fanny Cochrane’s biography with the provocative title ‘A Vicissitude of Virtue?’ Fanny’s early life was transient, being moved variously between the Clarks (who assigned her the surname Cochrane) and the Orphan School, with brief intervals with Tarenootairer and Mary Ann at Wybalenna. This forced removal, Birnie claims, caused the ‘deliberate destruction of Indigenous familial ties [resulting] in a disconnect between Fanny and her family’ (p. 125). He considers this ‘fuelled her apparent volatile behaviour to follow’ (p. 125). Indeed, the account of Fanny’s youth is harrowing. She was subjected to cruel treatment and appalling conditions at the hands of the Clarks. Then, aged around twelve or thirteen, she was raped repeatedly by a convict, who also coerced her to steal supplies for him and threatened harm to her and the Clarks. When she alerted the Clarks, she was punished for her ‘inappropriate conduct’ (p. 128), flogged often and locked in a trunk at night for her own safety and apparently for the household’s protection. She was eventually moved into the care of Mary Ann. Here was another account of a disrupted and complicated life, with little chance of Fanny, like the matriarchs of her family, having stability or safety. As Birnie points out, she had little choice but to play the assigned role of the scripted colonial narrative ‘of the “civilised savage”’ in an attempt to integrate herself among her oppressors or else ‘succumb to the despair, disease and inevitable death that were characteristic of the Aboriginal establishment’ (p. 133).

Reminiscent of her matriarchs, Fanny partnered with an older non-Indigenous man—an Englishman and former convict—although she was twenty-two and not a child. They had eleven children: six sons and five daughters. Fanny gained some colonial respectability for marrying a ‘gentleman’ and was exempted from being ‘fodder … for the colony’s propaganda machine’ (p. 145) to which the remaining residents of Oyster Cove were subjected. This social standing, however, was to affect her eligibility for a government pension and a land grant that played out in both parliament and the court where there was debate around her being the ‘last of the Tasmanian Aborigines’ and her ‘caste’ and, therefore, her entitlement to the claims (pp. 149–57). But it was her public image of religiosity, Birnie explains, that fed propaganda: she was a devout Christian image of ‘a singular colonial success story’ (pp. 159–60) and founding member of the Methodist Church at Nicholls Rivulet, ‘the first active Indigenous congregation in Tasmania’ (p. 176), along with her two sons. And yet she clung to her Aboriginal spiritual culture. Birnie contends that Fanny, as matriarch, would have fostered traditional customs in her children alongside the public-facing ‘culture of the paternal coloniser’ (p. 166). Unlike her sister, Fanny’s death at age seventy-four saw around four hundred people attend her funeral service.

As Birnie indicates, Fanny ‘had a strength of will equalled only by her mother and sister’ (p. 184). Her voice is immortalised on the wax cylinder recordings made by Horace Watson in 1899 and 1903 for the Royal Society of Tasmania, which lay dormant in the Tasmanian Archives for decades before being rediscovered. The eight cylinders contain the only records of the original Tasmanian Aboriginal languages spoken and sung by ‘the last surviving fluent speaker of those languages’.² In 2017, they were placed on the UNESCO Memory of the World register for being ‘of immense cultural significance as they provide a tangible connection to the voices of the ancestors of Tasmanian Aboriginal people’.³ That Fanny’s voice (instead of her bones) continues to be examined and analysed is evidence of the curiosity and colonial gaze to which this family and their people have always been subjected.

Birnie’s book questions Westernised, patrilineal narratives and focuses on the matriarchs of his family to restore Indigenous social, cultural and political histories. He deconstructs the fragmentary evidence and reassesses it alongside oral family histories and other records, such as contemporary art works and photographs. In reconstructing the narratives, he provides a deeper understanding of the dialogues between cultural and colonial structures to trace Tarenootairer and her daughters’ complicated lives. More importantly, Birnie adds Indigenous perspectives to their subjugated stories. Birnie also provides glimpses into Indigenous family relations. One instance relates to Truganini’s role. He refers to Truganini becoming a surrogate matriarch to Tarenootairer’s family upon her death, which ‘was of such strength that some of Fanny’s eventual 11 children, never knowing Tarenootairer personally, would cite Truganini as their grandmother’ (p. 48). That Truganini stepped in to assume the role is a testament to the importance of matriarchal cultural responsibilities. However, proving ancestry one way or the other is problematic, and Birnie shows this. Colonial practices of desecrating, exhuming, examining and exhibiting the remains of these family members, and their provenance, render them unsuitable for verification. No records exist proving parentage, and those that do may be incorrect. Government-enforced child removal practices have contributed to displaced and lost family lineage. Western practices have inextricably hindered Indigenous people from proving their bloodline. In any case, it is up to the Indigenous community, family groups and individuals to decide who is family and who is not. Birnie’s effort in My People’s Songs is an important contribution in doing so.