Lost in translation: stone tool collecting and Tasmanian Aboriginal cultural endurance

• In Event: Decolonising the Deep Past: Archaeological Narratives, Human Origins and Indigeneity

Abstract

On 12 November 1908, English amateur anthropologist Ernest Westlake sailed past the northern coast of Tasmania for the first time, but the beautiful landscape inspired anxiety. Westlake had come to collect Aboriginal tools, but how well was he going to be able to “read” them? Would he be able to translate a (supposedly) “extinct” culture from mute stone tools?
From 1908-1910 Westlake travelled by bike, boat, train and foot to 142 sites across Tasmania. He formed what is probably the largest single collection of Tasmanian Aboriginal stone artefacts, now housed in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. Why? Westlake wanted to prove, by comparison, that artefacts he had excavated in France dating back 100,000 years were human-made. The thesis was part of a wider scholarly project to determine the depth of European antiquity, but it was flawed. Westlake’s French artefacts were in fact broken rocks, incomparable to the carefully-made Tasmanian tools.
Westlake also returned home with the richest record of Tasmanian Aboriginal language and culture dating from the 20th century in his notebooks; he had talked to many Indigenous people. But he called them ‘halfcastes’ and presumed they spoke of a lost culture that had once belonged to their parents. Yet, with the guidance of contemporary Tasmanian Aboriginal community members, Westlake’s archive can be translated. Then we can see what the collector could not: an enduring and complex Aboriginal culture with a deep past.

Author

• Rebe Taylor, University of Tasmania