1When the words ‘transport’ and ‘Tasmania’, or Van Diemen’s land as it was then called, are used together, they invariably conjure up images of convict transportation. In 1840, at the peak of transportation, three quarters of the population of Van Diemen’s Land were convicts or ex-convicts and their children.1 In all, between 1821 and 1852 some 70,000 convicts were transported to this forlorn and wind-swept island. Whilst there is no doubt that the conditions the convicts lived in were appalling, the main victims of the British settlement of Australia, the original Indigenous population, were, until very recently, forgotten in accounts of early colonial history. Before the arrival of the British, an estimated 4,000 Aborigines lived in Tasmania. Once British settlement began their numbers were rapidly decimated and, according to official Australian history, the last ‘full-blood male’ died in 1869 and the last ‘female’, in 1876. Exactly how many died and the causes of death are currently the subject of bitter debate among Australian historians and this paper does not intend to deal with that issue. Instead it will look at how one particular episode which occurred during this period, and which could be termed ‘Aboriginal transportation’, has been treated in contemporary fiction.

2Violence between the English settlers and the Aborigines escalated in the 1820s and Governor George Arthur was under increasing pressure to bring the Indigenous population ‘under control’. One of the ways he sought to do this was by appointing George Augustus Robinson, a British-born brick-layer and untrained preacher, as the official ‘Protector of the Aborigines’, charging him with the job of rounding up the remaining natives and transporting them to Wybelenna, a specially created settlement on Flinder’s Island in the Bass straits. In 1831, in the company of four other Europeans and six Aborigines, Robinson walked all around the coast of Tasmania seeking out the Aborigines and persuading them that they would have a better life if they came with him. In 1832, 135 of them were transported to Flinder’s Island and Robinson undertook to ‘civilise’ them; trying to convert them to Christianity and to the ‘White man’s ways’. Living conditions on the island, however, were appalling and disease rife. By 1847 there were only 47 Aborigines left. The settlement was closed down and the survivors transferred to Oyster Cove south of Hobart. The very real threat posed by the Indigenous population barely twenty years earlier was forgotten. The survivors were seen as the last specimens of a dying race and became objects of scientific curiosity. When they died, their skeletons were transported to museums and the ‘Tasmanian Aboriginals’ consigned to history as a race so primitive as to be barely human.

3The main source of knowledge of Aboriginal transportation to Flinder’s Island comes from the journals of Robinson himself; journals which are necessarily selective and biased but which were nevertheless heralded as containing the ‘true story’ of the demise of the Tasmanian Aborigines. This paper looks at how the material in these diaries is used in novels by three contemporary writers: The Savage Crows (1976)2 by the white Australian Robert Drewe, Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World (1985) by the Indigenous writer Mudrooroo3 and English Passengers4 (2000) by the English writer Matthew Kneale, one of the few books not written by an Australian author to have been short-listed for the Miles Franklin prize.

4Three meanings of the word ‘transport’ seem particularly appropriate in discussing these novels. Firstly, historical and cultural transport: how the writer transports the non-indigenous reader back in time and away to another culture. Secondly, emotional transport or the way in which the novels work on the readers’ emotions and finally, actual physical transport: the movement, voluntary or otherwise, of the various characters from one place to another.

5 In settler societies such as Australia, writing about the past has always been something of a national preoccupation as it is a way of creating founding myths and a sense of nationalism. Historical novels are often seen as an ideal compliment to ‘official’ history as they give flesh to dry facts, bringing the past alive and enabling the reader to identify with the protagonist. At the same time, historical novels are also a potentially subversive form. Official history is sanctioned by the government and, as has often been remarked, is written from the point of view of the winners. The novelist works outside official structures and answers only to himself. As Annalisa Oboe, has argued historical novels are particularly well suited to challenging orthodox history since they are traditionally set at times of conflict and one of their main functions is to ‘rescue for history the unsung figures of the past’.5

1 The Savage Crows

6Despite dealing with the past, The Savage Crows is not, in fact, a historical novel. Instead the ‘story’ of its contemporary hero, the white Australian Stephen Crisp, is continually interrupted by long extracts, supposedly from Robinson’s diaries, which Stephen is reading as part of his research for his thesis on what, with surprising prescience, he thinks of as the genocide of the Tasmanian Aborigines. In fact, most of the ‘diary entries’ were not written by Robinson but are pastiches by Robert Drewe. Rather than attempting to plunge the reader into the past, the diary entries are written to echo Stephen Crisp’s life in contemporary 1960s Australia, a world with which his original readers would have been only too familiar. Like the Tasmanians, Stephen Crisp’s world is slowly falling apart: his wife and his lover have left him, he is about to lose all contact with his daughter, his parents die, his best friend drowns, other friends are killed in car accidents, a neighbour falls out of a window, a few streets away there is a brutal murder... Like the Aborigines Stephen is powerless to prevent any of these deaths which occur in a seemingly random way and yet, unlike the Aborigines, Stephen feels responsible for them and an overwhelming sense of guilt: ‘Why had he left Jane? Why had Anna left him? Why was his fear of death getting out of hand? Why did guilt weigh upon him like a wet woollen overcoat?’ (9) Through identification with Stephen the reader comes to share Stephen’s feelings and doubts and thus to question the familiar version of white Australian history books.

7Importantly, by inviting the reader to share in Stephen’s feelings of guilt, the novel invites the reader to take responsibility for the past, something which many non-Indigenous Australians, including the current Prime Minister John Howard, are reluctant to do. No attempt is made to create a convincing Aboriginal character or to enter into their thoughts but, by drawing a parallel between Stephen’s emotions and those of the Aborigines, the Indigenous other is humanised and the stereotypical image of the primitive savage is challenged. That said, The Savage Crows remains very much a white novel; both the third person story of Crisp and the first person account by Robinson are white voices and there is no attempt to transport the reader into an unfamiliar Indigenous culture. Recent critics have tended to judge the novel rather harshly. David Kerr for example claims that ‘Drewe’s outrage at the sufferings inflicted on the Aboriginals is not matched by understanding of their situation. Too often he distorts or sentimentalises their lives by turning them into helpless victims’.6 Kerr goes on to deplore the absence of any description of Aboriginal culture and a failure to recognise Robinson’s dependence on the Aborigines during his period in the bush (63).

8However, as Susan K. Martin has pointed out, refusing to ‘ “get inside the head of” the other—the dead Tasmanian Aboriginal people’ is not necessarily a bad thing for a white novelist;7 Drewe’s novel can be criticised neither for seeking to appropriate an Aboriginal voice, nor for perpetuating misinterpretation of the Indigenous population. It should not be forgotten that at the time of writing, Drewe’s options were severely limited. Most of his original readers would have learnt that the Tasmanians were a primitive race, doomed to extinction and would have been ignorant of the scale of the atrocities committed against them. Early on in the novel Crisp clearly states his aim as being ‘an act of laying down, of getting it all on paper, everything, rather than the advancing of some proposition to be maintained by cogent argument and aimed at receiving some scholastic honour or other’ (14). He is not writing a thesis on Aboriginal culture but on the violence of the first European settlers. In a similar way, Drewe is not writing a historical novel with the Aborigines as the heroes but is aiming to make the reader aware that there are gaps in official history which need to be filled. He is seeking to create indignation, a questioning of white motives, not an empathic identification with indigenous culture.

2 Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World

9In an interview8 Mudrooroo, like Drewe, claimed that Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World was meant to play a role in ‘educating’ white readers about their country’s unsavoury past. However, he also wanted to write something with which Indigenous readers could identify and chose to satisfy these conflicting demands by writing a historical novel, not from a European point of view but from that of Wooreddy, the last male survivor from Bruny Island where Robinson was first posted.

10This attempt to rewrite history from an Aboriginal point of view poses a number of problems. Firstly, for Aborigines, the very idea of history is an alien concept as Aboriginal society does not see time as a linear, sequential process9. Secondly, their transmission of knowledge is oral and not written. Kateryna Arthur argues that the mere fact of writing oral Aboriginal stories down irremediably changes them: ‘Print is formalin to oral culture. It has built into it the same museum impulse that drives anthropologists to put Aboriginal skeletons on public display.’10

11Finally, and even, more problematic perhaps, is the fact that the novel is written in English. Obviously if a work is aimed at white Australians it must be written in English but English necessarily lacks the words to describe Aboriginal concepts. A quotation from another Indigenous writer, Alexis Wright, describing the Aboriginal view of the world, will, I hope, illustrate my point:

The stories of our country are ancient, so old that we best describe ourselves, our culture, languages, religion and law as coming from when time began. All of these stories come from the land, are connected to the land, and every aspect of the land; every aspect of the universe—sky, stars, storms, ocean, night or day, animals and fishes, and all seasons of the year, all belong to the creative spirits from the stories of the Dreamtime. These stories have sacred laws which are our religious beliefs. To be given these laws to uphold, you have to be born into this society and have undertaken a whole lifetime of learning. [...] It is easy to understand—the land is sacred and land is people. People are the land. The two are synonymous—one and the same.11

12Although Wright claims that it is ‘easy to understand’, it is obvious that for a European ‘people’ and ‘land’ are not ordinarily thought of as synonyms and that the words ‘Dreamtime’ and ‘Dreaming’, the only two terms English seems to have been able to come up with, are inadequate to convey the Aboriginal sacred beliefs which govern the way they live. A final difficulty, as Wright hints at here, is that much Aboriginal knowledge is reserved for the initiated and cannot therefore be made public in a novel.

13The challenge to create through English something which is recognisably not English is not a new one. Many nineteenth century writers created Aboriginal characters whose speech differentiated them from the white heroes. The following is a typical example: ‘White Mary—you midney. That fellow medsin man— husband belonging to me. Him come close-up lon-a srub—throw ‘im spear, nulla-nulla—plenty look out Wombo. Ba’al Wombo got ‘im spear’.12 Such dialogues are characterised by grammatically incorrect English, limited and often mis-used vocabulary and the occasional Aboriginal (or pseudo-Aboriginal) word, supposedly proving authenticity. While these dialogues may have an interest for the modern reader as an illustration of an earlier writer’s prejudice, they can in no way be said to transport the reader into a different culture.

14Perhaps to avoid falling into this trap, Mudrooroo makes very little use of direct speech. Occasional Aboriginal words are used in the text (such as num or Ria Warrawah) but there is neither glossary nor translation. For Justin MacGregor, ‘avoiding translation demonstrates the need for context to accord meaning’,13 thus implicitly supporting the idea that Indigenous languages are not English translated but a different way of seeing the world. MacGregor goes on to argue that the English language is constantly ‘othered’ in the text ‘marginalized by its inability to relate Aboriginal concepts’ (117). At times, readers are even specifically told that they are being refused access to traditional knowledge, the women’s ceremonies, for example, are not described because they are to be ‘carefully avoided and not even to be talked about’ (Mudrooroo: 169). In other words, rather than letting white readers think they can easily share Aboriginal culture, they are constantly kept at a distance, constantly reminded that there are things they will never understand.

15Although the book does not enable the non-indigenous reader to gain any real understanding of Aboriginal beliefs it does accomplish two important things. Firstly it shows the Aborigines as humans; ‘people’ who think and feel, people with a right to decide how they want to live their lives and ‘deserving justice, humanity and dignity’ (Oboe: 94). Secondly, and very much linked to the first, it shows that there is another side to colonial history. The usual binary opposites are reversed, for example, the white settlers are seen as aggressive, inhuman and unnatural with Wooreddy fearing that they may be cannibals and wondering if the strange sounds they make can possibly be a language.

3 English Passengers

16English Passengers is a post-modern historical novel which calls into question the whole colonial enterprise. Kneale claims to have chosen to write about Tasmania simply because ‘it seemed to be a succinct summary of all that was worst about the Empire’.14 Like other works of post-modern historical fiction the book carefully creates its historical ‘credentials’. The novel is framed within supposedly factual documents. At the beginning, a facsimile of the front cover of the Reverend Wilson’s pamphlet A Proof against the Atheisms of Geology and at the end an Anglo-Manx glossary, preceded by a copy of an authentic letter about George Vandiemen, an Aboriginal boy sent to England to be educated. The catalyst for the plot is the 1857 Indian Mutiny and mention is made of the ‘Black Line’ (the farcical attempt to form a human chain across Tasmania and to capture the remaining Aborigines). A few ‘real’ historical figures also make brief appearances. However, the names of all the real major characters have been changed and the plot owes more to the picaresque tradition than to the writing of historians.

17The novel alternates short passages written in the first person from the point of view of twenty different characters including George Alder, the Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, George Bain, an ‘employee of the New World Land Company’, Jack Harp, an escaped convict turned sealer, Ben Hayes, a racist trigger-happy farmer and Emily Seaton, the native born wife of a London doctor. This juxtaposition of points of view creates a varied and believable account of everyday life in colonial Tasmania and includes several characters with whom the reader can identify.

18Like Mudrooroo, Kneale gives a voice to the Aborigines and arguably the most stylistically interesting voice in the novel is that of Peevay, the half caste son of Walyeric, Kneale’s fictional name for the legendary female warrior Walyer. In many ways Peevay is, like Wooreddy, conscious that the world as he knows it is coming to an end and like Wooreddy claims that ‘enduring was [his] special skill’ (48). However, I would argue that Peevay is a far superior literary creation to Wooreddy. Unlike his mother, who believes it is possible to physically fight the whites, Peevay comes to the conclusion that the only way to defeat them is to learn their ways and that this means learning their language. Peevay has a unique speaking voice, the result of never having been formally taught English but of having picked it up from those around him. His vocabulary is a mixture of convict slang, the biblical language of the missionaries, formal terms from Government letters and words of his own invention:

It is my fine purpose, to give them teachings. I tell them writing and LAWS, white men’s tricks and BIBLE CHEATING and more. They must know everything so they can endure. Who knows perhaps one day they can fight those heinous pissers back. This is my dream. This is my heartfelt desire deep inside my breast, and I will strive for it every day (450).

19As this quotation shows the way his thoughts are transcribed breaks with the conventions for rendering the speech and thoughts of non-native speakers of English. As J.M. Coetzee has argued at length, ‘a linguistically particularized rendering of the speech and thought of non-natives is rare in fiction’.15 When the novelist does write in such a way as to make the reader imagine that the words he is reading have a foreign original behind them, this all too often has the unfortunate effect of seeming to be a reflection of the ‘quality of mind of its speaker’; the native uses simple language because he is mentally incapable of complex thought (Coetzee: 128). Peevay’s vocabulary and sentence structure are complex, not simplified. Moreover, his invented words are not only a reflection of his Aboriginal culture but also a criticism of white culture as the expression ‘bible cheating’ above illustrates. I suggest that this active appropriation of English is both a very successful way of illustrating the shock of the meeting of two cultures and also of showing how the language of the coloniser can be turned against them.

20If Peevay’s voice is intended to create empathy in the reader, the voice of two of the three eponymous English Passengers invites only repulsion and forms a stringent attack on two of the driving forces behind imperialism: religion and science. The Reverend Geoffrey Wilson is a self-centred religious bigot whose belief that the Garden of Eden is to be found in Tasmania is the impetus which sets the plot in motion. Dr Thomas Potter is a Darwinian scientist, writing a treatise on the physical and mental characteristics of the different races and he has no qualms about stealing indigenous corpses to further his research. Neither man has anything to recommend him and the reader can only be appalled at the idea that such men should have had any influence in the running of colonies.

4 Physical Transport

21In all three novels it is the whites who are seen to be continually on the move, not purposefully like the Aborigines who, as a nomadic people, necessarily travelled from one place to another in search of food, but in a pointless quest for something else. ‘Robinson was restless’ states Stephen Crisp early on in The Savage Crows (Drewe: 39). Perpetually seeking something better Robinson moves first from London to Tasmania, then leaves the relative comfort of Hobart to travel around the island rounding up the Aborigines, later, abandoning the Aborigines to their fate, and moving from Flinder’s Island to Port Phillip. Not only does his travelling fail to bring him any personal satisfaction but it also inflicts suffering both on his own family and on the indigenous population with whom he comes into contact.

22Mudrooroo’s novel, offers even more damaging images of Robinsons’s restlessness. Whereas the Aborigines walk at a measured pace and are capable of walking for hours, Robinson ‘raced off at a fast trot’ (41) and soon exhausts himself. Descriptions of him ‘Rush [ing] to and fro along the bank in his excitement’ (74) make him sound like a dog rather than a person and highlight how completely out of touch he is with the natural environment. His restlessness and perpetual dissatisfaction can be read as symptomatic of colonialism in general with imperial powers perpetually seeking other lands to conquer.

23In the 1960s, this restlessness persists and Stephen Crisp travels all over Australia, seeking, and failing, to find a part of the country where he feels at home. One of the most telling images of the damage caused by Europeans travelling across Australia comes when he is on the Indian-Pacific train with his young daughter Wendy who is suffering from diarrhoea: ‘Behind them the Nullarbor Plain was strewn with soiled disposable diapers. Their garbage chute was choked with them. Little Wendy had defecated her way across the continent’ (Drewe: 79). Only at the end of the novel does Crisp undertake a purposeful journey when he decides to go and see Tasmania for himself and to meet the descendants of the Tasmanian Aborigines and the white sealers on Cape Barren Island. He goes hoping that they ‘may be the link in it all, the whole business, the bridge between the past and a longed-for tranquil future’ (248). His meeting with them is indeed cathartic and frees him from the burden of guilt, symbolised by his removal of the ‘brown’ ticks from under his (white) skin on the way back to mainland Tasmania. And yet, as Susan K. Martin has pointed out, the end of the novel is highly ambiguous. While the Blue Plum is recognised as leader of his people, he is ‘represented in terms which position him as entirely alien to (white) Australia’ (Martin: 62). Crisp has travelled sufficiently to go beyond guilt but not yet far enough to accept the Indigenous population as equals.

24In English Passengers transport is even more futile and is characterised by self-interest and duplicity. The Reverend Wilson’s expedition is doomed to failure even before it leaves as they travel on board a Manx smuggling ship whose captain initially has no intention of going to Australia and so does not invest in the proper charts to enable him to navigate in Australian waters. Once they start walking in the Tasmanian bush their incompetence and inability to work together is almost fatal. Both Wilson and Potter get their comeuppance during the voyage home. Wilson is so traumatised by the return journey that he finishes his life as a holy fool on the Isle of Wight. Potter is accidentally murdered by one of the Manx crewmembers and in a final ironic twist, his skeleton, which has been salvaged from the wreck of the Manx ship together with his journal, is exhibited alongside the ‘specimens’ he collected and labelled, with the help of his journal, as ‘Unknown male presumed Tasmanian Aborigine. Possible victim of human sacrifice’ (454). Only Timothy Renshaw, an errant younger son, sent away by his family, left for dead by Potter and Wilson and forced into immobility by a broken leg, comes to understand, to respect and even to love the Australian bush: ‘ [The land] was quite beautiful in a wild way [...] Even the cries of the birds, which I had at first found harsh, became pleasing to my ear. I would sometimes wake in the morning with a curious feeling, which I could not explain, that I was at home’ (373). He alone, of the three English passengers chooses to remain in Australia. Their respective fates seem to suggest that Colonialism could have been very different if only the English had taken the time to stay in one place and to get to know the new country properly.

25For much of the novel Peevay too is a restless traveller, not like the English passengers by choice but because white settlement has made his traditional way of life impossible. Peevay is the only character to undertake a final successful journey. After watching his community die in Hobart and believing himself to be ‘the final Palawa’ (418), Peevay returns to his white sealer father’s island, intending to kill him in order to accomplish his dead mother’s last wishes. Instead of his father, who died of natural causes some years before, he discovers a community of half-castes and moves in with them, finding perhaps not happiness but reassurance in the idea that the land will not be left entirely to ‘white scuts’ and providing a direct challenge to all those who claim the last Tasmanian died in 1876.

26Transportation in Van Diemen’s Land did not only concern white convicts. The forcible removal of the Aborigines to what was for them an unknown island, undoubtedly hastened their deaths. Whereas convicts knew they had been transported only for the ‘term of their natural lives’ and viewed death as a possible form of escape when conditions became too harsh, the Aborigines rightly feared that transportation would continue with their corpses. In different ways these three novels transport their readers back to this era, forcing them to think about their country’s past and to question their pre-conceived ideas about early Australian history, a necessary step towards reconciliation and the possibility of a shared future.