School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses

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Start date: 1980 × End date: 1999 × Subject: history × Subject: Aboriginal Australians × Author: TAYLOR, REBE ×

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    Sticking to the land: a history of exclusion on Kangaroo Island, 1827-1996
    TAYLOR, REBE ( 1996)
    In 1827, English ex-sailor Nathaniel Walles (Nat) Thomas and Aboriginal Tasmanian Betty were living at Antechamber Bay, in what later became the Hundred of Dudley, Kangaroo Island. They were among the several pre-colonial settlers who had come through the Bass Strait opened up by sealing and whaling industries from the turn of the nineteenth century. When the South Australia Company landed on Kangaroo Island in 1836, there were approximately five Tasmanian Aboriginal men and eight European men, some of whom, like Nat, had small farms of crops and stock. Nat and Betty appear to have been the only parents within this population of 1836 and the only Kangaroo Island pre-colonists to whom the descendants can trace their genealogies today. Their two surviving children, Mary born 1833 and Hannah born c.1839, married South Australia Company settlers; Mary married William Seymour in 1849 and Hannah married Thomas Simpson in 1860. Mary and William remained living near Nat Thomas at Antechamber Bay with their son and two daughters. William worked as a third keeper at the near-by Sturt Lighthouse, Cape Willoughby from 1852-1858. By 1885, however, Mary, by then widowed, moved to Penneshaw. There her son Joseph, a stone-mason, was married and had three daughters, whilst her eldest daughter Emma was married to local labourer Frank Barrett and had four sons and two daughters. The year they married, Hannah and Thomas took up a small lease of land near Penneshaw, known pre-1883 as Hog Bay, and Thomas, previously a Lincolnshire butcher, became the district postmaster. They had seven surviving sons and three daughters. At the age of nineteen, their eldest son, Nathaniel, inherited fifty-one acres of freehold land from his grandfather on his death in 1879. He and his brothers William, Thomas and Stephen worked on increasing this holding and, by 1893, were partners in over eleven thousand acres of land spanning south from Antechamber Bay to Cape Hart. Stephen Simpson also owned one hundred and eighty acres of suburban blocks in Sapphiretown, a township further west, and a forty acre section in Penneshaw where he lived. Nathaniel was a Justice of the Peace and he and his brothers Thomas and William councillors for the District of Dudly. The Simpsons had become an established family; they had houses, land and positions of influence. They could not, however, marry into the other established families. The colonial pastoralist families who had taken up leases on the Hundred of Dudley, predominantly in the 1850’s and 60’s found the pre-colonial descendants unacceptable on the grounds of their Aboriginal ancestry. Having met the colonial families on every other front- acreage, power and respectability-marriage; the mixing of black and white blood, proved the ultimate boundary the pre-colonial descendants could not penetrate. Chapter two discusses the marital frontier between colonised and coloniser, a barrier which was suppressed in daily and mundane interaction but tacitly expressed in forbidden or broken engagements. As one colonial descendant explained, “no-one would make a fuss until you start [sic] to talk of marrying one’. It was not that the second and particularly third or filial pre-colonial looked black; it was that they carried a contaminant gene. Interviews with colonial descendants expose that there was fear that mixed blood would create the “throw-back”. Far less fantastic, however, was the feat that marriage into an Aboriginal pre-colonial descendant family would lead to their own exclusion. While blood expresses the basic contamination, however, it only operates within a place. When the third and filial generation of pre-colonial descendants left Kangaroo Island for the mainland, where their ancestry was not known, they were able to marry. It is, therefore, evident that race is defined not only genetically, but by place, a notion more fully developed in the discussions of pre-colonial descendants ownership and loss of land in chapter one.