INDUCTIONS INTO TASMANIANNESS

Along with the Thylacine [1] extinction story, apple symbolisms, convict narratives, Huon pine furniture and boats, Lake Pedder and wilderness photography, forest protests, 'Jimmy Possum' chairs, stories about giant squid, enormous crabs, abalone, mutton birds and more, Tasmanians claim these shell necklaces – Hobart cum Truganini necklaces – as ‘theirs’. Unquestionably, shell necklaces figure large in Tasmania’s cultural imagination – and for the Tasmanian Aboriginal people, they are emblems of their cultural continuum.

‘New Tasmanians’ need to know about these things before they can to begin to make sense of their new home. Inevitably these iconic shell necklaces along with the Truganini story will be quietly explained in the induction process. These are the kind of stories that one needs to have explained to you on an island with complex histories under almost every rock.

The story that is not told however is a century old one about the theft of an ‘industrial quantity’ of shell necklaces; necklaces like Truganini’s; necklaces sometimes called ‘Hobart Necklaces’. There were 100 dozen shell necklaces stolen from onboard the ‘Westralian’ berthed at the Hobart Wharf on April 2nd 1907. John Ward, a wharf labourer, was found guilty for having

• “stolen, or otherwise [receiving], a large quantity of shell necklaces consigned to a wholesale firm in Sydney by Mr. Paget, fur dealer, Elizabeth Street. At [his] previous trial the prisoner pleaded not guilty, and the jury failed to agree as to a verdict, whereupon the accused was remanded on bail, to be retried. On this occasion John [Ward] again pleaded not guilty, and was defended by Mr. Harold Crisp, the Solicitor General (Mr. E. D. Dobbie) prosecuting for the Crown. [2] – Hobart Mercury, May 20 1908.

The robbery itself alerts us to the scale of the shell necklace trade going on out of Hobart. This robbery was no trivial affair. Ward’s trial alerts us to the fact that these necklaces had been produced commercially and in large numbers, indeed by the thousands, and for some time. The robbery also alerts us to the fact that John Paget was not alone as a trader in shell necklaces.Given the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands possibly, of maireener shell necklaces produced commercially as 'Hobart cum Truganini Necklaces' it seems that it is now the case that any such necklace without strong circumstantial evidence to back up Aboriginal provenance needs to be regarded as having ambiguous Aboriginal authenticity. Indeed this is the case for a great many of these necklaces in museum collections around the world – even the one from the Exeter museum returned to Tasmania in 1997 and an unknown number in Tasmania's museums. At the time these necklaces were collected different imperatives and sensibilities were in operation. In the end curators can only work with the best available information to hand.This shell necklace 'industry' not only exploited the cultural knowledge of Tasmania's Aboriginal people but also the shell resource they alerted them to. Below the waterline in southern Tasmania it seems that kelp forests were 'clear felled' out of sight and out of mind. These shells were harvested by the bucketful over a long time. In many ways this harvest is analogous to the clear felling going on right now in Tasmania's old growth forests on land.