Aboriginal women from Tasmania and South Australian mainland taken for 19th Century Kangaroo Island sealers
A night scene in the bush, Kangaroo Island in 1839, with an Aboriginal and European group, drawn by W.H.Leigh.
Aboriginal women from Tasmania and the nearby South Australian mainland areas became the first females on Kangaroo Island with the male Islander sealers in the early 19th Century.
The Aboriginal women took on important roles on the island, acting as labourers, hunters, wives, trackers, garment makers and food gatherers. Reflecting the early historical connection between southern South Australia and Tasmania, Aboriginal women from that colony were the first on Kangaroo Island. One report said “the traders, who visited the island occasionally, brought them a Tasmanian lubra for a consideration”. Some of these women evidently had been obtained from their Aboriginal husbands in Tasmania, exchanged for the skinned carcases of seals.
In Tasmanian Aboriginal culture, men seldom learnt to swim. They were often ferried on rafts by the women, who were good swimmers. This made the Aboriginal men limited use as labourers to the sealers, but the women proved invaluable.
The Islanders' desire for working wives led to excursions to the nearby South Australian mainland regions that were some of the most densely populated with Aboriginal people in Australia.
In 1819, a passing ship captain reported on several European menf rom the island going to the mainland in their boats and seizing Aboriginal people, particularly women, and “keeping them in a state of slavery, cruelly treating them on every trifling occasion”. Another party of five Islanders crossed to the mainland, leaving two Aboriginal women, they had already caught, hunting and fishing on the island. Landing at Cape Jervis, they walked across country to Lake Alexandrina. They waited until morning when the Aboriginal men had gone hunting, and then rushed in, grabbing the women and ty in g their hands behind their backs. Back at Hog Bay on Kangaroo Island, the women were released.
As the marauding trips inceased, the mainland Aboriginal populations became more wary, and the risk to the Islanders increased. On one trip to Cape Jervis, Aboriginal people waited until the Islanders were about five kilometres inland and then attacked. One Islander was speared in the foot but escaped w th a slight wound. Aboriginal women taken to Kangaroo Island grew to include those from Eyre Peninsula and occasionally Yorke Peninsula.
A report in the Sydney Gazette on July 1, 1826 (originally printed in the Hobart Town Gazette), described how on Kangaroo Island “every other labour, is performed by the native women, whom these unprincipled men carry off from the main, and compel to hunt, work, and fish, and do every other menial service, while they themselves sit on the beach, smoke, drink, and sleep by turns, occasionally perhaps rowing to kill a young seal while basking on the sunny beach. This food, though far from palatable, is all that their indolence will in general allow them to procure, and they sometimes salt it down for future store. It is much to be lamented that so debased a specimen of the Christian race as these men, should be the first to give an impression to the natives, who are there very numerous, and of a superior cast to those here and at Sydney.”
However badly treated the women were, the mode of their capture and treatment, appeared to have much in common with Aboriginal practices in the pre-European period.