Full Transcript for Naomi Parry Duncan

about history and funding for history. So we just had, you know, the cultural, there was a cultural program. Yeah, we were put into submission, a joint submission, all the history councils in Australia for the review of the national cultural policy. And we asked for history to be included as a specific creative discipline because it is a specific creative discipline. And in the academy... in the universities, history is really under attack because partly because of the woeful job ready graduate scheme, which is designed to discourage students from studying the humanities, but also because the universities in general are undervaluing humanity. So we've had a lot of historians made redundant over the last couple of years. It's particularly bad at the moment. And some universities have just, you know, run the, acts through whole departments. So, yeah. 00:04:10 Speaker 1: What's taken over? What's taken over from the university, specifically history? 00:04:15 Speaker 2: Well, I think that the goal, I don't know why, you know, history is more popular than ever. Students love it, but it's getting harder and harder for university academics to survive and to teach. You know, we're losing our jobs. So that means that the... the lifting, the heavy lifting goes to history teachers. And so that's when we work with, the History Council works with History Teachers Association as well. And so, yeah, it comes down to history teachers and to their kind of individual passion. 00:04:48 Speaker 1: Is it because history is open to interpretation? 00:04:50 Speaker 2: No, no, I don't think. 00:04:53 Speaker 1: But surely it is. You can get different perspectives depending which historian you speak to. 00:04:59 Speaker 2: Well, yeah, and that's one of the reasons that history is so good for fostering critical thinking. because it's about comparing viewpoints and coming up with very different ideas about the world and seeing things through fresh eyes and being aware of all of the kinds of influences that make history in particular kinds of ways. So everybody has a particular take on things. And I'm looking, I can see the bookshelf behind you and you've got lots of books about war. And so, you know, I've worked... I've done a little bit of military history as well, more about the social side of war rather than the guns and movements and formations. But it's... History is about asking questions about the past and about the present and understanding how we have created the present and what's going on at the moment. And so, you know, the old saying, history never repeats. Well, it's not true because it does and it repeats over and over. 00:06:03 Speaker 1: So.... 00:06:05 Speaker 2: Understanding why things happened I think really helps us know who we are right now. 00:06:11 Speaker 1: Now, we are going to talk about your book, I promise. But this thread we're on intrigues me because some of us are made to feel a little bit guilty about our history. I mean, you talk about the history of war. I mean, there's anti-war and, of course, and our relationship with the first Australians is also... cause for some reflection um yes where do you stand on where do you stand to get a tradition of the traditional history as we were taught it at school or the one you've researched okay so. 00:06:46 Speaker 2: Well what i was taught at school when i first began school which was you know more than 50 years ago um yeah i was raised in tasmania and we were taught the dominant narrative which is that tasmanian aboriginal people were driven to extinction by colonisation. And so that has always been, in Tasmania, has always been a source of shame that that had happened. So there was definitely always shame about it. But the reality was that Tasmanian Aboriginal people were not extinct. They did survive. Their culture and their knowledge survived. And there is a very strong Tasmanian Aboriginal community there's been a lot of intermarriage with white people. So people aren't necessarily particularly dark skinned, but they are very active. They know who they are. So that's, you know, that's one area where. 00:07:42 Speaker 1: Active or militant? 00:07:46 Speaker 2: Some of them are militant, that's for sure. So, and they need to be, you know, they've got to stand up for themselves. They've got to protect their cultural heritage. And so those things are really important. And in terms of, I suppose the revision of history and history is something, it does need to be revised. Every generation needs to look again at history and what we now do understand is the strength and the resilience of Aboriginal culture and also the humanity of Aboriginal people. 00:08:16 Speaker 1: It's interesting though that those people in history that we regarded as heroes have had their reputations torn down and trashed. Do you think, is it okay for that have we been awakened to the acts that they committed? 00:08:34 Speaker 2: Yeah, I think so. I think one of the things I suppose is looking at questions of responsibility, who is responsible, who's benefited from these things. And it is important that we know that. And it's important that views change over time. And I'm not one that necessarily gives people a free pass for being of their time or having attitudes of their time. But what I try and do in my history is explore the humanity of all of the people involved. So to acknowledge that when you're looking at something like frontier conflict, it's not everyone is scared, everyone is frightened and everyone is doing terrible things. So some of the Aboriginal people were doing, were obviously killing and attacking white people. We know that. We also know that white people were killing and attacking Aboriginal people. And we know that white people, I mean, I don't particularly like the term white or black, but it was a case that the colonisers wanted Aboriginal land and saw Aboriginal people as a barrier to that. So removing them was fairly important. And they did

that in various ways, sometimes just by outright killing them, but other times by doing things like taking their kids away and forcing them to move. 00:09:56 Speaker 1: So, yeah. Dr Naomi Parry-Duncan is my guest. We're to talk about a book called Mosquito, but the whole history thing is fascinating. I find it. I hope you do as well. Back after the break, folks. Welcome back, everybody. My guest on Conversations is Dr. Naomi Parry-Duncan, a professional historian, storyteller, author, editor, and and a really interesting lady to talk to because history is always interesting. And I guess we morphed into the discussion about colonisation of Tasmania. Naomi's from Tasmania. It's interesting, you just touched on that topic before the break of judging yesterday's actions by today's standards. And it's terribly misleading, in my opinion, to do that. I know you touched on it, but how can we judge yesterday's actions by today's standards? We've changed so dramatically, even in the last, say, 40 years. 00:10:51 Speaker 2: Is it about judgment, though? For me, I see history about acknowledging the things that happened, understanding why they happened. It's not about making excuses for the past. It's also not about necessarily even laying blame. It's just being truthful about what went on. And so that could be whether you're acknowledging something like the Stolen Generations, which I've done a lot of work on. My PhD was about assessing whether you could judge those child welfare policies by the standards of the time, because that was the excuse that the Howard government was making, well, these were the standards of the time. So I went and looked at the standards of the time, and guess what? Aboriginal people were treated... much more harshly than non-Aboriginal children in the child welfare system. And they were removed in much greater numbers. And the standards that were applied to Aboriginal people were very different to the standards that were applied to non-Aboriginal families. So you're talking about, you know, where there were systems set up to support families to keep their children, those systems were not extended to Aboriginal families. So that is a case where the standards of the time were actually not being applied fairly to Aboriginal families across Australia. So my specialty is New South Wales and Tasmania, but across Australia, it was a different set of standards being applied to Aboriginal people. 00:12:21 Speaker 1: I hate contemplating this topic because you see the young Aboriginal child being taken from their family and the terror of the child, the heartbreak of the... of the people, of the parents. And then you see some of them who've gone on to achieve such great things after they've been removed and integrated into a, I don't know, a white society for want of a better term. And that's where I find myself really conflicted about it. Had they stayed in the traditional system, what sort of life would they have had? I mean, have you done any research on that? Do you have an opinion on that? 00:13:03 Speaker 2: Yeah, I do. I have an opinion on it, that's for sure. So my opinion is very much that Aboriginal families weren't given the opportunity to stay together and achieve success on fair terms. And so where you've got, you know, I mean, of course, where a child is being severely neglected, it's you know, of course the welfare of the child matters. Of course those things really, really matter. But the approach of authorities, and my area is really before World War II, the approach of the authorities then was just to simply assume that an Aboriginal family was absolutely an unfit place for a child, whereas they were more inclined to value family structures for non-Aboriginal families, and that meant that they would provide things such as pensions, such as any kind of supporting parents' benefit, maternity allowances, things that help people raise their families and stay together because the value was that families stay together. But for the way that the authorities saw it was very much that an Aboriginal family was automatically a bad place for children to grow up in. So therefore you take the child out of the family and put it either into an institution or generally they were put into institutions and so that was actually considered adverse for white children but was the standard for Aboriginal children. So there's a lot of... And then those institutions, of course, were terrible places and it's, you know, history is always complicated and always nuanced and I just think understanding what happened helps us understand the now because you have an intergenerational... problem where people people weren't raised in a family um then if they have their own family they don't know how to be in a family and then that just puts the um sends the abuse down it kicks the can down the road in terms of um of the misery you know it makes for you know multi-generational misery whereas and you're also looking at you know many aboriginal families were contained in reserves and stations where they couldn't leave and they were underfunded and couldn't earn their own income. They were basically kept in a terrible abject poverty. So, of course, the family wasn't appropriate to raise a child in because the government wasn't providing the resources for the family. And then, yeah, so it's, you know, you'd have to read my PhD. And that's not what we're talking about today. 00:15:47 Speaker 1: No, but you've studied it. I mean, you talk pre-World War II. Does it still happen? Are the kids still removed? 00:15:55 Speaker 2: Yeah, kids right now are being removed at higher rates than they ever have been. 00:16:00 Speaker 1: But surely there must be caution before that happens, given the controversy about it that has raged. 00:16:09 Speaker 2: Yeah, look, I'm very alive to these debates and to the issues that go on. When you have got a lot of poverty, a lot of very poor families Living conditions, very

poor living standards. And I do think that governments must take responsibility for the conditions that a lot of people are living in. In my mind, for all children, the best thing for them is to grow up in their own family and to know who they are. And that's really, really important for every child. And I think it's important for societies to support families to keep their children with them and to help families that are struggling to raise their children well. Those things are really important. And that's the sort of standard of care that I would like. Right. 00:17:04 Speaker 1: Let's move because this is an ongoing debate. 00:17:07 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:17:07 Speaker 1: So let's talk about mosquito. 00:17:10 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:17:11 Speaker 1: Which is spelled with an M-U. Is that mosquito? Yes. 00:17:14 Speaker 2: That's the way it was spelled in colonial times. 00:17:17 Speaker 1: Yeah. M-U-S-Q-I-T-O. That surely couldn't have been his tribal name. 00:17:23 Speaker 2: No. No, it probably was not his tribal name. I think that one of the things that the Aboriginal people in Port Jackson did is when they met someone that they liked, they would swap names. They would take on someone's name as a sign of respect. So we know that Mosquito's brother, whose name was Noonga Noonga Moora Mergan, he. 00:17:47 Speaker 1: took on the name Collins, which, of. 00:17:49 Speaker 2: Course, is a lot easier. And I'm pretty sure that Mosquito had another name, which was Yerrungoolaga, and I'm pretty sure that he swapped a name with a sailor who would have had the name Mosquito, which is both an Italian and a Spanish name. 00:18:08 Speaker 1: You talk about the language that you use. I mean, in the foreword or introduction, you talk about how you used the language and the Indigenous language when you could There's so many dialects. There's so many different indigenous languages. How do you decide which one to use? 00:18:23 Speaker 2: Yeah, look, I relied a lot on linguistic work that's been done by people who do linguistics. I'm not a linguist myself, so I relied very much on that for spellings and for understandings. And in Tasmania, the languages obviously were not being spoken, but they have, through a lot of linguistic work and research, been renewed, refreshed. So there is a Tasmanian Aboriginal language called Palawakani, which is actually a private language. They don't publish their grammars or anything like that. But from that work, we know what Aboriginal names were. And Europeans wrote down a lot of different names for the things. They were interested to know what Aboriginal people called things. 00:19:14 Speaker 1: Those names rolled off the tongue for you, even the complicated one. Do you speak an Indigenous language? 00:19:20 Speaker 2: No. No. I don't speak any language other than English. I've got very bad French, so I suppose you could say Franglais. I speak that. But, yeah, I, you know. 00:19:32 Speaker 1: What was Mosquito's brother's name? That

just rolled off. 00:19:35 Speaker 2: Aaron Woolagar. 00:19:36 Speaker 1: No, I meant the brother's name. 00:19:38 Speaker 2: Oh, the brother. 00:19:39 Speaker 1: The brother's name. 00:19:40 Speaker 2: Numanonga Muramurgan. It's a lot. 00:19:45 Speaker 1: How on earth did you learn that? 00:19:48 Speaker 2: Just practice. I don't even know. if I'm saying it right, you know, but just, yeah. 00:19:52 Speaker 1: I can't even say it. Which could be, you know, you just don't know. 00:19:54 Speaker 2: I rely on people who have the skill to read books all the different ways that colonists wrote these words down and then to figure out how they sounded. And, I mean, when you listen to Aboriginal place names and things like that, you can hear a lot of how the language sounded. 00:20:23 Speaker 1: My guest today is Dr Naomi Parry-Duncan. We haven't barely talked about her book and the subject of her book, An Aboriginal Man, like a tall, strong, handsome Aboriginal man called Mosquito, who met a tragic end, unfortunately. And we'll talk about that after the break. Welcome back to Conversations. If you've just tuned in, it's a great Conversations. We could have so many debates about it. We can go down so many tangents, often so many tangents, with Dr Naomi Parry-Duncan, who's a professional historian. If you want your history research, she'll do it for you. storyteller, editor and author of a book called Mosquito, who did meet a tragic end. I'm giving the end away, but I suppose. 00:21:07 Speaker 2: Maybe, yeah, I'll give you like a potted biography of Mosquito. So the short story of Mosquito is that he was a Port Jackson man. From Sydney. 00:21:18 Speaker 1: From Sydney, yeah. 00:21:19 Speaker 2: So I'm not entirely sure where he was from or who his people were, but I do know many of his relatives and family. 00:21:27 Speaker 1: And he was there when the first fleet landed? 00:21:30 Speaker 2: Yep, he would have been alive when the First Fleet arrived in Port Jackson, so in 1788. So I think he was born around 1780, maybe a little older. He was a young man when the French arrived in 1802, and there's a very beautiful drawing of him that was done by the French, which is on the cover of the book. 00:21:49 Speaker 1: When did the French arrive? 1802. Where did they land? 00:21:54 Speaker 2: Oh, with the Beaudin expedition, which is. 00:21:57 Speaker 1: They came to South Australia, I think, did they not? 00:22:00 Speaker 2: They did, yeah. So they came to Western Australia first and they went to East Timor, then they came back down the West Australian coast and named a lot of the West Australian coast, so Geograph Bay. They went to Van Diemen's Land. They spent a lot of time in Van Diemen's Land. They were the first Europeans to actually spend extensive time there. There was Well, there was a couple of different expeditions, French expeditions. 00:22:26 Speaker 1: I'm sorry to interrupt, but why didn't they claim some of that land? How were they met by the colonists? Was there violence, resistance? 00:22:35 Speaker 2: Well, when the French arrived in Van Diemen's Land, there were no English people there. So England, it was known to be claimed by England, but the French visited England. And then they explored the Bass Strait, which had only just been discovered. They explored Victoria. They met Matthew Flinders at Encounter Bay. And then they came being to Port Jackson because their ships needed repairing. So they were there in 1802. They spent about six months in Port Jackson. 00:23:05 Speaker 1: It's amazing how they, in those years, in those craft, how they travelled the world. Anyway, let's get back to Mosquito. So he's a young man growing up in... in Sydney. So what was life like for him? 00:23:19 Speaker 2: Well, he was at the time, you know, this is a fair bit after the kind of arrival of the First Fleet. And so there was, there had been a big smallpox epidemic in the first year of the settlement, which wiped out a lot of Aboriginal people, but there were still quite a lot of groups, but they'd kind of reformed. And so they were mostly living, they lived often in and out of, the settlement of the houses in Sydney. There was quite friendly and amicable relations, but there was also violence bubbling on the edges of the settlement. So a big warrior called Pemawoi that many people have heard of, he was very active and he was actually murdered in 1802 and his head was sent to Sir Joseph Banks in England. And then there was a bit of quiet around that time and then in 1805 Mosquito emerges in conflict on the edges of Parramatta. So he is essentially made, well, he's blamed for starting that and so the Aboriginal people in Parramatta were told that they couldn't come into the settlement until he was handed over. So that happens and then he. 00:24:34 Speaker 1: So what sort of insurrection was there? Was it. 00:24:38 Speaker 2: It was a lot of attacks on farms around the edges. And so Parramatta was the most important settlement in the colony because that's where people were able to grow food. They weren't really able to grow it at Port Jackson. So it was absolutely critical to the survival of the colony. And so they had a little garrison town at the head of Parramatta, but they couldn't really defend it adequately so they relied on the settlers around the area to defend their own properties and that's where my ancestors come into the story because they were given convict allotments around the edge of the settlement and were obliged to defend them. 00:25:16 Speaker 1: So did you only discover the involvement of your ancestors whilst researching this book or had you known about it before? 00:25:23 Speaker 2: No I had no idea so I didn't know really very much about my convict ancestors at all and it was really just through um while I was researching mosquito, which I've done over, you know, two decades. And then I decided that I want to look at my ancestors. And then when I realised exactly where my

ancestor's land was, I realised that was where mosquito was active and where he was apprehended, which means it's very likely that my ancestor was in the party that dragged mosquito into Parramatta. 00:25:56 Speaker 1: How did you find out? Was it ancestry.com or did you have other. 00:26:01 Speaker 2: Ancestry.com did help a fair bit, but the details... So that helps you with tracing your family tree, but then you have to do all of the work to put your people where they were. And so I spent a lot of time looking at maps, a lot of time reading every kind of bit of correspondence that I could find, going through archives to figure out where people were, what they were doing. And it just so happened that eventually the penny dropped that the little bit of land that mosquito was kind of noticed to be active on was actually my ancestor's land. 00:26:40 Speaker 1: Were they transported or did they immigrate? 00:26:42 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. So I have a number of, I have ancestors that go back to 1796 in Australia and the first two were sent out. They had been stealing saltpeter in London and, which is the core ingredient of gunpowder, and they were banged up and taken to the Old Bailey and transported. One of them was William Mobbs, who was the actual thief, and then his brother-in-law was a fence, and so he got the bigger sentence. The brother-in-law was called William Bateman, and when they got to Australia, they changed their name to Batman, and their first child born in Australia was was John Batman. 00:27:26 Speaker 1: John Batman. You're kidding. 00:27:26 Speaker 2: So I found out that John Batman is my cousin six times removed, and I don't feel very. 00:27:34 Speaker 1: Good about that. What, because you didn't inherit any of the land? Well, Batman didn't leave anything. You didn't get a slice of Melbourne? 00:27:41 Speaker 2: No, because he was such a nefarious character. He was a very, very dodgy person, and he committed a lot of acts of cruelty in Tasmania to Aboriginal people, not in Mosquito's Lifetime. But he was heavily. 00:27:58 Speaker 1: He stole Melbourne. He got Melbourne for a song, didn't he? 00:28:02 Speaker 2: Well, yeah, and, I mean, he had no right to attempt to strike a treaty. So he... But he did do that, which was, you know, offering a couple of blankets and some flour for country. So it was wrong on every level. But by that stage, Batman was pretty insane because he had syphilis. Oh, right. 00:28:21 Speaker 1: That'll do it. 00:28:22 Speaker 2: That'll do it. 00:28:24 Speaker 1: Anyway, so Mosquito's agitating on the edge of Sydney society out at Parramatta. Yep. And he's handed over by his Indigenous community. 00:28:37 Speaker 2: Yes, yeah. He's traded as the price of peace. And then Governor King doesn't know what to do with him because their legal understanding, which is a dodgy legal understanding, but they believe that. He wasn't a British subject and he couldn't swear an oath on the Bible. So they take him and an Aboriginal boy called Tulgra or Bulldog and they decide that they're going to exile them to Norfolk Island. 00:29:01 Speaker 1: Had they committed, like, grievous crimes, like murder and the like? 00:29:07 Speaker 2: Not sure. Really not sure. 00:29:08 Speaker 1: Surely they would have been executed if that was the case. 00:29:14 Speaker 2: No. This is a theory that they... couldn't be judged by British laws. At this time, and we're talking 1805, the theory was that British laws couldn't apply to Aboriginal people. That changed over the course of Mosquito's life. 00:29:30 Speaker 1: My guest today in Conversations is Dr Naomi Parry-Duncan, and her book is called Mosquito. It's a great look at our history, and if you're not interested, you should be. Back after the break. I'm talking with Dr Naomi Parry-Duncan, who is a professional historian. So if you want your history researched, Naomi can do it for you. She's a storyteller. She's an editor. She is part of the Professional Historians Association of New South Wales and the ACT. Were you chairman of that at one stage? I was, yeah. We talked about that, the sort of things that historians sit down and discuss. But her book is called Mosquito, just simply Mosquito, and there's a front cover. The front cover is a painting done by a French, was he an artist? 00:30:17 Speaker 2: Yeah, he was a natural historian. So he was also a gunner. He was a naval lieutenant on the Baudin expedition, but he did a very, very beautiful portrait of Mosquito in pencil, essentially, and the cover is overlaid over a picture of Ben Lomond, which is actually where Mosquito was active in Tasmania. So I think we were up to him leaving Parramatta and going to Norfolk Island. 00:30:47 Speaker 1: Was that a harsh penal colony in Norfolk Island? 00:30:51 Speaker 2: So there were two convict settlements on Norfolk Island. The first one was actually... a pretty good place. And the colonists didn't want to leave. So a lot of convicts were sent there immediately after the first fleet arrived, and then they were freed and given land to cultivate, and they didn't want to go. And by that stage, we're talking about 1813, and a lot of them were quite old, and they were very upset at the thought of having to start again in another place. But they were forced to leave and go to Tasmania. And then when that happened, Mosquito went with them. And I think it was almost an accident that they, he kind of got forgotten about on Norfolk Island, but he had lived as a lime burner there. So he was a very, you know, he worked alongside white people. He knew white people well. And then in Tasmania, he worked with white people for quite a long time. I should say British people are colonists rather than say white people, because of course not everyone was white. But He lived there quite peaceably and then joins up with Tasmanian Aboriginal people and is blamed for inciting them to resist the colonisation of Tasmania. And so... The book's full title is

The Real Story of a Legendary Colonial Warrior. So it's Mosquito, The Real Story of a Legendary Colonial Warrior. And the reason I say real is because lots of people made up lots of myths about him while he was alive. And some of those myths were that he was leading the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. Some were that one of the big myths that they were saying at the time he was alive was, well, if we catch this guy, it'll all stop. But the thing is that it didn't. it got worse and worse and worse because Tasmanian Aboriginal people had every reason to be resisting colonial settlement. 00:32:36 Speaker 1: In the end, they were driven from Tasmania, were they not? 00:32:40 Speaker 2: Yeah, they were. So there was a lot of killing went on. There was a lot of, an awful lot of murder. You know, of course, some white people were murdered as well. It was a very bad and very violent time. And then eventually a gentleman called George Augustus Robinson went around the island and persuaded Aboriginal people to go with him. And they were removed to Flinders Island, which was in the middle of Bass Strait and was a very terrible place. They were given to live in and many of them died of illnesses and very broken hearts. Then they were repatriated to Tasmania to a place called Oyster Cove, which was bleak, horrible. Many of them died there. But while all this was happening, there was a community of people living independently on the Bass Strait Islands and some families who were living in mainland Tasmania who were part of sealing and other communities and so Tasmanian Aboriginal culture was surviving even though the people that were considered full bloods died. Everyone knows that Tuganini died in 1876 but she most certainly was not the last Aboriginal person. 00:33:53 Speaker 1: Rachel Perkins calls it the Australian Wars. I mean is it Were they wars as such? 00:33:59 Speaker 2: Yeah, I believe that they were. I'm very familiar with that level of scholarship. I mean, I know some people say that because the Aboriginal people didn't form into an army the way that, you know, British people did, then it wasn't a war and it wasn't a declared war. But there is no doubt that there were a lot of attacks. Aboriginal people were attacking and often organising across various large distances in both Tasmania and the mainland. And this kept on for a really long time. So like, I do believe, I do believe it was a war. It was a war that colonists and Aboriginal people were waging over land. They were all fighting for the land and the colonists were fighting for it too. And I think if we're going to recognise frontier wars, it's not just about memorialising Aboriginal people. It's also memorialising colonists who died to get control of the land. 00:34:55 Speaker 1: Your book visits lots of different places. You use the Indigenous term for them. We talk about Port Dalrymple, the Durban River, Pitwater, Grindstone Bay. I've never heard of Grindstone. 00:35:07 Speaker 2: It's a little bay, yes. So did you. 00:35:09 Speaker 1: Visit all these places? Did you visit. 00:35:11 Speaker 2: And make it all in? I did, yeah, I did. And I had a, like, A wonderful, I went to the Grindstone Bay property and it's only been ever owned like by two colonial families. So that colonist who had it in the time Mosquito was alive because the reason it's important is because that's where there was a big killing of people from the Oyster Bay, Aboriginal people from Oyster Bay, attacked three stock keepers and only one of them survived and it was a very grisly killing. It was bad. And Mosquito was immediately blamed for it because he was talking to the stock keepers because he could speak English. He was blamed for that and then became a hunted man. And that resulted in him eventually being executed in Hobart in 1825. But at Grindstone Bay, a family took it over in the 50s. I have met that family. They welcomed me to their place and took me to the site where the killings happened and which just taught me so much about why it was an important place for Aboriginal people and for colonists. And they told me lots of the stories about that and then were very welcoming, very interested, very alive to what had happened on the land and to caring for the land, to looking after it. They were very responsible farmers. They're really, it's a sheep and beef farm and they're just such great people. And so I had a, a launch event in Hobart last night and the current proprietor of this farm came down to be at the launch and it was just amazing to be. 00:36:50 Speaker 1: What was your emotion standing on that land, knowing what had transpired those two centuries ago now, basically? 00:36:59 Speaker 2: It's very emotional. It's very traumatic and very tragic. And, you know, the surviving stockkeeper, he's got descendants that still live in that area. I think Tasmanians do really know just what went into taking over the land that they have. And I don't think any Tasmanian ever thinks that it was a good thing. It was tragic. People were killed. People died. Aboriginal people died and non-Aboriginal people died. It was a very full-on and difficult thing and it's left big scars in the landscape. And then, of course, Tasmania has also got fairly bleak convict history and that is, there's a lot of sadness and tragedy around that. But I believe generally that the convict system was, it was a tool of taking the land as well. 00:37:47 Speaker 1: So, yeah. So Mosquito's condemned. There's another character, Black Jack, you call him Black Jack. That's short, Black Jack. 00:37:57 Speaker 2: That's... Yeah, that's obviously not his name. So he had another name. He was known as Black Jack Roberts, which means that he probably was an Aboriginal. He had been taken by a white family as a child and raised in a white household and then rejoined the Oyster Bay people as an adult. But he was very young. There's a death mask of him that shows just how young he really was when he was executed and It was a big scene in Hobart, a big public hanging where they hanged six white bushrangers and two black men in a kind of single drop. 00:38:35 Speaker 1: All at once. 00:38:36 Speaker 2: A big display, public display of violence, a warning to all the convicts in Hobart that if you transgress the law, this is what will happen to you. 00:38:46 Speaker 1: So six people on a scaffold and the floor drops away and eight people are hanging there dying. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. 00:38:55 Speaker 2: Yeah, that was Governor Arthur. He was into displaying violence. So that's, yeah, and it was, you know, Tasmania has a very dark history. 00:39:03 Speaker 1: You're right that that was the most moving moment of research, seeing that death mask of Black Jack's face. 00:39:10 Speaker 2: Yeah, it was a very profound moment. It's held by the State Library. So it was quite something to see it. And a death mask has to be made fairly soon after death. So there's a kind of, you have. 00:39:23 Speaker 1: The sensation of... Should they have it? 00:39:25 Speaker 2: I guess that would be something for Tasmanian Aboriginal people to consider whether they, but it isn't a human remain. It is a form. 00:39:37 Speaker 1: What do you hope for your book, Naomi? 00:39:39 Speaker 2: I hope that it helps people see the humanity of Aboriginal people, their strength and their resilience and that cultures survived. what people went through, but also that they understand, I suppose, the dynamics of colonialism and how it affected both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, that everybody, you know, the feelings and the sensations that all of these people had in this new world, which was the world after 1788. It was a whole new world and people were making themselves in whole new ways. 00:40:13 Speaker 1: Well, look, it's a fascinating topic. There's no doubt about it. It sort of makes us a little just, Just pricks the guilt a little bit. Just fix that scab of guilt that some of us have. I hope it goes really well for you, Naomi. All the best. 00:40:26 Speaker 2: Thank you so much. But I don't think anyone should feel guilty. It's not about guilt. It's about understanding. And there's no room for guilt. I don't feel responsible for the things my ancestors did, but I do enjoy the fact that I know what they did. 00:40:41 Speaker 1: Dr. Naomi Parry-Duncan, the book is called Mosquito. There's a bit more to the title, Naomi. Can you? That's right. 00:40:48 Speaker 2: It's Mosquito, the real story of a legendary colonial warrior. 00:40:52 Speaker 1: Thank you so much for your time. 00:40:54 Speaker 2: Thank you, Graeme. 00:40:55 Speaker 1: And thank you for joining us, folks.