The Memory of Genocide in Tasmania, 1803-2013: Scars on the Archive

212 Pages·2017·1.77 MB·English

by  Jesse Shipway (auth.)

THE MEMORY OF GENOCIDE
IN TASMANIA, 1803-2013
SCARS ON THE ARCHIVE
JESSE SHIPWAY
PALGRAVE STUDIES
IN THE HISTORY
OF GENOCIDE
Palgrave Studies in the History of Genocide
Series Editors
Thomas   Kühne
Clark University, USA
Deborah   Mayersen
University of Wollongong, Australia
Tom   Lawson
Northumbria University, UK
Genocide has shaped human experience throughout history and is one of
the greatest challenges of the twenty-fi rst century. Palgrave Studies in the
History of Genocide is dedicated to the study of this phenomenon across
its entire geographic, chronological and thematic range. The series acts as
a forum to debate and discuss the nature, the variety, and the concepts of
genocide. In addition to histories of the causes, course, and perpetration
of genocide, the series devotes attention to genocide’s victims, its after-
maths and consequences, its representation and memorialization, and to
genocide prevention. Palgrave Studies in the History of Genocide encom-
passes both comparative work, which considers genocide across time and
space, and specifi c case studies.
More information about this series at
h ttp://www.springer.com/series/14582
Jesse   Shipway
The Memory of
Genocide in
Tasmania, 1803–2013
Scars on the Archive
Jesse   Shipway
Glebe, Australia
Palgrave Studies in the History of Genocide
ISBN 978-1-137-48442-0 ISBN 978-1-137-48443-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-48443-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956366
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For my family and for Tasmania
A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like acknowledge everybody who’s helped me research and write
this book since I started in 2000. To say that it’s been a rough ride would
not overstate the case. At times, I questioned my own sanity, and others
did too. But these were political problems as well as scholarly and personal
challenges.
There were moments in this process where I felt inside the text and
times when I felt outside it or around it as if it was me and I was it. Which
can cause some serious problems when your topic is genocide and you’re
out on a limb methodologically and in disciplinary terms.
I had left Tasmania for Melbourne in 1999 and in 2000 began a post-
graduate thesis at the University of Melbourne called the economic imagi-
nary which aimed to synthesise Marx and Lacan in the context of the
neoliberal turn in global politics since 1973.
The magnitude and ominous technicalities of this study quickly over-
came me and with city life starting to wear us down, my partner and I
decided to return to Hobart, Tasmania to buy a house and start a family.
I was delighted to fi nd the support there of Philip Mead and the school of
English, Journalism and European Languages for a new research project
centred initially around the idea of Tasmania occupying a position on the
edge of a centre-less modernity.
Given a dark turn of mind that I have always had, and which manifests
in a persistent interest in the roads less travelled through ideas, music, and
life in general, it was no wonder that I was attracted to the minor tradi-
tion in philosophy and the Marxian tradition in political and economic
thought. Beginning serious research into the Tasmanian archive, it didn’t
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
take long for me to see that there was much scholarly work that needed to
be done on the Tasmanian genocide both in its own right and in compari-
son with other genocides, with the Holocaust still demanding recognition
as the paradigmatic instantiation of this baleful social logic.
All of a sudden a cosy retreat into the details of a local Tasmanian
modernity became a challenge to consider a pulverisingly meaningful his-
torical event—the Shoah—that I had never looked into in any detail before.
I was forced thus to cover up, and consider my object with exactly the kind
of “cool, encompassing and explanatory gaze” that Pierre Nora wants us
to turn against ourselves in the form of the ego-histoire to gain a better
understanding of our own personal imbrication in our topics of study.
It was hard with no aboriginal blood or “genetics” to allow myself
the right to study their victimisation at the hands of my own Anglo-I rish
ethnic group and so I resisted and refused this refl exive bending into inter-
rogative postures or e go-histoire —and for the same reason I apologise to
any readers who would prefer that this study read a little more personally.
I completed the PhD in 2005, graduated in 2006 and went to work
for the Tasmanian government in the policy division of the Department
of Premier and Cabinet. Suffi ce to say this didn’t work out exactly as
planned. And not much else did for the next ten years. I did become a poet
though and managed to work when and where I could, keeping my fam-
ily together, maintaining our house, making it occasionally overseas, and
then out on my own, after many bipolar psychotic episodes, to peace with
the cosmos, that has held now for long enough for it to feel permanent.
But my mirror phase was stubborn and bullying, I put my PhD research
aside after submitting it to dozens of publishers. I quit work entirely.
Moved out of home. Invested myself in poetry and the hot and cold log-
ics of fi nance, money, markets, again from a Marxian perspective. Then
out of the blue, in 2014, I was contacted by Tom Lawson asking if I’d be
interested in submitting a book proposal for the Palgrave Studies in the
History of Genocide series that he was editing with Thomas Kühne and
Deborah Mayersen.
I was astounded and naturally I agreed to sign the contract I was sent
from London. It was surely manna from heaven. I was f inally sublating
with the big leagues, in the only real meaningful and uniformly valued
symbolic order currently extant. How had I turned my hubris haunted life
around? And who would care to hear anything about it?
My relationships were tested by this book project. My care and love
and compassion and tolerance for humanity were cracked and darkened
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix
by exposure to and meditation upon the naturalness of genocide and the
false promises of modernity and other vacuous and jejune forms of societal
futures trading.
While my motives were personal and political in a quaint Tasmanian
way, my intention was also always to obliterate my own subject position
and produce a work more classically inclined toward the aloof and objec-
tive than the approachable, caring and compromised. But once morbid
subject matter like genocide and genocide echo effects get in your head,
and you end up studying your own death-world inside the larger realms,
it becomes impossible to dam desire for political and textual success and
even for private love or other form of salve or compensation. These thirsty
revenants just keep coming back again and again as eradicable symptoms
in grammar and lexicon and thematics.
Tasmania really is another country and I dearly hope this book can
help her citizens to better imagine what it is that they are and what we
are and what you and I both, as reader and writer, can be and do if we
keep on reading, thinking, writing and praying for the unquiet graves and
the atonements, expiations and penances left and demanded by genocidal
action and profi teering in Tasmania. There is certainly much still to be
found by anyone who begins to wonder what lies beneath the scars on the
Tasmanian archive left by the clear darkness of genocide and the caliginous
light of modernity.
Thank you then to Helena Shipway, Evelyn Shipway, Joseph Shipway,
Kate Shipway, Andrew Shipway, Lucas Shipway and family, Lee Prince,
Marc Prince, Philip Mead, Keith Jacobs, Peter Hay, Andrew Harwood,
John Cash, John Docker, Helen Tiffi n and Tom Lawson. I hope I’ve
already shown my gratitude to the multitude of others who’ve also lent
a hand, shared the burden or pointed me in the wrong direction home.
I’d also like to acknowledge the support of the many helpful librarians
I did business with in Paris, London, Melbourne, Sydney and Hobart over
the seventeen year preparation of this text.
The many editors who allowed me to become a poet have also earned
my instant love and respect.
C
ONTENTS
1 Introduction 1
2 What Is Tasmania? 11
3 Van Diemonian Time 63
4 Tasmanian Time 101
5 Global Time 1 41
Bibliography 1 87
Index 1 97
xi