Bear or Gardener? Writing Vandemonian History from the Perspective of Power

In “The Bear and the Gardener,” Jean de la Fontaine tells the story of a gardener who befriended a bear. The ursine stood watch to protect his friend’s sleep. When a fly threatened to settle on the gardener’s face, the bear tried to chase it away. When his first attempts failed, he seized a stone and crushed it – and with it his mate’s face. The story leaves the reader wondering what the gardener was thinking in befriending a bear in the first place and simultaneously cringing at the bear’s decision to use brute force to solve such a delicate problem. Reading Nicholas Brodie’s study on the Vandemonian War evokes a similar sense of surprise and apprehension. Brodie retells the story of the extermination and displacement of the Aboriginal Tasmanians in the wake of British settlement in 1803–04, focusing on the period between April 1828 and October 1831. He delves into the administrative records of Lieutenant Governor George Arthur, held by the Tasmanian Record Office in Hobart, and follows the inand outgoing paper trail connected to what the administration saw as “Aboriginal affairs.” So far, no author has inspected these records as meticulously as Brodie does in his description of the Vandemonian War. As such, his detailed account can be considered an achievement in its own right. However, contrary to Brodie’s boastful claims (2), many other scholars, who combined them with other primary material, have examined these records. In addition, Aboriginal artist, writer, and curator Julie Gough started a transcription project in 2012 that aims at opening up the government’s records to the public. Unlike Brodie’s study, her website, “Black War ∼ Van Diemen’s Land CSO 7578,” adopts a longer perspective (1824–36) and complements the Tasmanian material with additional archival sources (newspapers, governmental records of other origin). Similarly, the history of the Tasmanian genocide is far from “deliberately hidden” in some kind of “archival darkness” (4). During the so-called “history wars,” the fate of the Tasmanian clans stood at the centre of political and historiographical debates.