My family has a shack on the edge of Great Oyster Bay, on the east coast of Tasmania. One of the island’s Aboriginal tribes was known to the first whites as the Oyster Bay tribe. These may well have been the people who met the Protector of Aborigines in Van Diemen’s Land, George Augustus Robinson, in 1830. They told Robinson their people had come to the island by foot and that the sea had closed behind them. They had carried that item of knowledge, correctly as it turned out, for 12,000 years. By the end of the 19th century, however, the official version, the scientific version, was that the Tasmanian blacks were Polynesian in origin, having come to the island by sea. This intellectual orthodoxy owed its origins to a speculative guess by Thomas Huxley based in part on the observation that the first Tasmanians had curly hair. Recently, I received an inquiry asking how many Aboriginal people were in
Tasmania at the time of white arrival. The honest answer is I don’t know. The best I can do is guess or quote the guesses of other people. To grow up in Tasmania, as I did, is to learn there is much about the past that you don’t know and probably never will. In the end, you have to learn to live with the absence of the sort of certainty demanded of those who engage in intellectual jousting.
Tasmania has been in the news of late with the so-called Windschuttle debate. I’ve had only the one argument over Windschuttle, the subject being whether I was obliged to read him. My friend inferred that Windschuttle had become a sort of intellectual roadblock barring me from pursuing a path I had been treading all my adult life, upon which I had written scores of articles, several books and now a play. All this work has proceeded from the premise that the truth of what happened in this country lies between the races, not on one side or the other, particularly not in one side’s official records and newspapers. Imagine the response if the Japanese government were to produce a pamphlet on the treatment of Allied prisoners-of-war during World War II based solely on Japanese Army records and Japanese newspapers of the day. Windschuttle, and other champions of the so-called empirical method, might at this point interrupt and say but there are also Allied