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Quaker Dreaming: The "Lost" archive and the Aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land

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journal contribution
posted on 2023-05-18, 15:14 authored by Brodie, ND
© 2015 Religious History Association.This article explores interactions between Tasmanian Aborigines and residents of a Quaker settler property in documented actuality and familial, regional, and scholarly memory. Debunking a recent suggestion that authentic Tasmanian Aboriginal religious rituals and mythologies were kept secret by these settlers for a century and a half, I argue that such “mythologies,” and stories of their transmission, are post-colonial inventions that attempt to render this part of the narrative of Quaker colonialism in Van Diemen’s Land as principally humanitarian, with Quakers acting as a benignly aberrant exception to the wider phenomenon of settlers dispossessing Indigenous peoples. Demonstrating that these settlers colluded in wider colonial practices and policies, and were active participants in networks of scientific study of the Tasmanian Aborigines, this article serves as a case study of the multi-layered nature of colonial action and post-colonial historicism, and also points to a self-refer- ential tendency in historiographies of colonial Tasmania. I suggest that the stories presented as an authentic body of Tasmanian mythology in Land of the Sleeping Gods (2013) unconvincingly attempts to reinscribe Quaker colonialism as pacifist and humanitarian, and I argue that in fact Quakers demonstrably contributed to the dispossessing of Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples from their traditional lands.

History

Publication title

Journal of Religious History

Volume

40

Pagination

303-325

ISSN

1467-9809

Department/School

School of Humanities

Publisher

Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Asia

Place of publication

Australia

Rights statement

© 2015 The Author. © Religious History Association

Repository Status

  • Restricted

Socio-economic Objectives

Expanding knowledge in history, heritage and archaeology

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