Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Burned Hot and Bright: Walyer

In the painting by Julie Dowling, the Tasmanian warrior woman Walyer holds a colonialist's flintlock as she gestures towards her Country. She has another fowling piece tucked into her belt. Perhaps her voluminous skirt once belonged to a white woman and maybe her cape is of kangaroo skin or woven stuff, but her breasts are most definitely bare. She wears necklaces of marineer shells - ropes of tiny, pointed shells, shiny blue with sand-worn nacre. Pallawah women collected them every year on the northern beaches and strung them into body art with the stringy sinew of wallaby tail.


Walyer is a problematic sort of woman to have in the history books. 
Jorgen Jorgenson wrote that because Van Diemonian journals and letters had been recorded with 'such fidelity', nobody, absolutely nobody, given the evidence, would ever be given enough creative leash to compare Walyer to the Boadicea, even if she "... as a heroine, as the defender of her native woods against the aggressions of the British ... placed her on a level with the British Queen who, it is said, resisted the Roman arms for nine years. Speculation as now regards Van Diemen’s Land is quite out of the question – and for ever so."*
Jorgenson must have anticipated romantic academics popping up in the future. I doubt he anticipated the internet. He never mentioned the Red Queen's name in that paragraph but really, I think he was being a bit of a tease ... 

One of Walyer's names was Tareenorerer, which is very close to Tyreelore or 'Island Wife'. She was stolen by sealers when she was a teenager around 1817 and taken to the islands of Bass Strait. In the Australian Dictionary of Biography, it is said that she was initially abducted by Aboriginals and sold to the sealers.* 
Walyer learnt English quickly. But more crucially for this particular girl's career, she learnt from the sealers all about black powder - how to handle guns, how to pour shot and that vulnerable time in battle between firing and reloading. 

In 1828, Walyer returned to her country in the north of Tasmania. With some of her brothers and sisters, she mounted attacks against the white men luta tawin, whom she likened to black snakes. Apparently she would stand on a hilltop, organising the warriors and goading the potential victims to come and get speared! Walyer began getting into strife with rival clans as well. 
  
"When we came to Cape Grim we took two male natives and one female. We asked where were all the rest of the tribe. They told us that a woman named Walloa, a female chief, came to Cape Grim with three tribes and surrounded the tribe when sitting at their fires, killed them all with the exception of the three we spoke to. Walloa when running away said she would return and kill them all. She was however not seen afterwards until we put in at Port Sorell. We had previously taken the three poor creatures to Swan Island. Walloa, strange to say, was actually the chief of the ferocious Sorell tribe who killed Captain Thomas and Mr Parker. The same woman and her mob chased Mr Robinson and the Doctor in September last, with five of the tame natives we had with us, for nearly five miles."*

Some sealers collected Walyer up again. They took her to Hunter and Bird Island where she worked muttonbirding and sealing. She also lived with Norfolk Island Jack in the Furneaux Group for a while.


When Walyer returned from the islands to Van Diemen's Land the next time she was a wanted criminal; murders and misdeeds from her last rampage had caught up with her. Resistance was useless in the face of British law and she'd upset a lot of Pallawah people too. She was captured through the advice of some Pallawah women. They recognised her dog Whisky - he answered their call. 

George Augustus Robinson of 'Friendly Mission' work, was elated at her capture.  He had been trying to 'conciliate' the Pallawah for some time. He blamed Walyer for inciting them to violence and other unsavoury methods of survival.  He believed that all the 'mischief perpetuated upon the different settlements' could be traced to Walyer and her warriors. 

Walyer was indeed a chaotic, angry entity; an uncomfortably visceral example of the fraying traditions of culture and sex in Pallawah society, and a rather frightening wild card for the colonisers. She killed people black and white. She went back to her original sealer abductors for refuge when things got too hot for her in VDL. She may have been an Antipodean Boadicea but there was no final scene of a woad-smeared warrior woman screaming naked down a grassy battlefield. 
 Walyer was simply moved to Gun Carriage Island with Robinson's other 'charges'. She died on the 5th of June, 1831, of the 'flu.




*Julie Dowling, Walyer, 2006. http://nga.gov.au/Exhibition/NIAT07/Detail.cfm?IRN=144778

*N.J.B. Plomley, Ed., Jorgen Jorgenson and the Aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land, Blubber Head Press, Hobart, 1991, pp. 73-80.

*Australian Dictionary of Biography

See also David Lowe, Forgotten Rebels, Black Australians Who Fought Back, 1994.

4 comments:

  1. It's not the same Walyer, but this tale reminded me of an old Dublin folk song. It has the kind of terrible menace about it that Walyer seems to have had about her, that kind of rebel gone mad theme and strangely, infanticide too. In the Irish spelling, Weelya Weelya Walyer is Weile Weile Waile...

    There was an old woman who lived in the woods
    A weelya weelya walyer
    There was an old woman who lived in the woods
    Down by the river Saile

    She had a baby three months old
    A weelya weelya walyer
    She had a baby three months old
    Down by the river Saile

    She had a penknife long and sharp
    A weelya weelya walyer
    She had a penknife long and sharp
    Down by the river Saile

    She stuck the penknife in the baby's heart
    A weelya weelya walyer
    She stuck the penknife in the baby's heart
    Down by the river Saile

    Then three loud knocks came a-knockin on the door
    A weelya weelya walyer
    Then three loud knocks came a-knockin on the door
    Down by the river Saile

    It was three police men and a man
    A weelya weelya walyer
    It was three police men and a man
    Down by the river Saile

    They took her away and put her in a jail
    A weelya weelya walyer
    They took her away and put her in a jail
    Down by the river Saile

    They tied a rope around her neck
    A weelya weelya walyer
    They tied a rope around her neck
    Down by the river Saile

    They pulled the rope and she got hung
    A weelya weelya walyer
    They pulled the rope and she got hung
    Down by the river Saile

    And that was the end of the woman in the wood
    A weelya weelya walyer
    And that was the end of the baby too
    Down by the river Saile

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  2. Thanks for that, Ciaran. I have that song, sung by the Dubliners.

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  3. Great post. Have you heard local myth (Denmark) talk about a split between the Bibbulman and the Menang re the former wanting to share traditional men's business (knowledge) with the women-folk? Could be an evolving/emerging 'urban' myth but a nice one for this 'feminist' none-the-less.

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  4. No I haven't Michelle. Sounds like the work of some 'difficult women'!

    ReplyDelete