Girl in a Red Dress: Inventions of Mathinna

Abstract

This article seeks to do the impossible: to unsettle the fixity of fictions that have been so long in circulation that they have taken on the appearance and solidity of fact. Mathinna, the Aboriginal girl who lived at Government House under the care of Lady Franklin in the early 1840s but was abandoned at the Orphan School when the Franklins returned to England a few years later, is an elusive historical subject. Stories and images of Mathinna have circulated for a century and a half, drawing sustenance from each other to entrench powerful sentimental tropes about her life. The article argues that we should be wary about the origins of these sentimental stories, and about their capacity to be reworked into acts of historical recovery.

Notes

^* In my labyrinthine quest for the archival trail of Mathinna I have accrued debts to two scholars in particular, who generously shared aspects of their own research with me. Victoria Haskins early furnished me with results of her research into Mathinna's movements between Flinders Island and the Orphan School; Leonie Stevens has most kindly allowed me to make use of her transcripts of Robinson's original letters and the Friend enquiry at Wybalenna. Versions of the paper on which this article is based were presented at the Australian Historical Association conference in Perth 2010, the Berkshire Conference on Women's History in Amherst 2011, and the University of Sydney in 2011, and the resulting article has been enriched by discussion at all these venues, as well as the careful reading and critique of Frances Clarke and Kirsten McKenzie.

¹See for example, Ballet Guild, Mathinna, 1956. Choreography Laurel Martyn. Musical score Esther Rofe. Adapted from a radio play by Margaret Murray; Nan Chauncy's children's book, Mathinna's People (London: Oxford University Press, 1967); Claudia E. M. Phillips, Mathinna (a play in four scenes), 1970; Carmel Bird In My Father's House (radio play, ABC/BBC); Carmel Bird, The Bluebird Cafe (Sydney: Vintage 1996, [1990]), pp. 102–105; Don Kay, Mathinna in the Red Dress (large ensemble for string orchestra, 2007) and Mathinna's Lullaby (chamber music for oboe and piano, 2009); Christina Henri, Mathinna (collograph print). See Christina Henri, Conceptual Artist: Painting [online], accessed 17 November 2011 from <http://www.christinahenri.com.au/>; Craig Walsh, Intension (video installation), Franklin Square, Hobart, March–April 2011 in Carol Raabus, ‘Projecting Art all over Hobart for more than Ten Days’ [online], accessed 7 May 2011 from <http://www.abc.net.au/local/photos/2011/03/11/3161356.htm>; Russell A. Potter, ‘Franklin Projections in Hobart, 15 March 2011, Visions of the North’ [online], accessed 7 May 2011 from <http://visionsnorth.blogspot.com/>.

²Richard Flanagan, Wanting, (Sydney: Knopf, 2008).

³Bangarra Dance Theatre, Mathinna, 2008. Choreography Stephen Page. Musical score David Page.

⁴See for example Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Clifton C. Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

⁵Bangarra's Mathinna is described in one review as telling the ‘true story’ of Mathinna's ‘short, confusing and tragic life’ in Erin White, ‘Review: Mathinna, Bangarra Dance Theatre, 2 June 2008’ [online], accessed 3 July 2010 from <http://australianstage.com.au/reviews/brisbane/mathinna>. Yet the performance prompted journalist Carol Raabus to ask, ‘what do you know about the true story of this little Tasmanian Aboriginal girl in the red dress?’ – and to turn to novelist Richard Flanagan for elucidation of the mystery in Carol Raabus, ‘The Hidden Story of Mathinna: Spirited, Gifted, Utterly Destroyed, 15 February 2011’ [online] accessed 3 May 2011 from <http://www.abc.net.au/local/audio/2011/02/16/3140544.htm>.

⁶‘Something of the Past, by “Old Boomer”’, Mercury (Hobart) 7 June 1869, 3.

⁷To give just one example of the genealogy: one year after Boomer's story appeared, James Bonwick included a version of it in The Last of the Tasmanians; or, The Black War of Van Diemen's Land (London: Sampson, Low, Son & Marston, 1870), 382–84. A. W. Loone drew in turn upon Bonwick's account to tell Mathinna's story in Tasmania's North-East: A Comprehensive History of Tasmania and its People (Launceston: 1928). Carmel Bird mentions Loone as one of her early sources of information on Mathinna; a smudgy reproduction of Bock's portrait was another. Bird, ‘Mathinna. A Short Strange Secret Misty Smoky Mysterious History’, http://www.carmelbird.com/mathinna.html. Accessed 3 July 2010.

⁸There have been no major scholarly studies of Mathinna. The most detailed and thoroughly researched account of her life to date is that given by Heather Felton in a series designed for upper primary school, On Being Aboriginal: Book 3 – The Lowreene People and Mathinna (Hobart: Education Department, 1984), a book which combines archival research with creative, sympathetic deduction in ways appropriate to its genre. The fact that this children's history is often cited as the main source of information on Mathinna (and is the indirect source of much information even when not cited) may be testament to the quality of Felton's work, but it is also a telling indication of the willingness of many historians to accept the child's story at face value. Little purpose would be served by providing a list of such citations: the point here is not to find fault with individual historians but to unsettle a story which finds wide acceptance across multiple media. But I freely confess to having made use of narrative detail I now find less than authoritative in Penny Russell, ‘“Unhomely Moments”: Civilising Domestic Worlds in Colonial Australia’, The History of the Family 14 (2009): 331.

⁹See Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians [1981], 2nd ed. (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996); Henry Reynolds, Fate of a Free People: A Radical Re-examination of the Tasmanian Wars (Melbourne: Penguin, 1995); Vivienne Rae-Ellis Black Robinson: Protector of Aborigines (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1988); Anna Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families, 1800–2000 (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000), 65–130.

¹⁰N. J. B. Plomley, Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829–1834 (Hobart: Tasmanian Historical Research Association, 1966).

¹¹George Augustus Robinson, Journal Friday 16 October 1835, in N. J. B. Plomley, Weep in Silence: A History of the Flinders Island Aboriginal Settlement (Hobart: Blubber Head Press, 1987), 302.

¹²N. J. B. Plomley ‘Thomas Bock's Portraits of the Tasmanian Aborigines’, in Thomas Bock: Convict Engraver, Society Portraitist, exhibition catalogue (Launceston: Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, and Canberra: Australian National Gallery, 1991), 35.

¹³Robert Crooke, The Convict (Hobart: University of Tasmania Library, 1958), 45.

¹⁴Journal of Jane Franklin in Van Diemen's Land (V.D.L.), vol. 8, 10 September 1841, 204. MS 248/92, ML FM4/725, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. Just one week earlier Jane Franklin had received a letter from Peter Fisher, the recently appointed superintendent at Flinders Island, responding (though far from satisfactorily, in her view) to her questions about Mathinna's parentage, birth and age. The fact that Jane Franklin was only then making these enquiries suggests that Mathinna had not been very long at Government House. Journal of Jane Franklin in V.D.L., vol. 8, 3 September 1841, 189. On 14 February 1842 she took Mathinna to visit Mrs Smith, wife of Captain Malcolm Laing Smith, who was commandant of Flinders Island from April 1839 till August 1841. Journal of Jane Franklin in V.D.L., vol. 10, 14 February 1842, 56. MS 248/94, ML FM4/725.

¹⁵Jane Franklin to Mary Simpkinson, 14 February 1843, Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) MS 248/174/20.

¹⁶Journal of Jane Franklin in V.D.L., vol. 10, 11 March 1842, 144.

¹⁷Strzelecki reached London in October 1843. His Physical Description of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land, published in 1845, does not include an engraving of Mathinna's portrait. Heney, Helen, ‘Strzelecki, Sir Paul Edmund de (1797–1873)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/strzelecki-sir-paul-edmund-de-2711/text3809, accessed 22 November 2011.

¹⁸Jane Franklin to Mary Simpkinson, 8 March 1843, SPRI MS 248/174/21.

¹⁹For a more detailed discussion that places Lady Franklin's civilising project within a broader context of the home as tool of civilisation, see Russell, ‘Unhomely Moments’, 327–39. On the tensions of gender and civilisation that Lady Franklin herself faced at Government House, see Penny Russell, Savage or Civilised? Manners in Colonial Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2010), 141–64. See also Alison Alexander, Obliged to Submit: Wives and Mistresses of Colonial Governors, rev.ed. (Hobart: Montpelier Press, 1999).

²⁰Bird, ‘Mathinna’.

²¹Cassandra Pybus, ‘A Savage Lesson in Civility’, Sydney Morning Herald, 10 May 2008.

²²Raabus, ‘The Hidden Story of Mathinna’.

²³G. A. Robinson to Jane Franklin, 15 January 1839, Robinson Papers, vol. 24, Robinson's Letterbook, Mitchell Library MLA7045.

²⁴Robinson, Diary 19 Feb 1836, 17 August 1837, in Plomley, Weep in Silence, 346, 472. Robinson makes several other references to ‘Adolphus’ in his diary, noting his intelligence, also his misdemeanours and punishments.

²⁵Robinson, Diary 21 November 1838, in Plomley, Weep in Silence, 605.

²⁶Plomley, Weep In Silence, 779, 783.

²⁷Robinson, Diary, 16 and 17 January 1839, in Plomley, Weep in Silence, 612.

²⁸In March 1842 Jane Franklin noted that Timmie had been employed ten months on a vessel under the care of Mr Dayman. Felton suggests that Timmie was put to work in the stables and then sent to work on the government yacht Eliza; Plomley says he was employed on the Vansittart. Eleanor Isabella Franklin to ‘Grandpapa’ [John Griffin], Hobarton 11 October 1839. Letter in private collection, courtesy Mary Williamson. Jane Franklin, Journal in V.D.L., vol. 3, 4 November 1839; vol. 10, 11 March 1842, 144. Felton, The Lowreene People and Mathinna, 16; Plomley, Weep in Silence, 887.

²⁹A list compiled by Flinders Island catechist Robert Clark, probably in the 1840s, said that Adolphus had ‘gone to England’. He does not appear to have returned to Tasmania, but nothing further is known of his fate. Plomley, Weep in Silence, 886–7.

³⁰This is not to say that their history has never been written: Anna Haebich, in particular, has gathered and movingly told many of these stories of Tasmanian children, Broken Circles, esp. 77–117. But Mathinna remains their most familiar representative, her name and image standing in for multiple stories, though some are less fragmented than her own.

³³Bird, ‘Mathinna’.

³¹Maryanne Dever, Sally Newman and Ann Vickery warn of our ‘insistent (deeply suppressed and often denied) desire to find in our archival sources a whole where there can only ever be random parts, to perform acts of reconstitution in the service of producing a coherent and seamless account of our subject’. The Intimate Archive: Journeys through Private Papers (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2009), 6.

³²Potter, Franklin Projections in Hobart.

³⁴‘Old Boomer’, ‘Something of the Past’.

³⁵‘Old Boomer’, ‘Something of the Past’.

³⁷ Mercury, 20 February 1857.

³⁶‘Old Boomer’, ‘Something of the Past’.

³⁸B. W. Wray (State Librarian) to Nancy Cato, Query No 1963/51, Archives Office of Tasmania (AOT) Correspondence File, ‘Mathinna’.

³⁹B. W. Wray (State Librarian) to Nancy Cato, Query No 1963/51, Archives Office of Tasmania (AOT) Correspondence File, ‘Mathinna’. Plomley says that when Milligan arrived at Flinders Island in February 1844 he brought with him three Aboriginal children from the Orphan School. Weep in Silence, 144.

⁴⁰Mathinna, Testimony to the Friend inquiry, October 1846, AOT CSO 11/1/27 Correspondence Civil Branch C658, 93–95.

⁴¹Deposition of Mathinna to Jeanneret, 25 March 1847, CSO 24/101/7, 299–300.

⁴²Most recent historical accounts of these events at Flinders Island take the view that Jeanneret's actions were motivated by his enmity with Robert Clark and his attacks on the political agency of Walter George Arthur and others. See Henry Reynolds, Fate of a Free People. Anna Haebich also takes this line, mentioning that Jeanneret gathered signatures from the parents of the allegedly mistreated children, but making no reference to the depositions he took from the children themselves; Broken Circles, 121–2. Plomley offered a more sympathetic reading of Jeanneret's actions and judged the Aboriginal petitions to have been largely a product of Clark's interventions; Weep in Silence, 153–63. The case illustrates the difficulty of identifying Aboriginal agency within an archival trail created primarily by vested white interests. There can be little doubt that Mathinna and the other children were, as Haebich suggests, ‘caught up in the crossfire’.

⁴³Mrs Jeanneret to Lady Denison, 9 June 1847, CSO 24/7/101, 321; John Phillip Gell to Colonial Secretary, Bicheno, 4 October 1847, CSO 24/7/101, 119–22.

⁴⁴Memorandum by Milligan regarding the Aboriginal children brought to Oyster Cove. CSO 24/7/101, 185–89.

⁴⁵Robinson, Diary, 26 January 1838, in Plomley, Weep in Silence, 525–32.

⁴⁶Hobart Orphan School 3 July 1851 CSO24/280/6187, 311.

⁴⁷Bonwick, Last of the Tasmanians, 382–84.

⁴⁸Wray to Cato (AOT) Correspondence File, ‘Mathinna’.

⁵¹Archives Office of Tasmania, Inquest of Aminia, 4 September 1852. SC 195/31/2798.

⁴⁹Plomley, Weep in Silence, 865. In his letter to Cato, Wray mistakenly wrote the date of Aminia's death as 1856. Plomley gave the date correctly as 1852 in Weep in Silence. Heather Felton took the 1856 date as the correct one in The Lowreene People and Mathinna, 5 and 22. She also found a compromise between the river of Old Boomer's story and the muddy lane of the inquest by suggesting that Mathinna drowned in a shallow creek near the Oyster Cove station, later called Mathinna Creek. Thus two versions of Mathinna's death are now in circulation: choked in a lane at the age of 17 or drowned in a ditch at the age of 21.

⁵⁰Plomley, Weep in Silence, 181.

⁵² Mercury, 5 August 1879.

⁵³Russell Potter for example writes on his blog, ‘not surprisingly the young girl did poorly after this, being found dead in the street some years later, apparently of acute alcohol intoxication’. Potter, Franklin Projections in Hobart. Pybus writes that Mathinna ‘drowned in a shallow creek’ beside the old convict station at Oyster Cove, Pybus, ‘Savage lesson’.

⁵⁴Flanagan, Wanting, 146–47.

⁵⁵ Mercury, 18 February 1870, 2.

⁵⁶A. W. Campbell, ‘Graves, John Woodcock (1795–1886)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 4, (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1972), 285–86.

⁵⁷Joyce Purtscher (comp) Children in Queen's Orphanage, Hobart Town 1828–1863 (Hobart: I. Schaffer, 1993).

⁵⁸Wray to Cato (AOT) Correspondence File, ‘Mathinna’.

⁵⁹Greg Lehman ‘Beneath the Still Waters: Connecting with Tasmania's Deep History in Sullivan's Cove’, Sullivans Cove Waterfront Authority Conversations in the Cove 2 March 2006, 4–5, [online], accessed 7 May 2011 from <http://www.waterfront.tas.gov.au/attachments/conv4_transcript.pdf>. Billy Lanney was said to be eight years old when admitted to the Queen's Orphanage on 28 December 1847. Purtscher, Children in Queen's Orphanage.

⁶⁰ Launceston Examiner, 31 October 1876, Colonial Times (Hobart), 22 July 1851.

⁶¹ Mercury, 31 October and 15 November 1876.

⁶² Mercury, 31 October 1876.

⁶³As the Mercury observed, ‘from his florid style of writing it was not difficult to detect his effusions’. 31 October 1876.

⁶⁷John Woodcock Graves ‘New Zealand’ (Letter to the Editor) Sydney Morning Herald, 8 April 1845.

⁶⁴ Mercury, 31 October 1876.

⁶⁵ Courier, (Hobart) 4 July 1846.

⁶⁶ Australian, 8 April 1845.

⁶⁸ Launceston Examiner, 2 April 1870, 5.

⁶⁹Graves always insisted on this particular spelling of her name, saying that it best reflected the way she herself pronounced it. See for example his letter to the Mercury, 7 June 1876.

⁷⁰ Mercury, 21 and 24 November 1874.

⁷¹ Mercury, 1 October 1873.

⁷² Mercury, 1 October 1873.

⁷³For the account that follows I have drawn on contemporary newspaper accounts: especially the Mercury, 8 and 13 March 1869, and the Launceston Examiner, 11 March 1869. For detailed analyses of the circumstances of Lanney's burial see Helen MacDonald, Human Remains: Dissection and its Histories (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 144–78, and Stefan Petrow, ‘The Last Man: The Mutilation of William Lanne in 1869 and its Aftermath’, Aboriginal History 21 (1997): 90–112.

⁷⁴Old Boomer, ‘Something of the Past’.

⁷⁶Tasmania's Tennyson, ‘The Story of Mathinna’, 9–10.

⁷⁵ The Story of Mathinna. In Prose by Old Boomer. In Verse by Tasmania's Tennyson (Tasmania: Printed at the “Mercury” Steam Press Office, 1871).

⁷⁷Tasmania's Tennyson, ‘The Story of Mathinna’, 12.

⁷⁸Tasmania's Tennyson, ‘The Story of Mathinna’, 12.

⁷⁹‘Old Boomer’, ‘Something of the Past’.

⁸⁰Greg Lehman ‘Telling us True’, in Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History, ed. Robert Manne (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2003), 175.