The first time I came to know about Lanney the last full blooded aborigine male of Tasmania who died in March 2 in 1869 was twenty four years ago when I was living in Rosebery a remote mining town in the deep jungles in the heart of Tasmania. I was on a visit under UN fellowship to study gold mining in Australia-I was an exploration Geologist at that time- and I was very keen to make a visit to Tasmania. That interest in Tasmania has a history going back to my schooldays. One day my geography teacher showed us the map of Australia and told us about Tasmania the cone shaped island at the bottom of the bulge of the continent. I did not know why I was so fascinated by Tasmania. In the atlas there were several other equally or more remote regions. But it was Tasmania that kindled my imagination. I dreamed of going there one day. Thirty five years later I could make that dream come true!Lanney-The last TasmanianAborigine
Towards the end of 1984 I got an opportunity to go to Australia on a UN fellowship to study the mining operations for gold. I stayed about a year in Australia studying gold deposits that were being mined in Western Australia and Victoria and sapphire mines in New South Wales. These study tours gave me an opportunity to have a glimpse of the vast Australian country sides where these mining centers were located. But Tasmania of my childhood imagination that stayed with me was not far away from Melbourne where I had a week’s stay before the end of my tour in Australia. I had an irresistible urge to go to Tasmania. Somehow I could manage to get an opportunity by persuading my sponsors to allow me to visit the famous Rosebery mines in Tasmania that was only about 400km across the sea from Melbourne..
.
I reached Tasmania on a summer day in December by flight from Melbourne - being farther down under, winter time in northern temperate zone is summer time in Australia!- and landed at Burnie the nearest city to the mainland Australia. The drive from Burney was by car and I could see some of the densely forested hills of Tasmania that reminded me of the greenery and hills of Wyanad! Rosebery, where I stayed was not far from the mines after which it was named. The team of geologists and mining engineers were very friendly and were eager to help me to study the complex ore deposits of the mines. In the evenings after hectic work in the mines I used to go out exploring the town walking alone along the narrow streets. One day I saw a small bookshop- of all places in a mining town far removed from any urban centers!- and curiously browsing through the books on display I saw a book titled ‘The Tasmanian Aborigine’. Being more interested in the history of people in exotic places than enticing places of spectacular scenic beauty, I was attracted by that book. From the book I learned that there was an Ice age lasting till about 30000-20000 years ago and a tribe of aborigines could travell across the land bridge that connected Tasmania with the mainland. Soon the Ice age came to an end and the glaciers retreated raising sea level closing the land bridge. The aborigines of Tasmania began to develop a culture of their own to adapt to the new environment.
It was in that book I read about the story of Lanney the last Tasmanian aborigine. There was a photograph of Lanney sitting his hands cuffed, legs sprawling in front of his body and two smiling white sailors standing beside him. The caption read ‘Lanney the last Tasmanian aborigine’. Nothing more. Neither the year nor the name of the photographer. He was described as a hardened drinker of liquor the sailors generously offered him, a hard working whaler who jumped ship whenever he got a chance. I could not take my eyes off Lanney. It was not only the terror in his eyes but the look of paralyzing shock in the eyes of a human being subjected to unutterable violence and evil he had to suffer during his short life. His image and those eyes haunted me and stayed permanently etched in my mind. I bought that book and started reading about their absorbibg story.
That book was with me for several years till one of my friends, only casually interested to read something took it away and never returned it. (to my bitter experience I found that well meaning friend’s have that good habit!) All my efforts to retrieve it or buy a new one from a book shop in India failed. Neither could I reach out to my old colleagues in Rosebery mines way back in 1984. Lanney remained a disturbing dream in my mind and I felt as though he was inviting me to share his pathos. He became a friend to me though his figure remained a shadow.
Many years after my visit to Tasmania, that was twenty three years ago, I told my son about Lanney the last Tasmanian aborigine and the lost book. He offered me help. I am not a computer bug and had only a poor opinion of the internet. How wrong I was! In front of me he clicked a few buttons and out came the page on Lanney the last Tasmanian aborigine! There he was! Lanney! Not in a sailer’s garb but alone in one photograph and in another one Lanney leaning on tarunganini his third wife! I was immensely happy like a child who could retrieve a toy loved so much. Lanney appeared to remain the same without any wear and tear by passage of time with that haunting glint in his eyes still there. The photograph must have been taken some time in 1860’S about 150 years ago!
When I speak of Lanney the readers might feel what is so great about an aborigine in Tasmania who died long ago. I have no explanations to offer for my fascination nor do I expect the reader to be interested in him as much as I do. But I feel his story is worth telling because he represents the history of a race of doomed community that lived peacefully for about 40000 years and was wiped out of the face of the earth in a short period of sixty years since the arrival of British colonialists in Tasmania! It was the shortest carnage, a total wiping out of a people and their culture in recorded history. Nothing particularly interesting if you look at that photograph in a casual manner as most people tend to look at old photographs. But you can also look at in a different w
ay as I do. History written so large and clear on such faces as in those photographs are easily forgotten histories. To me that photograph taken long ago by an unknown photographer tells the poignant story of destruction of a race and man’s inhumanity to man in a most telling way..
I reached Tasmania on a summer day in December by flight from Melbourne - being farther down under, winter time in northern temperate zone is summer time in Australia!- and landed at Burnie the nearest city to the mainland Australia. The drive from Burney was by car and I could see some of the densely forested hills of Tasmania that reminded me of the greenery and hills of Wyanad! Rosebery, where I stayed was not far from the mines after which it was named. The team of geologists and mining engineers were very friendly and were eager to help me to study the complex ore deposits of the mines. In the evenings after hectic work in the mines I used to go out exploring the town walking alone along the narrow streets. One day I saw a small bookshop- of all places in a mining town far removed from any urban centers!- and curiously browsing through the books on display I saw a book titled ‘The Tasmanian Aborigine’. Being more interested in the history of people in exotic places than enticing places of spectacular scenic beauty, I was attracted by that book. From the book I learned that there was an Ice age lasting till about 30000-20000 years ago and a tribe of aborigines could travell across the land bridge that connected Tasmania with the mainland. Soon the Ice age came to an end and the glaciers retreated raising sea level closing the land bridge. The aborigines of Tasmania began to develop a culture of their own to adapt to the new environment.
It was in that book I read about the story of Lanney the last Tasmanian aborigine. There was a photograph of Lanney sitting his hands cuffed, legs sprawling in front of his body and two smiling white sailors standing beside him. The caption read ‘Lanney the last Tasmanian aborigine’. Nothing more. Neither the year nor the name of the photographer. He was described as a hardened drinker of liquor the sailors generously offered him, a hard working whaler who jumped ship whenever he got a chance. I could not take my eyes off Lanney. It was not only the terror in his eyes but the look of paralyzing shock in the eyes of a human being subjected to unutterable violence and evil he had to suffer during his short life. His image and those eyes haunted me and stayed permanently etched in my mind. I bought that book and started reading about their absorbibg story.
That book was with me for several years till one of my friends, only casually interested to read something took it away and never returned it. (to my bitter experience I found that well meaning friend’s have that good habit!) All my efforts to retrieve it or buy a new one from a book shop in India failed. Neither could I reach out to my old colleagues in Rosebery mines way back in 1984. Lanney remained a disturbing dream in my mind and I felt as though he was inviting me to share his pathos. He became a friend to me though his figure remained a shadow.
Many years after my visit to Tasmania, that was twenty three years ago, I told my son about Lanney the last Tasmanian aborigine and the lost book. He offered me help. I am not a computer bug and had only a poor opinion of the internet. How wrong I was! In front of me he clicked a few buttons and out came the page on Lanney the last Tasmanian aborigine! There he was! Lanney! Not in a sailer’s garb but alone in one photograph and in another one Lanney leaning on tarunganini his third wife! I was immensely happy like a child who could retrieve a toy loved so much. Lanney appeared to remain the same without any wear and tear by passage of time with that haunting glint in his eyes still there. The photograph must have been taken some time in 1860’S about 150 years ago!
When I speak of Lanney the readers might feel what is so great about an aborigine in Tasmania who died long ago. I have no explanations to offer for my fascination nor do I expect the reader to be interested in him as much as I do. But I feel his story is worth telling because he represents the history of a race of doomed community that lived peacefully for about 40000 years and was wiped out of the face of the earth in a short period of sixty years since the arrival of British colonialists in Tasmania! It was the shortest carnage, a total wiping out of a people and their culture in recorded history. Nothing particularly interesting if you look at that photograph in a casual manner as most people tend to look at old photographs. But you can also look at in a different w
A brief history of British colonization of Tasmania would not be out of place here before I talk about the tragic life and death of Lanney. The island is named after the Dutch navigator Abel Jansoon Tasman who discovered the island in 1642. It came into the hands of British colonialists by 1802 and next year the British Government send a ship full of convicts sentenced to lifelong imprisonment whom they could not accommodate in British prisons. The convicts were a group of traumatized and many of them almost deranged and hardened criminals, homicidal maniacs and all sorts of men who stopped at nothing to get a chance to butcher the natives to satiate their blood lust. They ran amuck in the virgin island of Tasmania where from several thousands of years ago the native population lived in harmony with nature. The aborigines were not well equipped to resist this onslaught like the war like red Indians of North America.(They too were decimated but only partially because they were spread across two continents and it took a much longer time to reduce the different tribes) It was a carnage, a blood bath, cruelties most fowl and beyond description.
The British colonial government did nothing to stop it. In fact they encouraged it! The cunning and crude weapons of the aborigines were of no match to the knives, axes, and guns the criminals used against them in the most gruesome manner once they were let loose in the island. The British government sent out its troops to kill them wherever and whenever they were spotted in the jungles and in 1808 the government proclaimed the infamous martial law that gave legal sanction to the settlers of convicts to kill aborigines. They were not accepted as human beings even by the civilized government of Britain. The colonial government even paid monitory rewards for the ‘bounty killers’ as they were called, for the bodies of dead aborigines shot by them A lot of people, all of them convicts, made good deal of money out of bounty killings. Shooting bashing of brains burning them alive slaughtering them as dog meat went on at a large scale. A few missionaries took a few remaining aborigines to nearby Flinders Island to convert them into Christians. That proved to be the beginning of their ultimate fate. The living conditions were too hard at the missionary camps that most tried to escape the tyranny in the name of Jesus Christ. History written mostly by English historians recorded that most of the Australian aborigines died because of alcoholism and venereal deseases. (They did not mention that these wonderful gifts were given to them by white settlers- a mor suble way of destroying them.
Lanney along with a few Tasmanian aborigines were moved to a concentration camp at Oysters cove. He escaped but was soon captured and abducted by the crews of a whaling ship. Lanney died in the age of 33 on March 2 in 1869 at the Dog and Partridge Public House in Hobart, capital of Tasmania. By 1975 the carnage was over, by the death of his wife Tarunganini who outlived him until her death in 1876. The last two members of Tasmanian aborigines belonging to the family of man ceased to exist.
Even in death Lanney could not escape the cruelty and humility at the hands of the colonialists who were gradually taking control of all Australia in the name of God and the King of England. His head was dismembered, his hands were cut off, to preserve in the name of ‘Science’. Another man’s skull was stitched before the body was given to his half bred relatives for ritual burial. There was an unseemly fight to grab his body by the Royal Society of Surgeons in England and Tasmanian Society of Scientists. A dead aborigine so mutilated was very valuable to humanity than a live one! In the name of ‘Science!’ You cannot read these gruesome details of the decimation of the aborigines of Tasmania in officially approved history that island. The true story is silenced by many deceptions. Their tragic end remain erased for ever from history.
Truganinni, William Lanney, and an unidentified woman
Readers may wonder why these aborigines were clothed in nineteenth century Victorian English dress. Lanney whom you find clothed in a Jacket and trousers was turned into a sailor and paraded as the last male aborigine before the royalty in Britain. These aborigine men and women who were the last among their tribe were captured men and women who survived the carnage and turned into Christians. But that did not help them to survive because life in boarding houses under the missionaries care was worse than living in the bush where they could have lived happily like their ancestors. Civilisation as they could experience was a strange and repulsive way of life that only helped them to live as slaves to the white man.
No comments:
Post a Comment