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- Article Title: Letters - June 2010
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Tragedy and loss
Dear Editor,
In his otherwise eloquent defence (‘Seeing Truganini’, May 2010) of Benjamin Law’s busts of Truganini and Woureddy as ‘irreducible historical objects’, secular works of art and therefore items that should be available for free discussion and exchange, and also in his sketching of the various shades of guilt accompanying this very complex issue, David Hansen, a professional curator, is, I feel, himself ‘guilty’ of looking around these works rather than at them – in fact, not ‘seeing’ them. Dr Hansen says: ‘It is not the sculpture that conveys the extinction myth, but the way the image is and has been used in another past, a later past.’ Focusing on Truganini, he details how, when her bust was made, there were still ‘two hundred full-blood Palawa living’, Darwin’s ‘Origin’ was twenty years off, Truganini was ‘smart and vivacious, young and attractive’, and she and her treaty group were ‘A-list colonial celebrities’.
But what is overwhelmingly conveyed by the bust itself, reproduced in ABR, is a sense of profound tragedy and loss, beautifully rendered in the individual expression of the subject. Surely, Aboriginal activists Maynard and Mansell-McKenna are right in seeing in this an implicit concept of race extinction. Whether or not this entails that these works should be bought and sold in an open market is, for me anyway, a separate matter.
Leigh Swinbourne, Bellerive, Tas.
David Hansen replies:
Interestingly, Leigh Swinbourne’s letter actually serves to underline the central thrust of my essay. Of course, I cannot but agree with him that Truganini’s face in Law’s moving portrait expresses ‘a profound sense of tragedy and loss’. But to see in her expression ‘an implicit concept of race extinction’ is, quite simply, bogus ahistorical projection, a judgement of twenty-twenty hindsight from 1876 and beyond. More significantly, such a view also serves to obscure or diminish Truganini’s early personal sufferings at the hands of the colonial invaders: her mother was killed by sailors, her uncle shot by a soldier, her sister abducted by sealers, and she herself was raped following the murder of her betrothed, Paraweena, by timber-getters. There had been plenty of tragedy and loss in Truganini’s life before she sat for Law, and well before she became ‘the Last Tasmanian’.
Defending the West
Dear Editor,
I was taken by Robin Prior’s eloquent defence of ‘the West’ in his review of Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds’s What’s Wrong with Anzac? (May 2010). It is a nice idea to posit Australia as an outpost of ‘secularism, tolerance and personal freedom’. But, for much of our history, being part of the West has also meant supporting colonialism, exploitation and repressive governments. There are defensible wars, and I agree with Prior about World War II, though the West hardly entered that war to liberate Belsen and Dachau.
The hard question that Prior poses is whether supporting these values means we should engage in military adventures to impose them on others. The current record in Iraq and Afghanistan seems to suggest it is a doomed enterprise.
Dennis Altman, Bundoora, Vic.
Clarification: In the April 2010 issue, Judith Armstrong reviewed Maria Tumarkin’s Otherland: A Journey with My Daughter. She stated that Tumarkin’s other child, Miguel, was at one point left in the care of another relation, ‘neither of the two fathers being in the picture any more’. Mr Edward Najera, the father of Miguel, who is not named in the book or our review, has pointed out that he remains present in his son’s life and shares the responsibility equally with Maria Tumarkin. No suggestion of parental dereliction was intended in Dr Armstrong’s review, which was based solely on the evidence before her in Otherland. We regret any distress that may have been caused.
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