Aboriginal women trio, taken to Kangaroo Island in 19th Century from Van Diemen's Land, outlive Truganini
Rebe Taylor's award-winning book, Unearthed: The Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island, was published by Wakefield Press. Right: A South Australian Museum display of archaeological remains of Tasmanian-type artefacts – including a flint, hand-made domino piece and marsupial jawbone tool – at former campsites around Kangaroo Island.
Three Aboriginal women brought to South Australia’s Kangaroo Island from Van Diemen’s Land in the early 19th Century in South Australia outlived the noted Palawa (Tasmanian Aboriginal) woman Trukanini/Truganini, who died in Hobart in 1876.
The Aboriginal women from Van Diemen’s Land, later joined by South Australian mainland Aboriginal women, were taken to the island as wives of its sealers, also acted in important roles on as labourers, hunters, trackers, garment makers and food gatherers.
On Kangaroo Island, the Tasmanian women and their children appear not to have mixed well with Aboriginal people from the South Australian mainland. The Tasmanians apparently considered that their own hunting and gathering skills superior to all others. So these women and their children generally went on expeditions alone. Tasmanian women were able to use skills in sealing from their homeland.
The Tasmanians apparently retained their language, some words still known by their descendants on Kangaroo island, as discovered by South Australian Museum anthropologist Norman Tindale's fieldwork on the island in the 1930s.
The total population of Kangaroo Island was about 200 in 1826, and, by 1844, there were 12 Aboriginal women living on Kangaroo Island, several originally from Tasmania and they “were judged to be between forty and fifty years of age, having been on the island upwards of seventeen years”.
Although a few Tasmanian women on Kangaroo Island were eventually taken back to Tasmania, several chose not to return because they knew what had happened there. By 1830, only 300 fully descended Tasmanians of an original population of several thousand remained.
Some Tasmanians on Kangaroo Island may have have been absorbed into the mainland Aboriginal population but, by 1869, the island still had three Tasmanian women, Sal, Suke and Betty, who lived “by their wits and their waddies”, preferring to hunt for themselves rather than to accept government rations.
By the 1870s, it seems that most of the Aboriginal people who had originally been taken to Kangaroo Island, had either died or were removed. The last of these island women died around 1888. Betty's descendants continued to live on Kangaroo Island.
