The Cross-Cultural Relationships Between the Sealers and the Tasmanian Aboriginal Women at Bass Strait and Kangaroo Island in the Early Nineteenth Century

The discovery of vast numbers of the highly prized fur seal in Bass Strait in 1797 attracted many international and local ships into the area. Sealing became a highly profitable enterprise and Australia’s first staple export commodity. The islands of Bass Strait and Kangaroo Island had been unoccupied for thousands of years, were yet to be explored and mapped, and were beyond the jurisdiction of the colonial administration in Sydney. Anarchy prevailed and countless Tasmanian Aboriginal women were kidnapped as slaves and concubines by the sealers who pillaged, raped and murdered, unchecked, for more than three decades. These sites became places where the normal social and cultural borders were transgressed and gave rise to a unique, hybrid way of life. Despite the prevailing myth that the Tasmanian Aborigines did not survive the invasion of the British, in the mid 1970s, historians, such as Lyndall Ryan and Anne McMahon, wrote about the emergence of a new Aboriginal community in Bass Strait, descendants of predominantly white sealers and the Tasmanian Aboriginal women whom they abducted and forced to work as slaves.1 In the 1990s, historians Bain Attwood, Henry Reynolds and Jan Kociumbus began to re-evaluate frontier relationships between black and white Australians.2 Further, Mari