In the Vault
‘This is Australia’s real history,’ Western Yalanji Man, Johnny Murrison
I wasn’t sure if the beach had changed. When I had been here before, yellow warning signage, like news of a traffic accident, surrounded the ancient petroglyphs and flapped from afar. Now, as I walked up the sand, past kelp, whalebone and screeching tern, hearing the rushing sea, I couldn’t see the site. A white man, I had entered Aboriginal Land, Preminghana on the far northwest coast of Tasmania. And jutting further away to the north, on Cape Grim, I could discern a wind farm. The turbines were carving circles slowly in the air. It seemed a strange conjunction of the pre-European and the post-carbon. Then, at the far northern end of the glistening beach, I saw red markings, and, as I neared, realised these were new signs. NO CLIMBING and NO PUBLIC ACCESS they said in white on vermilion. This was the place. By a small creek, I recognised the heaped dune, sown with grass, through which some golden sandstone still protruded. Buried here was the finest expression of Aboriginal art in Tasmania. Beneath lay a set of remarkable carvings, a matrix of geometric motifs – concentric circles, drifting trellises, rows of dots, crosses, parallel lines – chiselled into the rock. Certain facets resembled monumental abstract sculpture. The eminent archaeologist, Fred McCarthy, author of Stone Implements of Australia, had once said the site was as important to the human story as the temples of Abu Simbel, then saved from the waters of the Aswan Dam by many millions of dollars. McCarthy was appealing for funds at Preminghana. His appeal fell idle. Now largely forgotten under the sand, all that was visible of this great work of hunter-gatherer art was a pair of circles floating in the unburied stone. The place had the undoubted allure of the hidden. But I went no further and stayed off the dune.
I heard the story from Peter Sims. He is an octogenarian former industrial chemist with keen blue eyes and a white beard, who has devoted much of his life to rock art. At his house, resembling an alpine lodge transported to a rainforested dell, Peter, an intellectual in jersey and tracksuit pants, pulled out the old files, his slides and the documents, copies of the monographs he was working on, and put the pieces together for me. Meanwhile, a grand piano slumbered by a firebox. The day was cold. His friend, John, another white bearded gentleman – they might almost have been brothers – kindly served us orange cake and cups of tea.
Peter told me it was a schoolmaster and amateur scholar named Archibald Meston who rediscovered the carvings. Shepherds from the nearby Van Diemen’s Land Company (a pastoral concern with a bloody past in the island’s indigenous wars) led him to the site in 1932. The schoolmaster immediately recognised the significance and prepared a paper for the Royal Society of Tasmania. Next, in 1950, a stonemason, called Leo Luckman, turned up. He documented the petroglyphs, finding that some of the panels had collapsed under the pounding of the Southern Ocean. Luckman took two fragments back to his local museum in Launceston. Then, in the early sixties, the State’s leading museum, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG), arrived on the scene. Workers took a crosscut saw – generally used for logging operations – and hacked off one of the finest panels, hefting the slab back to Hobart. At the time, this caused real grief and was descried as ‘official vandalism’ by John Mulvaney, the ‘father of Australian archaeology’, and others at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies in Canberra.
A young Welsh archaeologist, freshly out of Cambridge, soon to be a gilded name, was despatched to the Tasmanian backwater. Rhys Jones completed a proper excavation in 1974. He carbon-dated material around the petroglyphs and found the carvings were at least as old as the Haga Sophia and probably far older. He made fibreglass casts of the motifs. There was talk of building a protective dome, but funds could not be found. Eventually, in the late 1970s, concerned locals, with a nod from the Institute of Aboriginal Studies, buried the rock art under sand as protection
from the waves. The Van Diemen’s Land Company had the bulldozer and the work was done. The dune has since been seeded with marram grass and the landscape changed beyond recognition. This was the situation the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania inherited when Preminghana was returned to them in 1995. The carvings have not been sighted since.
Peter was quietly scathing as he relayed this tale. ‘At the time, when the sand was bulldozed,’ he reflected, ‘we said in twenty years time, there will be an enlightened community to protect and promote the petroglyphs. Well, it’s not twenty years, it’s fifty years. My lifetime will pass and nothing will change. It should be resurrected,’ he said. ‘TMAG holds the key.’
***
Following the thread, I went to TMAG, hoping I might at least view the missing panel sawn off in the sixties. Located down near the Hobart docks, TMAG is not to be confused with the city’s other museum, the fizzing contemporary dream factory of MONA (the Museum of New and Old Art, brainchild of the gambling whizz turned collector and impresario of the arts, David Walsh), which since opening in 2011 has given Hobart a sudden unexpected shot of the cool. In comparison, TMAG can seem provincial, orderly, sedate, not a place you would automatically associate with one of the dirty secrets of Australian ‘archaeology’.
One morning, with the pre-school children and the carers, I wandered through the galleries, seeing the odd curiosity. Here was a room dedicated to the Thylacine. A slightly moth-eaten specimen stared back at me, trapped in a glass box; footage showed a second forever pacing inside a cage. The largest of marsupial carnivores, it was hunted to extinction by the white man and yet bizarrely now serves as the proud symbol of all things Tasmanian, from number plates to beer. Here was a room celebrating the Gay Rights movement in Tasmania, where infamously anti-homosexuality laws were repealed only in 1997, for a long time crystallizing the island’s image as a byword for backwardness in Australia. Painted in black on a yellow wall I read:
We’re here We’re queer and We’re not going To the mainland.
And in amongst these exhibits, the colonial art and the natural history, I found a gallery dedicated to the island’s indigenous people. Water carriers made from kelp. A reed and bark catamaran. Native baskets woven from grass fibres. Iridescent pink and purple seashell necklaces. And of course information placards. One related to a past mea culpa, involving Truganini, so-called ‘last of the Tasmanians’, whose skeleton for decades formed a grisly display. ‘In 1976,’ I read, ‘following lengthy legal battles with the trustees of TMAG, Truganini’s skeleton was finally returned to the community.’ However, of the missing rock art, I saw no sign, nor mention.
Later, I tried to see if I could speak with the indigenous curators (there are two). After several days, the museum’s communications manager informed me both indigenous curators were unavailable, ‘due to other work commitments’. She also sent me a formal statement. It contained a curious assertion:
The large petrolglyph in the TMAG collection is currently off display at the request of the Aboriginal community. Its future is still a question that is under consideration with the community, and until then it is being conserved and cared for at TMAG.
Curious, because I’d been in touch with the custodians of the site, the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre. They had told me that some ten years before they sought to have the missing piece returned and that request went nowhere. There had been no discussion with them since. Nor would the Director of the Museum, Janet Carding, respond to my queries when I sought clarification. I felt as defunct as the Thylacine. Was this Truganini’s bones again?
The following week I drove north through the Tasmanian midlands past round hills and fields still flayed by the sun though it was autumn. Under bright scudding clouds sheep grazed. These were the fabled kangaroo grasslands, once carefully managed for game by firestick farming and handsomely ringed by trees. The early settlers had likened these hunting grounds to the parks of English noblemen, so stately had they seemed.
At a cafe on the streets of Launceston I found Michael Mansell waiting for me drinking coffee. He is a leading Aboriginal activist and lawyer instrumental in the land rights movement going back to the 1970s.
With him was a companion, the head of the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania, Graeme Gardner. Both, I later learnt, were descendants of Mannalargenna, revered warrior of the northeastern tribes, until his surrender in 1830 on false promises of an honourable peace. Famously, Mannalargenna cut off his ochred locks when he was betrayed and removed to Flinders Island in Bass Strait to weep in silence. I told his kin of my dealings or non-dealings with the museum. At first, they were watchful, laconic, understated. Then Graeme confirmed that on the petroglyphs there had been ‘no discussion whatsoever’ with TMAG for years. Michael offered a withering diagnosis:
Their behaviour is unchanged since the time we sought the human remains of Truganini. That went on for decades. They’re not going to give up anything willingly. They think that they are the keepers of mankind’s history. They think they are the only ones who can be trusted. But the carvings were stolen - sawn off and taken away in a truck. If that’s not desecration, I don’t know what is. The museum is aiding and abetting a theft, and the State Government should step in and cancel the permit that allows them to keep the petroglyphs under the Relics Act. We can then repatriate the carvings to the original place.
White people say Aborigines were illiterate. We weren’t illiterate. If you carve out the camping grounds, the walking tracks, the totems
to honour as you go through, the birds and the trees you cannot cut down, you might not be writing it down in English, but you are writing down messages, you are writing a roadmap to the territory. Then this lot come in and carve it up.
Michael Mansell rose to go, pleading an appointment. I stayed talking with Graeme Gardner. He told me his preference was that the missing petroglyph be put back exactly as it was beside the Southern Ocean, but there must be community consultation. At length, I too made to leave. Then Graeme said that he had communicated just yesterday with the Minister’s Office.
‘Oh, you hadn’t mentioned that?’ ‘Didn’t I? Well, we talked and I wrote to them just yesterday.’
And then Graeme pulled out his mobile phone and read to me a letter he’d sent asking that the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs intervene and support the Tasmanian Aboriginal Community’s request that the museum return the carvings to their rightful place, because, as Graeme put it, ‘they don’t belong in a shed.’
‘And what was the response?’
‘It was quick,’ said Graeme. ‘I heard back from them this morning. They said they’re investigating.’