Postcard from nipaluna: beyond Acknowledgment of Country

The other place is nipaluna, the Aboriginal name of the land on which Hobart sits. Its history runs deep, yet it is all but invisible to the casual eye. A visitor might stroll through Franklin Square and see a statue of John Franklin, lieutenant-governor of what was then called Van Diemen’s Land. But there is no sign of Mathinna, the Aboriginal child who was taken from her parents as a baby and “adopted” by the Franklins when she was five with the goal of “civilising” her, only to be abandoned four years later. Dispossessed of her Aboriginal identity and rejected by White society, she died around the age of 17. 

I found Mathinna through the words of Nunami Sculthorpe-Green, who is descended from palawa (Aboriginal Tasmanian) and Warlpiri people. Her voice piped into my ears via a headset as she guided some 30 of us through the city centre, sharing the stories—or rather, truths—of her ancestors’ dispossession and resistance. 

Under the spell of her words, nipaluna began to punctuate Hobart’s placid streetscapes. Elizabeth Street, damp and chilly on a winter’s evening, is transformed into a dusty road on a hot summer’s day in 1832. A group of 40 Aboriginal resistance fighters is walking towards us, on their way to negotiate a truce with the governor after about a decade of fighting British expansion into Tasmania, in a long and bloody guerrilla war known as the Black War. 

“I really wanted to change the way people look at Aboriginal history and how they see these colonial cities,” Sculthorpe-Green told the host of “Great Australian Walks” last year. “You can see it’s pretty hard to imagine that there are any Aboriginal stories here, and I wanted to change that by reminding people that Aboriginal stories are everywhere.” 

Atrocities on an epic scale—entire Aboriginal bloodlines wiped out by disease and violence, lands and languages lost to future generations, grave robbers who stole the remains of palawa for private collectors and museums—unfurl under Sculthorpe-Green’s artful telling. So too do the minutiae of everyday life. As we cross a thoroughfare teeming with rush-hour traffic, Sculthorpe-Green points out that resistance leader Truganini, whose death in 1876 gave life to the myth that palawa had become extinct, used to walk her dogs on the same street. I began to see and think of Hobart as nipaluna Hobart, a conjoined name used by some, reflecting a connection I had not understood until then.

A 90-minute walk can reveal untold truths and correct historical inaccuracies, but it cannot alter the course of history. Assured by the British that their lands would be eventually returned to them if they laid down arms, some 200 Aboriginal Tasmanians did. But this “truce” turned out to be treachery. The British exiled all of them to Flinders Island, which effectively functioned as a death camp. Diseases decimated their numbers until they successfully petitioned to be allowed to return to mainland Tasmania in 1847. The British sent the 47 who’d survived to a former penal colony in Oyster Cove, south of nipaluna. All living palawa today, including Sculthorpe-Green, are their descendants.

“Forgetting—I would even go so far as to say historical error—is the crucial factor in the creation of a nation.” Ernest Renan, historian, in an 1882 lecture 

Australia’s First Peoples comprise two broad distinct groups: Aboriginal Australians, who are descended from inhabitants of mainland Australia and Tasmania; and Torres Strait Islanders, who are descended from inhabitants of the Torres Strait Islands, an archipelago of 274 small islands that was annexed by Queensland in 1879. Humans are thought to have migrated to the continent from Asia at least 50,000-65,000 years ago, when it was still one supercontinent with Tasmania and New Guinea—making indigenous Australians one of the oldest populations of humans living outside of Africa. Studies suggest that there could have been as many as 1m people living on these lands when the British arrived. 

In 1768, when Captain James Cook set sail under the auspices of the British government to confirm the existence of a vast southern continent, he was told that should he find the continent, he was to use “all proper means to cultivate a friendship and alliance” with any people he found there, and to only take possession of land if it was uninhabited. 

Whatever Cook made of these exhortations, he evidently decided they did not apply to Australia. He and his compatriots described the land as “thinly inhabited”, and, as children of Europe’s incipient “Enlightenment”, saw the people they did encounter as primitive hunter-gatherers with no knowledge of land rights or, crucially, agriculture. At the time, the British believed that cultivation was a hallmark of “civilised” society, and agriculture as they knew it went hand in hand with property rights. By 1770, Cook had claimed the eastern coast of the Australian continent for the British crown, which he named New South Wales. 

Terra nullius, or “land belonging to no one”, became the legal principle upon which the British colonisation of Australia rested, and the basis for determining property rights. Despite some sympathetic settlers and government officials expressing doubts about the right of this claim, it remained legal doctrine until it was overturned by a landmark court ruling in 1992. 

In a 2005 paper titled “Why Terra Nullius? Anthropology and Property Law in Early Australia”, legal historian Stuart Banner, commenting on the enduring power of terra nullius, noted that “the land titles of every single landowner in Australia were based on a purchase from the Crown…And the Crown’s title to the land rested on the legal fiction that the Crown had instantly become the owner of all the continent in 1788. In short, every landowner in Australia had a vested interest in terra nullius.”

Cook and his fellow amateur anthropologists were oblivious to as much as 65,000 years of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history. As Sculthorpe-Green told us, her people “have always been here, and always will be.” Along nipaluna Hobart’s picturesque waterfront, she pointed to walls constructed using bricks made from lime derived from shell middens—vast and distinct concentrations of discarded shell and bone, evidence of Aboriginal hunting, gathering and food processing. The famed Tasmanian “wilderness” also bears signs of careful Aboriginal land management: the vegetation has been shaped by centuries of targeted burning regimes, which serve to prevent wildfires, manage hunting grounds, provide greater ease of travel, and enable the regrowth of new flora.

I’d initially assumed that takara nipaluna would be an educational walking tour of a city, but listening to Sculthorpe-Green, I realised I was in fact witnessing truth-telling in action, which is infinitely more powerful. Australia’s First Peoples consider truth-telling as essential to proper reconciliation and historical acceptance of Australia’s past—not only the early years of British colonisation, but also more recent injustices such as the Stolen Generation, where until the 1970s, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were forcibly removed from their families and communities.

“Truth-telling”, as a concept, can allude to a court process. Consider the Commission of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa, formed to uncover evidence of human rights violations during apartheid. But this limited imagining underestimates truth-telling’s creative potential. Sculthorpe-Green’s interpretation was a clear-eyed, compassionate, and compelling expression of moral clarity, drawing from the lived experiences of her elders, and asking nothing of participants except our open minds—open to the possibility that we might have to unlearn and unsee what we thought we knew.

Standing in a tree-lined square surrounded by bronzes of British men and fountains, it was not lost on me that I too, am a product of a former British colony. Born in Singapore to a Malaysian father and Taiwanese mum—we’re all Singaporean citizens now—I too at some point believed that Singapore was an untamed jungle with a fishing village on its river banks before the arrival of Stamford Raffles. I have since acquired a more critical lens, thanks in no small part to the scholars and artists who have questioned the validity and framework of Singapore’s bicentennial celebrations. Nevertheless, the dominant national narrative remains one of celebrating “modern” Singapore and all its capitalist achievements. We lack a deeper national appreciation for our own “first peoples”, and a true reckoning with colonialism has yet to emerge, to say nothing of Singapore’s own colonialist tendencies as an independent nation—our mining of other countries’ natural resources to literally expand our borders; our dependence on low-wage migrant labour who work under conditions akin to slavery. 

What are the untold truths, little-known stories, and messy narratives behind Singapore’s tidy cluster of colonial buildings, and where do we begin? Much as there is to learn from the experience of Australia’s First Peoples, it is also questionable whether there is a single “best way” of acknowledging indigeneity, when it risks compressing the rich diversity of cultures from which we sprung into a simplistic version of “nativeness”—a word that can also be code for “primitive”, suggesting that these cultures are somehow incompatible with modern life.   

Faris Joraimi, Jom’s history editor, told me that concepts like “First Nations” are potentially limiting in the Singapore-Malaya context, “because there are long histories of migration, intermarriage and acculturation in the region that render categories like ‘native’ and ‘foreigner’, as we understand them in our present-day sense, not very helpful.” After all, he added, the indigenous peoples of Australia, New Zealand and North America have equally if not more complex categories of belonging, and “each context carries its own fraught relationship to ideas of locality and habitation.”   

While efforts by groups like Orang Laut SG, and heritage tours have managed to create more interest and appreciation of Singapore’s pre-colonial history and cultures, more can be done to complement their work. “There’s actually a lot of great work by scholars going back to the early 1980s and before about our rich indigenous past, rigorously documenting the intricate processes of movement, settlement, and group-formation around the Singapore Straits over centuries,” said Faris. “I wish they were better read and discussed by the public. Maybe we should do more of that through book clubs or workshops, and not just stop with experiences.”

Even before we landed in Melbourne, I heard the “Acknowledgements of Country” that have become commonplace across Australia. “We acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we work, live and fly, and pay respect to Elders past, present and emerging,” said the flight attendant on my Qantas flight from Singapore. I’ve heard similar words before at a concert in Hamer Hall, and from my yoga instructor at the start of every practice (she adds: “sovereignty was never ceded”). I also saw the words tucked away at the bottom of many Australian websites, and sometimes at the entrances of buildings. 

Acknowledgements of Country can be made by both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal persons. As a Singaporean who has little experience with such things I was fascinated, mainly because where I live—a Melburnian inner city suburb—words acknowledging the presence of Aboriginal people are more visible than the people themselves. Aboriginal and Torres Islander people currently comprise 3.8 percent of the total Australian population, and 74.5 percent of them live in New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia. In the state of Victoria, where Melbourne is located, Aboriginal and Torres Islander people form just one percent of the population.

My husband was just as struck by the ubiquity of Acknowledgements of Country as I was; this practice was far from the norm when he last lived in Australia. By this measure, the Acknowledgements can be seen as a hard-won victory by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to become more visible in a country that tried for a very long time to erase their presence and minimise their long history. While true, whenever I hear these words, I also wonder, who are the Wurundjeri and the Boonwurrung, and what is the Kulin Nation? What is their history and culture, in what ways did they serve as custodians of the land, and how do they still do that today? What happened to them when the British arrived, and where do they go from here? 

In Australia, these are not academic questions. On October 14th 2023, Australians voted in a referendum that asked if they were willing to recognise First Nations people in the country’s constitution, and establish a body of advisors—to be known as the “Voice”—who could make representations to Parliament on matters relating to them. The Voice, together with truth and treaty, is one of the three pillars of reform in the Uluru Statement from the Heart by First Nation peoples, urging better recognition of indigenous rights. 

“No,” was the response from 60 percent of the nation’s voters, a sentiment starkly at odds with the Acknowledgements of Country I had heard so much of. It also sets Australia apart from other Commonwealth countries like Canada and New Zealand, which have formally acknowledged their indigenous populations with treaties and constitutional affirmations. 

A broad range of people voted “no” for various reasons. Lidia Thorpe, a senator, was one of the more prominent Aboriginal politicians to do so, arguing that the Voice was merely “window dressing for constitutional recognition” and a treaty was the only way forward. But the “no” campaign, funded by a right-wing lobby group, also perpetuated a fog of misinformation that sowed fear about the Voice, such as how it would control Parliament and seize land from Australians.

It was difficult to not perceive the referendum result as a step backwards, as exposing the limitations of Acknowledgements of Country. After all, the Wurundjeri are not just traditional owners of most of what is now Melbourne—their ancestors were dispossessed of their land, killed in violent clashes with early settlers or by the diseases that they introduced, and repeatedly traumatised over generations by policies such as the forced removal of their children. Compared to non-indigenous Australians, Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders have shorter life expectancies, are twice as likely to die by suicide, are 17.5 times more likely to be arrested and more likely to be denied bail and jailed. Acknowledgements, symbolically meaningful as they are, can only say so much. 

In the presence of truth-telling in nipaluna Hobart, I felt a flicker of optimism. Truth, told from the heart, is difficult to look away from and impossible to forget—it becomes the lens through which I could view my surroundings, and my homeland, in a new light. 

As a traveller, we often focus on our enjoyment—what can we see and do—and as a migrant, we worry about the opportunities available to us and our ability to thrive in a new environment. I am not immune to the very valid anxieties of the latter, but I’m learning that it’s also important to recognise that I am still a guest in this new-to-me land, and sometimes I have to see past my needs, respect the history and culture of my hosts, and take the time to listen to the truths being shared with me. As opposed to only asking, “What’s here for me?” 

Truganini’s memorial site is one that wakes you up, forces you to resist and fight, and lingers in your memory long after you leave. Not unlike the power of truth-telling. 

Lin Yanqin is a Singaporean writer and producer currently living in Melbourne. 

Note to readers: palawa kani, the only Aboriginal language to survive in Tasmania to this day only uses lowercase letters.

Letters in response to this piece can be sent to sudhir@jom.media. All will be considered for publication on our “Letters to the editor” page.