Niamh's Site

Wybalenna Aboriginal Establishment

Item

Cartographic Name

Wybalenna Aboriginal Establishment

Description

The Wybalenna Aboriginal Establishment was an internment facility built at Flinders Island by the colonial British government of Van Diemen's Land to accommodate forcibly exiled Aboriginal Tasmanians (Palawa).

Identifier

SITE-WYB

Contained in place

Flinders Island

category

Reserve

temporalCoverage

1834-1847

sourceOrganization

Black Line (1830)
Aborigines Protection Act (1838)
Establishment of Wybalenna (1834)

text

“A village of some seventy cottages, each with its own small garden, ranged in rows, with a church dominating the centre.” Cameron, A.M. “Wybalenna: The Aboriginal Settlement on Flinders Island.” Papers and Proceedings of the Royal Society of Tasmania, 1986, p. 7

“Stone footings of cottages, chapel ruins, and the cemetery… a regimented, surveillance-friendly layout typical of mission-prison complexes” Birmingham, Judy. “Wybalenna and the Archaeology of Colonial Mission Settlements.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 14, no. 1 (2010): 82.

"In the main, however, they simply died—of accidie, deracination and new diseases. In 1835, only 150 Aborigines were left. Little by little, they wasted away and their ghosts drifted out over the water" Australian History. Hughes, Robert. The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia. Vintage, 1987, p.438.

"The deaths of the four mission Aborigines at the beginning of the mission to the western nations confirmed for the others that Flinders Island was a place of death and that they must on no account return there (about George Augustus Robinson journal entries)" Colonial Administrator Journal Writing. Lyndall, Ryan. The Aboriginal Tasmanians. University of Queensland Press, 1981, p.200.

"They live in an artificial society where most of their traditional food resources have been hunted out, and living in damp poorly ventilated huts with impure water and inadequate provisions" Indigenous History . Lyndall, Ryan. The Aboriginal Tasmanians. University of Queensland Press, 1981, p.203.

Source

Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office
State Library of Tasmania
Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston
AIATSIS, Canberra
Birmingham, Judy. Archaeologies of Cultural Interaction in Tasmania. Heritage Studies, 2010.
Cameron, Patsy. Grease and Ochre: The Blending of Two Cultures at the Colonial Sea Frontier. 2012.
Price, Rebecca. Wybalenna: Negotiating Colonialism. PhD Thesis, 2009.

isRelatedTo

Blue Tier Tin Mines

Item sets

Carceral Sites