Collecting Looerryminer's ‘Testimony’: Aboriginal Women, Sealers, and Quaker Humanitarian Anti-Slavery Thought and Action in the Bass Strait Islands

Abstract

In 1832 British Quakers James Backhouse and George Washington Walker travelled ‘under concern’ to the antipodean colonies on a mission sponsored by the Religious Society of Friends. This article examines Backhouse and Walker's mission to witness the ‘testimony’ of Looerryminer and other Aboriginal women who had lived with sealers in the Bass Strait Islands. It argues that this investigative journey is best comprehended in the context of the long tradition of Quaker transimperial travel ‘under concern’ and particularly their abolitionist witnessing undertaken from the late eighteenth century and its associated texts with their distinctive form, language and repertoire. Urging that we read ‘along the grain’ of the archive in line with Ann Stoler, the article explores the travel and curious translation of humanitarian abolitionist sentiment, text, and action across and between colonies of settlement, and the various ‘species of slavery’ that were imagined, constructed and examined by Quaker humanitarians in this Age of Reform.

Notes

¹ Patsy Cameron uses the term ‘sea frontier’ in Grease and Ochre: The Blending of Two Cultures at the Colonial Sea Frontier (Launceston: Fullers Bookshop, 2011), 1.

² James Backhouse, Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies (London: Hamilton, Adams and Co., 1843), 25 September 1832, 71.

³ Backhouse and Walker's Bass Strait journey spanned 7–30 October 1832.

⁴ The ‘Establishment for Aborigines’ was a station where Tasmanian Aboriginal people were effectively incarcerated, after they had been removed from their traditional lands, before the creation of Wybalenna on the other side of Flinders Island. See N. J. B. Plomley, ed., Weep in Silence: A History of the Flinders Island Aboriginal Settlement (Hobart: Blubber Head Press, 1987); Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines: A History Since 1803 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2012).

⁵ Journals of George Washington Walker, 1831–41, State Library of New South Wales (hereafter SLNSW), B709 1832, 9 October 1832, 144.

⁶ James Backhouse, Letter book 1831–4, Friends House Library (hereafter FHL), London, Ms. Vol. 1 S48, 14 October 1832, 79.

⁷ See N. J. B. Plomley, ed., Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals of George Augustus Robinson 1829–1834 (Launceston: Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery and Quintus Publishing, 2008); Plomley's Weep in Silence shows Appendix 1: A ‘Names of the Aborigines in the Records of GA Robinson’ which lists ‘LOO.ER.RY.MIN.ER’. Alternative names are ‘LEE.NER.ER.KLEE.NER/ LEE.NAR.ER.KLEE.ER/ “Boatswain”’. It notes her brother was ‘Arthur (Jemmy) [LUE.RING.DING.ER]’ and the band of location of origin was Swanport; and that she was a ‘sealer's woman—abducted by John Smith; kept by William Proctor’. Ref R/B 73, 805; SLR 31’; Appendix I: E ‘Census of the aborigines at Wybalenna’, January 1836. In the females list is ‘Jane—Boatswain—LEE.NER.ER.KLEE.NER’, 880.

⁸ Backhouse, Letter book 1831–4, FHL, Ms. Vol. 1 S48, 14 October 1832, 79. See also Backhouse, Narrative of a Visit, 88–9, on ‘Boatswain’.

⁹ Backhouse, Letter book 1831–4, FHL, Ms. Vol. 1 S48, 14 October 1832, 79; Backhouse, Narrative of a Visit; Journals of George Washington Walker, 1831–41, SLNSW.

¹⁰ Parts of the tour to the Bass Strait are recorded in Backhouse, Narrative of a Visit, chapter 6; parts of the tour were also recrafted to form chapter 6, ‘Visit to the Aborigines on Flinders Island’, in The Life and Labours of George Washington Walker, ed. James Backhouse and Charles Tylor (London: A. W. Bennett, 1862).

¹¹ The most comprehensive work to date is by William N. Oats, Backhouse and Walker: A Quaker View of the Australian Colonies, 1832–1838 (Sandy Bay: Blubber Head Press in association with the Australian Yearly Meeting Religious Society of Friends, 1981).

¹² See Plomley, Friendly Mission.

¹³ Ann Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 4.

¹⁴ See Penelope Edmonds, ‘Travelling “Under Concern”: Quakers James Backhouse and George Washington Walker Tour the Antipodean Colonies, 1830s–1840s’, Journal of Commonwealth and Imperial History, Special Issue on Humanitarianism, 40, no. 5 (2012): 769–88. See also Oats.

¹⁵ Backhouse, Narrative of a Visit, 6 December 1831, 8; and James Backhouse, A Narrative of a Visit to the Mauritius and South Africa (London: Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1844), December 1838, 143.

¹⁶ I wish to acknowledge Zoë Laidlaw's paper, ‘Investigating Empire: Humanitarians, Reform and the Commission of Eastern Inquiry’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40, no. 5 (2012): 749–68.

¹⁷ Stoler, 4.

¹⁸ John West, A History of Tasmania (Launceston: Henry Dowling, 1852); James Fenton, History of Tasmania from Its Discovery in 1642 to the Present Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1884] 2011). Fenton remarked that the ‘women were treated as slaves in most cases’, and quoted Backhouse's vignettes of Aboriginal women Looerryminer and Jackey.

¹⁹ Anne McMahon, ‘Tasmanian Aboriginal Women as Slaves’, Tasmanian Historical Research Association Papers and Proceedings 23, no. 2 (1976): 44–9, 44, 46.

²⁰ Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1981); Lyndall Ryan, ‘Aboriginal Women and Agency in the Process of Conquest: A Review of Some Recent Work’, Australian Feminist Studies (Autumn 1986): 35–43.

²¹ Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians; and Rebe Taylor, ‘Genocide, Extinction and Aboriginal Self-Determination in Tasmanian Historiography’, History Compass 11, no. 16 (2013): 405–18.

²² Ryan, ‘Aboriginal Women’, 37.

²³ See also Iain Stuart, ‘Sea Rats, Bandits and Roistering Buccaneers: What Were the Bass Strait Sealers Really Like?’ Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 83, part 1 (1997): 47–58; N. J. B. Plomley and K. Henly, The Sealers of the Bass Strait and the Cape Barren Island Community (Hobart: Blubber Head Press, 1990), 71–3.

²⁴ Rebe Taylor, Unearthed: The Aboriginal Tasmanian of Kangaroo Island (Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2002).

²⁵ Plomley, Ref R/B 73, Weep in Silence, 805.

²⁶ Major William Stewart to Campbell, 28 September 1815, Historical Records of Australia, Series III, Despatches and papers relating to the settlement of the states, vol. 2 (Sydney: Library Committee of the Commonwealth Parliament, 1921), 575–6.

²⁷ Hobart Town Gazette, 26 August 1826, 2.

²⁸ Hobart Town Gazette, 26 August 1826, cites ‘New Holland Van Diemen's Land—their coast, commerce and production’ in European Review reprinted in the Australian, 2 August 1826, 4.

²⁹ Taylor, Unearthed, 46.

³⁰ Rebe Taylor, ‘Savages or Saviours? The Australian Sealers and Aboriginal Tasmanian Survival’, Journal of Australian Studies 24, no. 66 (2000): 73–84; and Taylor, ‘Genocide’.

³¹ Lynette Russell, ‘“Dirty Domestics and Worse Cooks”: Aboriginal Women's Agency and Domestic Frontiers, Southern Australia 1800–1850’, Frontiers: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Women's Studies 28, nos. 1 & 2 (2007): 18–47; Lynette Russell, Roving Mariners: Australian Aboriginal Whalers and Sealers in the Southern Oceans (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012).

³² Russell, Roving Mariners, 120.

³³ Russell, Roving Mariners, 120.

³⁴ Cameron, ix, xiv.

³⁵ Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, 71.

³⁶ Hilary Hinds, ‘An Absent Presence: Quaker Narratives of Journeys to America and Barbados, 1671–81’, Quaker Studies 10, no. 1 (2005): 6–13, 6.

³⁷ Sarah Crabtree, ‘“A Beautiful and Practical Lesson of Jurisprudence”: The Trans-Atlantic Quaker Ministry in the Age of Revolution’, Radical History Review 99 (Fall 2007): 51–79, 53.

³⁸ Sarah Crabtree, ‘“A Beautiful and Practical Lesson of Jurisprudence”: The Trans-Atlantic Quaker Ministry in the Age of Revolution’, Radical History Review 99 (Fall 2007): 51–79, 54, 55.

³⁹ Sarah Crabtree, ‘“A Beautiful and Practical Lesson of Jurisprudence”: The Trans-Atlantic Quaker Ministry in the Age of Revolution’, Radical History Review 99 (Fall 2007): 51–79, 54.

⁴⁰ Sarah Crabtree, ‘“A Beautiful and Practical Lesson of Jurisprudence”: The Trans-Atlantic Quaker Ministry in the Age of Revolution’, Radical History Review 99 (Fall 2007): 51–79, 65.

⁴¹ Jonathan D. Sassi, ‘Africans in the Quaker Image: Anthony Benezet, African Travel Narratives, and Revolutionary Era Antislavery’, Journal of Early Modern History 10 (2006): 1–2, 95–130.

⁴² James Williams was a pseudonym to protect the narrator from retribution. Joseph Sturge, Events Since the First of August 1834 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 3.

⁴³ Edmonds, 779.

⁴⁴ Alan Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia: A History, vol. 2 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2004), 188.

⁴⁵ Backhouse, Narrative of a Visit, 162; ‘Report (no.3) on the State of the Settlements of the Van Diemen's land Company and the character of the Northwest part of the VDL’, Backhouse Letter book 1831–4, FHL, 93.

⁴⁶ Ian Duffield, ‘Daylight on Convict Lived Experience: The History of a Pious Negro Servant’, Tasmanian Historical Studies 6, no. 2 (1999): 29–62, 35.

⁴⁷ Report by Lieutenant-Colonel W. Balfour and Lieutenant J. Welch, 4 May 1826, TAHO CSO1/36, 180–96.

⁴⁸ See Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), who speaks of ‘anomalous legal zones’ in remote regions of empire.

⁴⁹ G. A. Robinson, Friendly Mission, 21 September 1829, 85.

⁵⁰ G. A. Robinson, chapter ‘Mission to the Sealers’.

⁵¹ G. A. Robinson, chapter ‘Mission to the Sealers’, 11 October 1829, 91.

⁵² G. A. Robinson, chapter ‘Mission to the Sealers’, 11 October 1829, 277–514.

⁵³ G. A. Robinson, chapter ‘Mission to the Sealers’, 10 November 1830, 305.

⁵⁴ G. A. Robinson, chapter ‘Mission to the Sealers’, 14 November 1830, 309.

⁵⁵ Ryan, ‘Aboriginal Women’, 38.

⁵⁶ G. A. Robinson, Friendly Mission, 19 December 1830, 328.

⁵⁷ G. A. Robinson, Friendly Mission, 19 December 1830, 329.

⁵⁸ G. A. Robinson, Friendly Mission, 11 October 1829, 91.

⁵⁹ G. A. Robinson, Friendly Mission, 16 November 1830, 313.

⁶⁰ G. A. Robinson, Friendly Mission, 17 December 1830, 326.

⁶¹ G. A. Robinson, Friendly Mission, 17 December 1830, 326.

⁶² G. A. Robinson, Friendly Mission, 19 January 1831, 349.

⁶³ Journals of George Washington Walker, SLNSW, B709, 1832, 106.

⁶⁴ Backhouse, Narrative of a Visit, 156.

⁶⁵ Henry Whitely, Three Months in Jamaica in 1832: A Residence of Seven Weeks on a Plantation (London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1833).

⁶⁶ Backhouse, Narrative of a Visit, 156.

⁶⁷ Backhouse, Letter book, FHL, 30 October 1832, 81.

⁶⁸ Backhouse, Letter book, FHL, 30 October 1832, 82.

⁶⁹ Backhouse, Letter book, FHL, 30 October 1832, 82.

⁷⁰ Laidlaw, 749–68.

⁷¹ Laidlaw, 749–68.

⁷² Stoler.

⁷³ Sherene Razack, ‘Dying from Improvement: Redemptive Gestures in an Inquiry into the Death of an Aboriginal Man in Police Custody’, Canadian Journal of Women and the Law (forthcoming 2014): 22.

⁷⁴ Stoler, 141–3.

⁷⁵ Stoler, 2.

⁷⁶ Journals of George Washington Walker, SLNSW, 13 October 1832.

⁷⁷ Journals of George Washington Walker, SLNSW, 13 October 1832.

⁷⁸ Journals of George Washington Walker, SLNSW, 13 October 1832. The published version drawn from Walker's journal Life and Labours, edited by James Backhouse, is quite different and does not include these observations.

⁷⁹ Journals of George Washington Walker, SLNSW, 13 October 1832, 140.

⁸⁰ Stoler, 256; Gillian Cowlishaw, ‘Disappointing Indigenous People: Violence and the Refusal of Help’, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 107, cited in Razack, 23.

⁸¹ Backhouse, Narrative of a Visit, 15 October 1832, 89.

⁸² Plomley, Weep in Silence. See Appendix I: N ‘Burials at Wybalenna’, 909.