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Chosen by:
Professor Bain Attwood,
School of Historical Studies, Faculty of Arts
Bonwick, James, (1817-1906)
The last of the Tasmanians, or, The black war of Van Diemen's Land / by James Bonwick. (London : Sampson Low, Son, & Marston, 1870)
James Bonwick (1817-1906) was undoubtedly the most prolific of Australian colonial historians and his The Last of the Tasmanians, or The Black War of Van Diemen’s Land (1870) was probably his most important book. Profoundly influenced by evangelical Christianity, he was deeply troubled by the dispossession and destruction of the Aboriginal people caused by British colonisation. He sought ways to redeem the honour of the British people by telling stories about figures such as the famous mediator, George Augustus Robinson.
Bonwick’s work tells us much about the ways in which European historians wrote history in the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century. Bonwick claimed to be a servant to the cause of historical truth and tried to distinguish his work from what he called the prejudiced partisans and careless collectors of facts by using the documentary record wherever he could, but he actually placed more store by his personal acquaintance with those who had made the history and whose testimony he collected. This meant that his writings were characterised by considerable empathy with his subjects; as he observed at the beginning of The Last of the Tasmanians:
It was not a mere hunt through Blue Books [i.e. the British parliamentary record]. The forest depths, the sultry plain — the homes of peace, the dens of penal woe — have each brought something to the store. The laugh of the bushman, the sigh of gentle womanhood, the grief at lost affection, the curse of some remembered wrong, have been the varied accompaniments of tales thus told.
Indeed, a powerful sense of empathy or identification seems to have compelled Bonwick to have become a colonial historian in the first place. You can see this for yourselves by looking at the story he tells in the pages of The Last of the Tasmanians featured in this exhibition.
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