Shadows from Tasmania’s past shine a light on social justice challenges

By Ben Smith, Director of the Office of Justice and Peace

It turns out that Truganini was not the last individual solely of Tasmanian Aboriginal descent. It was a woman called Suke, who died on Kangaroo Island in South Australia in 1888 (Rebe Taylor, Unearthed: The Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island, 2008).

Suke was almost certainly abducted by sealers and trafficked to Kangaroo Island to be exploited as an “island wife”. Suke was one of the hundreds of Aboriginal women, including three of Truganini’s sisters, who were abducted or purchased by sealers.

The sealers were a group of men living on Kangaroo Island and a number of Bass Strait islands.

In the main they considered these Aboriginal women as chattels, trading them in order to exploit them sexually and also for their survival skills and their capability in capturing seals and muttonbirds.

The women, as young as twelve, were often abused and occasionally killed. Many children were born from these unions however historians claim that the practice of infanticide was quite common on these islands.

Hidden out of plain sight, these women and their children were subject to isolation from their culture, slavery like conditions, physical violence and were ultimately abandoned in their old age by their sealer masters.

Despite these tragic historical practices, there are historians (such as Dr Patsy Cameron) who point out that some Tasmanian Aboriginal women from the north east coast were happy to live with the sealers on the Furneaux Islands.

These tribes developed trade relationships with the sealers that also included young women in the trade exchange.

These women were in regular contact with their tribes and returned to country each year with their sealer partners. Cameron suggests that in these circumstances, abuse was less common.

This relatively unknown chapter of Tasmanian history illustrates how various forms of slavery and abuse can occur to vulnerable people whose freedom is limited, and the normal checks and balances of civil society are suspended for people who are largely out of sight.

The injustices experienced by Tasmanian Aboriginal women in the nineteenth century should help inspire us to take the upcoming ACBC Social Justice Statement focusing on domestic violence very seriously.

It should also inspire the effort of all those in the Archdiocese of Hobart who are seeking to eradicate modern slavery.

Every human person is created in God’s image and deserves to have their human dignity respected and protected.  We need to recall that: “anything you did for even the least of my people here, you also did for me,” (Matthew 25:40).