After the dust has settled on the state election, a politically diverse parliament would demonstrate meaningful respect in a bipartisan gesture to the original custodians by returning the ideated precinct known as Macquarie Point to the name of the indigenous muwinina people – nipaluna.
Though largely symbolic, this act would go some way to acknowledging the horrors inflicted upon First Nations people by our early governors – Macquarie preeminent among them.
“I came, I saw, I renamed.”
If not a quote, then surely a sentiment embraced by our pioneering colonial Governor, Lachlan Macquarie. His first name and surnames and those of his second wife Elizabeth (née Campbell), have been honoured throughout the country, no more so than here in Tasmania (VDL) where the couple’s familial monikers were personally ascribed or later attributed to everything from streets, buildings, farms, rivers, bridges, statues, banks, harbours, wharves, parks, rivulets, islands, headlands, plains, monuments and, to the subject of this critique, Macquarie Point.
The Colonial Governor (1809–1821) possessed either a very limited imagination for place names or, more likely, an ego the size of an uninhabited continent. Perhaps such self-promotion was not surprising given his upbringing under a monarchy with the regal doggedness to christen as ‘George’ six successive Kings for well over a century (1714–1830).
Unfortunately, such blinkered aggrandisement also fostered the most heinous of decrees against the rightful defenders of a sustainable and peaceful society.
The following is an excerpt from Governor Lachlan Macquarie’s official diary, my emphasis added.
Sydney Cove, Wednesday 10 April 1816:
‘In pursuance of this resolution, and on the grounds of the most imperious necessity, arising from their own hostile, daring, outrageous, and sanguinary proceedings, I have this Day ordered three Separate Military Detachments to march into the Interior and remote parts of the Colony, for the purpose of punishing the Hostile Natives, by clearing the Country of them entirely, and driving them across the mountains; as well as, if possible, to apprehend the Natives who have committed the late outrages, with the view of their being made dreadful and severe examples of.
If taken alive. — I have directed as many Natives as possible to be made Prisoners, with the view of keeping them as Hostages until the real guilty ones have surrendered themselves or have been given up by their Tribes to summary Justice (read ‘hanging’). In the event of the Natives making the smallest show of resistance – or refusing to surrender when called upon so to do – the officers Commanding the Military Parties have been authorized to fire on them to compel them to surrender; hanging up on trees the Bodies of such Natives as may be killed on such occasions, in order to strike the greater terror into the Survivors’.
Enshrined in stone and bronze throughout this country, the venerated Governor Macquarie was hereby ordering an act of proto-genocide upon the indigenous inhabitants of a land declared by King George III, ‘terra nullius’ (uninhabited) – the first of a litany of British lies.
And today, we blindly recognise a brutal overlord whose name is emblazoned across respected institutions, government publications, maps, encyclopedias, universities, libraries, and even the trusted tome of an antipodean dictionary.
While no direct evidence exists of Macquarie ordering retribution against the Indigenous population during his visits to Van Diemen’s Land in 1811 and 1821, his twelve-year colonial governorship presided over the documented subjugation, dispossession and slaughter of mainland Indigenous peoples.
Entirely isolated from the outside world for 8,000 years until European contact; in a blink of history, from the first settlement in 1803, until the death of Truganini in 1876, the British colonists had – by way of mass-murder, disease, execution, deprivation and terminal confinement – annihilated the entire Aboriginal population of Van Diemen’s Land – an irrevocable crime against humanity first defined as ‘genocide’ following the events of WW11.
History, as they say, is written by the victors. As a geographically segregated landmass, Tasmania should now embrace the opportunity and show the courage to revisit, rename and rewrite a truthful narrative.
‘No New Stadium’ supports the vision of Tasmanian Aboriginal descendants to create a Truth and Reconciliation Park at the heart of the nipaluna precinct as a way of healing the trauma of dispossession and genocide, and of celebrating the resilience and generosity of Tasmanian Aboriginal culture.
Mark Pooley is a ‘No New Stadium’ supporter living in Hobart.
