[The following takes place during the mid-19th century, ending with Mathinna’s death in 1852. It’s a revealing story about the being a Tasmanian Aboriginal during that time period.]
If anything the brief life story of the young Tasmanian girl called Mathinna is even more tragic. As an act of Christian charity, she had been plucked from the desperate milieu of her race by Sir John and Lady Franklin, the island’s new governor and his wife. Years of private education gradually wore away the girl’s Aboriginal antecedents, exposing an attractive, witty young lady who comfortably held her own in matters of social grace, dancing and singing. Gradually she metamorphosed into a spirited and intelligent debutante identical to her white counterparts in everything, except perhaps the dark colour of her skin and the depressed configuration of her nose. So when the Franklins prepared to return to England at the end of Sir John’s years of office and were obliged to abandon the girl they looked upon almost as their own daughter, Mathinna was marooned in a social and racial no-man’s-land.
Without her high-society guardians she retained no valid claim to residence at the governor’s palace. Nor, however, could she easily adjust to the dilapidated shacks that house the dwindling remnant of her people, without performing a massive U-turn. For a while her schizoid personality was given refuge in a convict orphan school, but eventually her physical health gave way under the inner strain and she was forced to return to the swampy, verminous comforts of Oyster Cove. There she rapidly became the darling of the sawyers, splitters, slaughtermen, sealers and convicts, selling her formerly pampered body for a few hours’ release of an alcoholic stupor. The inevitable end was not long in coming. Mathinna, the former toast of Hobart society, was finally discovered, inebriated and drowned, in a small creek in the bush.
Source:
Cocker, Mark. “The Last Tasmanian.” Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe's Conquest of Indigenous Peoples. Grove Press, 2001. 172-73. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Travers, The Tasmanians, pp. 213-14.
Davies, The Last of the Tasmanians, pp. 200-202.
Further Reading:
Mathinna: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathinna_(Tasmanian)
Rear-Admiral Sir John Franklin KCH FRGS
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