Palawa: Tasmania's First Nations Heritage and the Living Culture

The Palawa, the Aboriginal people of Tasmania whose ancestors crossed the land bridge from the Australian mainland more than 35,000 years ago when the Bass Strait was dry land and who maintained the most isolated human culture on earth for 10,000 years after the Bass Strait flooded at the end of the last ice age, are experiencing the cultural renaissance and the assertive political engagement that has followed the dispossession and the violence of the colonial period and the decades of denial of Tasmanian Aboriginal identity that the colonial narrative sustained by falsely declaring the Tasmanian Aboriginal people extinct after the death of Truganini in 1876. The Tasmanian Aboriginal community's assertion of their continuing existence and the cultural vitality that the community organisations, the land rights campaigns, and the language revitalisation have demonstrated, directly challenges the extinction narrative and creates the basis for the recognition and the cultural respect that the living community deserves.

The land rights returns that the Tasmanian Aboriginal Land Council has achieved through the negotiation with the state government, including the return of the significant cultural sites of Oyster Cove and the Cape Barren Island lands, provide the territorial recognition that the connection to country requires to be expressed in the form of management authority and the legal ownership that the Aboriginal land rights frameworks create. The land returns' significance extends beyond the specific parcels to the principle that the Palawa people's connection to Tasmania's land, maintained through 10,000 years of isolation and more than 200 years of colonial impact, warrants the legal recognition that the returns represent.

The mutton bird harvesting, the traditional practice of the Palawa community on the Cape Barren Island and the Furneaux Group islands that harvests the short-tailed shearwater in the autumn season for the traditional food use that the community has maintained across generations as the cultural practice that the seasonal connection to the muttonbird colonies sustains, is the most significant surviving traditional food practice of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community. The harvesting rights, recognised in the Aboriginal Lands Act, create the legal framework for the cultural practice that the community uses to maintain the connection to the country and the seasonal rhythms that the muttonbird harvest embeds in the community's cultural calendar.

The language revitalisation of palawa kani, the reconstructed Tasmanian Aboriginal language that the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre has developed from the historical records of the words and the place names of the pre-contact languages, provides the linguistic expression of the cultural identity that the living community is rebuilding. The language's use in the place names of the returned lands, in the cultural interpretation of the Aboriginal heritage sites, and in the community education programs that transmit the language to the next generation, creates the cultural tool that the community uses to express the identity that the colonial period sought to erase.

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