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By Root 709 0

people's food, killing kangaroos en masse with guns and dogs. And frequently when the aboriginals would return to a coastal spot they had been living in for perhaps thousands of years, they would find it occupied by settlers and soldiers. These encounters led to bloodshed and exposed aboriginals to European diseases to which they had no immunity. At first the colonial government maintained a policy of détente with the native people. But by the 1820s, the situation had completely deteriorated. In 1828, aboriginals were banned from entering settlement areas and some settlers interpreted the ban as a shoot-on-sight policy. In 1830, the colonial government staged an exercise known as the Black Line. Colonists, convicts, and soldiers marched across the settled parts of Tasmania in a long line in an attempt to capture any and all aboriginals in their path. Though only two aboriginal people were captured during the seven-week-long sweep, the Black Line effectively drove the aboriginals permanently from their ancestral homes around the colonial settlements.

It was in response to these hostilities that George Augustus Robinson began to round up Tasmania's aboriginals at the behest of the government. Robinson, who was a housebuilder from London before he turned missionary, thought he could save the aboriginals by moving them to concentration camps in the Bass Strait and converting them to Christianity. An aboriginal woman named Truganini assisted him. Truganini was born in 1812, nine years after settlement, and her clan was decimated by colonization. Her father had been shot by settlers. Her sister had been kidnapped by sealers and later killed. With Truganini as translator, Robinson went around to the furthest reaches of the island, convincing aboriginals (sometimes at gunpoint) to follow him to a better place. Where he took them were isolated islands in the Bass Strait. There, in camps cut off from their way of life, the aboriginal people died at a rapid rate from disease, poor nutrition, and squalid living conditions. In her last years, Truganini became the symbolic last survivor. And when she died in 1876, her bones were taken by the Royal Society of Tasmania, strung up, and eventually put on display like an animal's. They remained on public view until 1947. They were supposed to be the icon of a lost race.

Darlene called the last aboriginal story a convenient fiction. Tru-ganini's bones, which were displayed for “scientific” reasons, were nothing but a trophy, wrapped up in a phony aura of regret. When the Europeans had eliminated the Tasmanian “aboriginal problem” and taken over all the aboriginal lands, they could pretend the aboriginals were no longer there.

“Science will say that I can't be a black woman, because I'm not blackskinned. I can't be an aboriginal woman, because I can't speak lingo. Science will tell you that we're just descendants or half-castes. That's what I was brought up being called, little half-caste girl.”

Darlene was born on Flinders Island in the Bass Strait. “That was where George Augustus Robinson removed a lot of my old people.” Most of the aboriginals taken by Robinson to Flinders perished, and the last survivors, including Truganini, were ultimately moved to Oyster Cove, not far from Hobart, where they continued to die off. But they weren't the only aboriginal people on Flinders or the other Bass Strait islands. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, sealers from America and Britain had begun harvesting fur seals in the strait. The sealers kidnapped and lured aboriginal women to the Bass Strait islands to be their wives and companions, and to work harvesting the fur seals. The children of these unions stayed on the islands, and when the seals were hunted to the vanishing point, they began harvesting muttonbirds for their livelihoods.

Darlene's father had been chief of the Mansell clan, the Moonbird people. “That's my cultural totem, the muttonbird, the shearwater. Our community goes once every year for about eight weeks to harvest the birds. I was brought up on them.”

Darlene had some