Rocky Cape Christian Community

Truganini, last of Tasmania's tribal inhabitants, 1812 - 1876.

 
"We should no longer talk about what happened to the Aborigines," a Christian friend told me recently. "Only if we forgive and forget can we have good relationships today."
 
He had a point. But how does God look at it? Where, in fact, was God while the British conquered Australia and claimed it for their own?
 
A British expedition under Captain Tobias Furneaux landed on Bruny Island, off the coast from what is now Hobart, Tasmania, in 1773. He saw signs of habitation and left gifts, but saw no one. Five years later, Captain James Cook landed there and met the Nuenonne people of whom he wrote, "These Indians have little of that fierce or wild appearance . . . and seem mild and cheerful without reserve or jealousy to strangers."
 
Indeed, the Nuenonne and other Tasmanian tribes were a gentle people, unlike the rest in the South Seas and Australia. They were also racially different and spoke a completely different type of language. Modern historians believe they were a remnant race, driven from Australia by what are now the mainland Aborigines, who, in their turn, came most likely from India.
 
Whatever the case, relationships stayed peaceful until the British (convicts at Hobart, sealers and whalers on Bruny Island), bent on making money off Tasmania, moved into the area during the early 1800s.
 
Born around 1812 on Bruny Island, Truganini soon saw and felt the effects of the white people's arrival. A band of marauding whalers took her two older sisters and stabbed her mother to death when she interfered. Her father, a leader among the Nuenonne, took another wife. But she went off with the whalers as well. Then her father and brother died of newly introduced diseases that ravaged the island.
 
A young man of Truganini's tribe found her abandoned as an early teenager and began to care for her. He loved her and promised to be her husband. His name was Paraweena. One day a band of British sawyers offered to take Truganini and Paraweena along with them on a trip to Hobart. Halfway across the channel, they threw Paraweena into the sea and began to abuse Truganini. When Paraweena tried to climb back into the boat they chopped off his hands with a treefeller's axe and left him in the sea to drown.
 
For some time Truganini lived as a slave among the sawyers. She learned English. Then the Anglican missionary, George Robinson, found her and took her with him to be his interpreter. George (even though he had an English wife and family in Hobart) liked her and forced her to sleep with him too. As a cover-up he took along an aboriginal man named Wooraddy who, he told everyone, was Truganini's husband.
 
Wherever they went with the missionary, Truganini and Wooraddy were used as a lure to bring the rest of Tasmania's aboriginal people onto the Flinders Island reserve. Other white men also did with Truganini what they liked, but she paid back good for evil. Once she saved George Robinson from drowning in a flooded river. On another occasion she rescued him from a band of hostile tribesmen that wanted to kill him.
 
Finally, after George Robinson left Tasmania, Wooraddy died, and the Flinders Island reserve failed, Truganini lived with the last survivors of her people at Oyster Cove. After her friends, William Lanney and Bessie Clark died, she found shelter in Hobart. Always wearing the red stocking cap she liked best, she wandered up and down the streets, collecting firewood and finding odd things to eat.
 
Her greatest concern, before she died, was that her body would be left intact and buried "somewhere up among the trees." But her wish was not granted. When she finally breathed her last on 7 May, 1876, city authorities buried her on the grounds of the female prison. Scientists soon obtained permission to exhume her, clean off her skeleton and put it on display (along with other "endemic wildlife") at the Royal Museum in Hobart, where it stayed until the mid-1970s.
 
"Half-caste" descendants of the Tasmanian aborigines survived among the sealers and whalers of the Bass Strait islands, but with Truganini died a language, a culture, the unrecorded story of a race whose origin and end remain shrouded in the mystery of the wonderful works of God.
 
Why would God allow genocide?
 
Why did he call for it, in fact, during the time of the early Israelites? Surely the God we serve does not stand passively by and watch innocent people getting hurt, when he could do something about it.
 
To go back a bit further, why did God create the Tasmanian people -- knowing full well what would happen to them? Were they nothing but inferior beings, "vessels of wrath" created for destruction, as English theologians liked to think?  
 
If God was limited to doing what we humans can do, we might have a case against him. But that is not so.
 
Throughout history God has raised up people and nations and allowed them to exist for a while. Then, just when he sees best, he withdraws them from the scene and replaces them with another. Not with a "stronger" or "better" race, as evolutionists would have us believe, but simply with another one. Our turns come and go. And death -- "extinction" as we look at it from a human perspective -- does not really exist.
 
When God arranged for the destruction of the Amalekites, the Canaanites and other peoples of early times, he gave specific orders not to leave any women or children, not even animals, behind. Their time was up. Their place on earth was gone.
 
If death were automatically torment or "hell" as Biblical writers describe it, this would be outrageously unfair. But there are things worse than death, and death is not always the end of the human soul.
 
Only the soul that sins (who makes himself guilty before God) will die. The truly innocent -- still innocent from lack of knowledge, or made innocent through the blood of Christ -- he rescues from this world and keeps safe until they may return with Jesus to populate a new and fully restored creation. New heavens and a new earth where righteousness dwells.
 
When God sees innocent people -- many thousands that do not, as yet, know their right hands from their left -- languishing in a pernicious society, bent on corruption, he simply, graciously, reaches down and lifts them out of it.  Call it death. Call it genocide if you like, but from God's perspective it may be a massive rescue operation!
 
Think of all the children God saved in Sodom and Gomorrah! Children that would otherwise have grown up in violence and perversion. Think of the Black Death in the Dark Ages, of the fall of Tenochtitlan and Angkor Wat, of the decimation of Africa in the nineteenth century and of Noah's flood.
 
Will God know what to do with the millions upon untold millions of souls he snatches from this troubled world into his presence?
 
I rest in the knowledge that God who made us is absolutely just. He sees the sparrow that falls. He will do what is right on every occasion. Even though men and women have acted treacherously, unfairly, and inflicted incredible sufferings upon one another, without cause, God never does. And he lets no one else get by with it.
 
Every cruel and treacherous act will get paid for -- in full.
 
The story of this world is not nearly done. Our nations' accounts have not been settled or squared. And when their day of reckoning dawns, King Billy, Truganini, the entire Tasmanian race and all that have suffered injustice in all generations from all lands and tribes of the earth will stand with those that live today before the judgement seat of Christ. What will the Queen of the South rise up to say then (Luke 11:31)?
 
According to Jesus, "the servant who knows his master's will and does not get ready or does not do what his master wants will be beaten with many blows. But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, more will be asked" (Luke 12:47-48).
 
* * * * *  
 
Should we Christians talk or think about these things?
 
We have two options. Either we remember and deplore the injustice, the brutality, the greed and corruption on which our Western society (English and North American "Christendom") is founded, and strike out in a different direction. Or else we "forgive and forget," we smear everything over, we accept our godless capitalistic system as good and right, and rush with it down the broad road to destruction.
 
We cannot serve both God and money.  
 
Peter
 
Rocky Cape Christian Community
19509 Bass Highway
Detention River, Tasmania 7321
Australia
www.thecommonlife.com.au