My Peoples Songs: How an Indigenous Family Survived Colonial Tasmania

(Paperback)

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Tarenootairer (c.180658) was still a child when a band of white sealers bound her and forced her onto a boat. From there unfolded a life of immense cruelty inflicted by her colonial captors. As with so many Indigenous women of her time, even today the historical record of her life remains a scant thread embroidered with half-truths and pro-colonial propaganda.

But Joel Stephen Birnie grew up hearing the true stories about Tarenootairer, his earliest known ancestral grandmother, and he was keen to tell his familys history without the colonial lens. Tarenootairer had a fierce determination to survive that had a profound effect on the course of Tasmanian history. Her daughters, Mary Ann Arthur (c.182071) and Fanny Cochrane Smith (c.18321905), shared her activism: Mary Anns fight for autonomy influenced contemporary Indigenous politics, while Fanny famously challenged the false declaration of Indigenous Tasmanian extinction.

Together, these three extraordinary women fought for the Indigenous communities they founded and sparked a tradition of social justice that continues in Birnies family today.

From the early Bass Strait sealing industries to George Augustus Robinsons conciliation missions, to Aboriginal internment on Finders Island and at Oyster Cove, My Peoples Songs is both a constellation of the damage wrought by colonisation and a testament to the power of family. Revelatory, intimate and illuminating, it does more than assert these womens place in our nations story it restores to them a voice and a cultural context.

Reviews

Over a hundred years, Joel Stephen Birnies ancestors Tarenootairer, and her daughters Mary Ann and Fanny Cochrane, endured abduction, rape, enslavement, destitution, despair and disease, while their family and their world died before their eyes. But they were not broken, and Fanny Cochranes voice comes to us still to declare their truth. A brilliant and harrowing recreation of lives once treated so cheaply.

A brilliant and harrowing recreation of lives once treated so cheaply.

In this bold and original book the author shows how one of Tasmanias best known Indigenous families survived colonial policies of extermination and extinction. A tour de force.

A tour de force.

Author Bio

Joel Stephen Birnie is an academic, visual artist and filmmaker. Raised predominantly by his Indigenous Tasmanian family, he proudly embraces a multi-ethnic heritage from across the globe. Joels creative work has been exhibited in galleries and festivals across Australia, including in Darwin, Sydney, Adelaide and at the Koori Heritage Trust in Melbourne. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Indigenous Studies and a Master of Fine Arts, and in 2019 completed a PhD at Monash, which focused on deconstructing and reconstructing the 150 years of European colonisation in Tasmania from a familial (Indigenous) perspective.