Journey 2: James Backhouse and George Washington Walker’s tour of the Bass Strait islands in the 1830s

Author: Penny Edmonds

In the British Museum, London, an Aboriginal woman’s food-gathering stick, or ‘waddy’, crafted from butterscotch-coloured wood and shiny with wear marks, was recently rediscovered in the storage shelves. The yellowed paper label attached to one end records the name of the collector: ‘WADDY, Mr Jm’s Backhouse, Tasmania’. Why was the Quaker traveller, abolitionist and botanist James Backhouse in the Bass Strait? And how did he come by this precious object, which had probably belonged to a Palawa (Tasmanian Aboriginal) woman? In addition to the many texts Backhouse wrote and plant specimens he collected on his nine-year voyage to the Australian colonies, this waddy may be understood as a rare material trace of Backhouse’s distinctive form of humanitarian travel and of a cross-cultural encounter.

Collecting the testimony of Aboriginal women and sealers

Above all, the Quakers sought to collect women’s testimony, or evidence of their ‘sufferings’, as a key part of their moral abolitionist goals. They believed that the women who lived with sealers in the Bass Strait were enslaved and wanted to record the women’s testimony.

Yet this witnessing exercise, key to the Quakers’ abolitionist and investigative enterprise, was always to be troubled, because it occurred in the midst of the ‘Black War’, a violent settler invasion and frontier war in Van Diemen’s Land leading to the eventual incarceration of Aboriginal people to Flinders Island in the name of government protection.

In a range of encounters during October 1832, Backhouse and Walker carefully interviewed Aboriginal women and sealers to ‘witness sufferings’ and collect ‘evidence’ – as they saw it – of life on the Bass Strait frontier at the edges of the British Empire. In reality, the Quakers had arrived in Aboriginal Sea Country, a vast Indigenous world.

Over and over the Quakers used the language of slavery – the women were ‘slaves’ in ‘bondage’ and the sealers their pitiless ‘masters’ – and spoke fervently of their desire for the women’s ‘liberty’ and ‘emancipation’.

This moment in the Bass Strait shows the curious life of abolition in the colonies of the Southern Hemisphere and the fraught politics of humanitarian ‘eyewitnessing’ to Aboriginal peoples whose lands were invaded by colonists in the process of an aggressive British imperial expansion

In recording their journey, Backhouse and Walker showed far more than a predisposition for the abolitionist and evangelical literary flourish. Abolitionist thought and action are apparent in much of their activity in the Bass Strait and provided the moral architecture of their mission. But there were signs of uncertainty about the ambiguous situation of the women in a colonial setting that was different to the slave trade as the Quakers had known it.

Although Walker felt that the women were held in a state of near ‘slavery’, he did make one particular observation on their self-representation that jarred with the slavery narrative. He wrote with acuity and admiration about their agency, dignity and freedom:

I have been led to admire in them, along with their good nature, or desire to please and to be pleased, a certain independence of character, and a dignity, I may correctly term it, which reminds the observer that they have not in their own estimation forfeited their liberty. They appear to feel that they are a free people, and voluntary free agents.

The women were not slaves. In many ways, these Quakers would profoundly misunderstand the relationship between Aboriginal women and sealers, a cross-cultural relationship of both mutual acculturation and violence. Over several generations, this world would become the Straits community, and the source of Aboriginal survival; it is a place from which many Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples today are descended. As Patsy Cameron, Aboriginal Elder, shows in her work Grease and Ochre, these encounters were cross-cultural exchanges that inaugurated ‘the coming into being of a new lifeworld and a new people of the islands’.

On Flinders Island in 1832 the Quakers met Looerryminer, an Aboriginal woman who had been abducted by sealers as girl. They recorded her testimony – partly spoken and partly by bodily signs – of the violence of the sealers. She was, for them, a subject of moral concern. But she was also a collector, a generous informant and an important intermediary.

Likewise, the rare digging stick, or waddy, collected in 1832 by Backhouse from this same journey – and which is now held in the British Museum – is an enigmatic reminder of a global network of encounter and trade. Was this Looerryminer’s food-gathering stick?

Looerryminer walked five kilometres to collect plant specimens for Backhouse, offering him a native fern root that could be eaten. Plant specimens from this Bass Strait journey over 190 years ago are today held in the archives of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

The Aboriginal stick and the plants specimens are material evidence of this colonial enquiry, on Flinders Island, between Aboriginal and European networks of humanitarian action, where objects and language mingled in the traffic of empire.