Latest news with #FlindersIsland
SBS Australia
09-07-2025
- General
- SBS Australia
From horror to healing: a truth-telling journey on a Bass Strait island
From horror to healing: a truth-telling journey on a Bass Strait island Published 9 July 2025, 8:57 am On Flinders Island in Bass Strait sits a little-known place, significant to not only Tasmanian and the nation's history, but global history. It's known as Wybalenna and it's a place of deep sorrow for the Aboriginal community. More recently, the community has been working to make it a more comfortable place to spend time and continue the truth-telling that's been happening since colonisation. This year marking NAIDOC week at the site with a flag raising in what's believed to be a first. A warning to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers that the following story contains images of people who have died.
SBS Australia
09-07-2025
- General
- SBS Australia
The historic Tasmanian site that's both sacred
For Tasmanian Aboriginal people Wybalenna, onFlinders Island in Bass Strait, is a sacred and painful place. 'This was virtually a concentration camp for the old people.' That's Brendan Brown, better known in his community as Buck; his connection to the site is through Manalakina, a warrior and leader of his people. He was made a promise: if he came to Wybalenna willingly and brought his people with him, he'd be able to return to his homelands in north east Tasmania. It was a promise never fulfilled. 'My great grandfather was here, great great grandfather, he was brought here and made promises to and the promises were broken and he shaved his hair off and became a broken man and he died here with a broken heart.' He says Wybalenna can be difficult place to visit. 'There's mixed emotions when you're here, I've had spiritual things happen to me here and I've had the old people come and visit me while I've been here, when you walk around you feel a lot of sadness here too, there's only certain places I'll go on this property, because of that reason.' He was part of a sit-in at the site in the 1990s, which eventually led to the site being handed back to the Aboriginal community. 'I was only a teenager, when we come out over here and we done a sit in here on the property and took the property back, a big mob of us come from Cape Barren and there was a heap of locals here from Flinders, we all sat here and stayed here, occupied the place and took the place back.' The Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania has managed the site since the late 1990s. Rebecca Digney was its manager when works began a few years ago to make it easier for the community to spend time at Wybalenna. 'We're really trying to invite people back to this site so we can reconnect with the history here, and particularly reconnect with the Stories of our ancestors.' She explains the significance of the site. 'Wybalenna is a really sacred place for the Tasmanian Aboriginal community. It was the place where our people were exiled to as a result of the Black War, and many of the people who were brought here died here.' While some Aboriginal women were taken by sealers to other Bass Strait Islands, it's estimated as many as 300 Aboriginal people were exiled to Wybalenna. There are 107 confirmed burial sites in the cemetery at Wybalenna, with the locations of many more not known. 47 survived the poor conditions and treatment at the site, to be taken to Oyster Cove in Hobart in 1847. And despite the sadness of the site, it's also a story of survival. 'Wybalenna is definitely a place that conjures up a variety of feelings, its one of great sadness, it can feel quite desolate at times, but also it's a good reminder of what my people have been through and how strong they are. Our cultural practices continue, despite the attempts to Christianise our people here, our people survived against all odds, and we continue as a strong and vibrant community today.' Sarah Wilcox is the now general manager of the Land Council. "Wybalenna is a key historical place in our history, not just in lutruwita Tasmania, not just in Australia, but globally, it was a place that was recognised when the term genocide was penned, referring to the Tasmanian Aboriginal people.' The Land Council has been working with Tasmanian architect Mat Hinds on their plans for the site. 'We were asked by the Land Council to look at ways that we could help the place become more comfortable and that can be very straightforward things like bathing or places to cook or places to be together.' Sarah Wilcox says it'll help the community as they continue to honour the memories of their ancestors. 'Making sure that there's space there for elders to come and visit so having that accessibility and those essential services are really important for their comfort and also for families so our younger generations and future generations understand that place, understand the significance of that place.' The work so far has focused mostly on the Aboriginal community's experience at the site. But improvements are also being made to the visitor experience – with information panels in the chapel being updated by the community. 'It's a really fantastic opportunity that we have here to tell this truth in our words and so all of the interpretation of Wybalenna is being told from a Palawa perspective, so the people who are visiting the site, I mean you feel it when you're there, but then the truth is there, in great detail from our perspective, of what happened to our people, what it means to us, what that place means to us, and so it's a great opportunity for people to learn, to listen, to understand and to absorb that truth.' Accessing grants to do all this work has been difficult ... so they've turned to public fundraising. 'The generosity through those donors and those sponsors we've been able to get over time has been overwhelming for us it's an incredible and humbling experience in a way.' Members of the community gathered at the site on Sunday to mark the start of NAIDOC Week. Land Council Chair, Greg Brown, addressed this year's theme - The Next Generation: Strength, Vision and Legacy 'It speaks to the leadership and strength within our community, past, present, and future. Truth Telling at Wybalenna most certainly acknowledges the true story and legacy for our old people here at Wybalenna, it also shows the strength of our community with our continuing fight to have our stories told and vision for our community with the interpretations and works here at Wybalenna. Our community is very lucky that we have a strong and talented pool of young people as evidenced by the young rangers over here and to continue and improve on the gains that we have achieved in past years.' Jazmin Wheatley from the Junior Ranger program helped organise the event. 'I thought it would be really important and significant to come and do it at Wybalenna and just to honour our people and honour the story that's here and to get together as a community again.' She said it was an emotional day for the community. 'It is a sad place, but at the same time it's important that we're here to take back that sense of pride at this place and honour our people.' Flinders Island Elder, Lillian Wheatley was there too - she was among a group of eight adults and eight children who occupied the homestead in the 1990s. She hopes the site can become a place of unity for her people. 'My dream before I leave is to see my people come together on this country and respect it for what it is and share their story, our old people's story, it's about them and what happened here needs to be told.' Sarah Wilcox said the long history of truth-telling at the site … will continue. 'Truth telling is just part of our family history, it's what we talk about all the time when we're together so we've been doing it for a very long time, now it's about truth understanding and It's about truth acceptance and our people will always fight for a treaty.' Something they've been waiting for - for around 200 years.
ABC News
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Geraldine Brooks on her memoir Memorial Days and travelling to Flinders Island to do 'the work of grief'
In 2019, Geraldine Brooks was sitting at her desk at home in Martha's Vineyard, working on her sixth novel, Horse, when the phone rang. On the line was a doctor from a hospital in Washington DC, calling to say her husband, journalist and author Tony Horwitz, had collapsed in the street. "I'm expecting her to say, 'And now he is in surgery,' or, 'We're keeping him for observation,'" Brooks tells ABC TV's Compass. "And instead, she says, 'He's dead.' Just like that." Horwitz — a Pulitzer Prize-winner, like his wife — was midway through a busy tour promoting his latest book, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide. Brooks couldn't understand how a man so fit and full of vitality had died so suddenly. "I just couldn't assimilate it." She wanted to howl in pain but feared that if she lost control, she might never regain it. In her new memoir, Memorial Days, she describes how, from that day on, she put on an "endless, exhausting performance" to give the impression she was fine. Eventually, however, Brooks realised she couldn't go on pretending. "I felt like this love had not been acknowledged by the capacious grief that it deserved. That's when I thought of Flinders Island," she says. In 2023, Brooks travelled to the remote Tasmanian island to confront her feelings, a cathartic experience she recounts in Memorial Days. And now, two years later, she returns to Flinders Island with ABC TV's Compass to discuss the important work of grief. Now one of Australia's most celebrated authors, Brooks began her journalism career at the Sydney Morning Herald. After covering the Franklin Dam controversy in the early 80s, she got a scholarship to Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in New York City, where she met a fellow journalist by the name of Tony Horwitz. "I was initially attracted to him because he was such an idealist. He had this high moral seriousness and a great sense of humour," Brooks recalls. The couple married in France in 1984 and moved to Sydney for a brief stint, before life again took a different direction. "Out of the blue, the Wall Street Journal called and said, 'Would I like to become the Middle East correspondent?'" The answer was yes, and an adrenaline-filled decade followed, reporting on geopolitical crises throughout the region. As foreign correspondents, Brooks and Horwitz often shared joint bylines, earning the tag 'Hobro' in the Wall Street Journal newsroom. "We were always getting calls in the middle of the night [to cover a story] … We lived with a duffel bag packed with crazy things; I had a chador and a bulletproof vest. "We often worked on different sides of the same story — [if] he was in Iraq, I would be in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War and vice versa." Brooks eventually gave up journalism to write fiction, publishing the bestselling plague novel, Year of Wonders, in 2001 and winning a Pulitzer in 2006 for her US Civil War novel, March. She and Horwitz remained in the US, raising their two sons, Nathaniel and Bizu, in an 18th-century mill house on Martha's Vineyard, an island off the New England coast. "Their relationship is probably one of the all-time love stories," Bizu says. "More than anything, [he] revered and respected and loved how smart, intelligent and passionate she was about everything." Brooks first visited Flinders Island with Horwitz in 2000 to research a novel. Together they'd toured the island, marvelling at its natural beauty. They were confronted by its dark history too. At Wybalenna, they viewed the unmarked graves of Aboriginal people who died on the island after being forcibly removed from Tasmania in the 1800s. Brooks ended up abandoning the project, but she was taken with the island and toyed with the idea of one day buying a block there. When she returned in 2023, it was in very different circumstances. "For three years after his death, I'd been pretending to be normal. And I wasn't normal. I wasn't right … I wasn't myself," she says. "You're supposed to work through denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance, and I'd vaulted all the intermediate steps and pretended that I'd arrived at acceptance. You can't do that. "I needed to go back and work my way through those steps." For Brooks, Flinders Island offered "time and space … to do the business of mourning". "Grief counselling would've been one way," she acknowledges. "But I thought, 'Well, what do writers do? Writers write.'" She rented a shack overlooking a goblet-shaped bay, gazing out at the granite outcrop known as Mount Killiecrankie. There, alone and without distraction, Brooks returned to the worst day of her life to work through her grief. "I would get up in the morning and … do the work, write my thoughts, and then when I realised that I had a cramp and hadn't moved in hours, I'd go for a walk." She found solace in the rocky, windswept landscape. "I fell in love with granite," she says. "The rocks on Flinders Island are in these sculptural shapes. They're great works of art, monumental sculptures that completely moved me in the way art moves you." She also found another kind of comfort in her solitude. "I realised I wasn't alone. I was with Tony. I was able to be with him night and day. And it was wonderful." Brooks fell into a routine on the island, ending each day with a swim in the ocean. "At first it was just a swim. But as I got deeper and deeper into the work, I realised that there was something almost ceremonial about it," she says. "It became this gift to myself to be fully immersed and completely alone in my skin, in the water, like some kind of aquatic creature. And it felt cleansing and healing." Brooks felt a connection between her daily swim and the mikvah, a purifying bathing ritual that had formed part of her conversion to Judaism when she married Horwitz three decades earlier. Horwitz's Judaism was cultural rather than religious or spiritual. "If he had died and I was an Orthodox Jew, there would've been a very set road map to travel, a pathway into and out of grief," Brooks says. "There are strict rules. The first one, I think, is incredibly insightful: in the first hours after somebody experiences a loss like this, you don't even offer them condolences. They're in a state of 'stupefying grief' is how it's put. All you do is help them. "It's only after the burial that the grieving and condolences start." Known as Shiva, this formal mourning period lasts for seven days. "You sit and let people come and talk about the deceased. You don't bathe, you cover the mirrors, you're taken out of time," Brooks says. In her travels, Brooks has observed similar mourning rituals in other cultures, but found these customs largely absent from Western society. "I had no idea what a brutal, broken system it is when somebody dies suddenly far from home among strangers," she says. "I wasn't allowed to see his body. I got to Washington thinking that I could be with him and hold his hand and say goodbye. And I get to the hospital, and it's not allowed. They just show you a photograph and it's horrible. It wasn't until days later when he was finally released to the funeral home that I was finally able to see him." Alone on Flinders Island, Brooks found herself instinctively adopting the practices of Shiva. "I realised, I'd been swimming every day, but I hadn't had a shower, and there was no mirror in the shack," she says. "I was making it up as I went along but finding my own way to some of these things that have been enshrined for millennia in old religious practices." During her stay on Flinders Island, revisiting that terrible day in her mind, Brooks felt the howl of grief return. "I felt it coming back and I let it come," she says. "And after that, I realised that the time had done what it needed to do, and I was ready to go home." Brooks will never stop grieving for Horwitz, but she's found a kind of peace. "What I have been able to do … [is] set down that life I'd expected to have — growing old with him — and just accept that that life is gone. I ain't getting that back. I have to make the most of the life that I do have." Writing Memorial Days was instrumental to this process. "When you're in grief, the best thing you can do is tell your story … It wasn't until I wrote my story that I was able to feel like a normal human being again," she says. Watch Geraldine Brooks. Grief, A Love Story on Compass on Sunday night at 6:30pm on ABC TV, or stream now on iview.
ABC News
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Coming up: Geraldine Brooks — Grief, a love story - ABC Religion & Ethics
One of our most cherished authors, Geraldine Brooks, goes to Flinders Island to finally grieve the sudden death of her husband. As a convert to Judaism, she ponders how other religions use rituals to help with healing. Coming up 6:30pm Sunday 30th March on ABC TV and anytime on ABC iview. Posted 17m ago 17 minutes ago Tue 3 Jun 2025 at 12:59am
ABC News
28-05-2025
- General
- ABC News
Welcome to Country to stay after Flinders Island council rejects move to end Aboriginal protocol
Flinders Island councillors have rejected a motion to cease Welcome to Country and Acknowledgement of Country at events the council is involved in. Councillor Garry Blenkhorn put forward the motion at the Tasmanian council's meeting on Wednesday, but it failed to get a seconder. Around 50 people, including many from Tasmanian Aboriginal communities, were present when the motion was put to the council. All those present were against the motion. In his councillor's report for putting forward the motion, Cr Blenkhorn said there had been "an increase in discontent throughout Australia" regarding the use of Welcome to Country and Acknowledgement of Country at public events. "The use of Welcome to Country and Acknowledgement of Country is seen as divisive, unnecessary and not contributing to reconciliation between Indigenous Australians and others," Cr Blenkhorn wrote. The motion was not discussed by council before the meeting and the community had not been consulted. Cr Blenkhorn has previously told the ABC he'd been approached by "well over a hundred people" on the topic and "for that reason presented the motion." Speaking at the meeting after the motion lapsed, Flinders Island Deputy Mayor Vanessa Grace said she was dismayed to read the motion. "While Cr Blenkhorn says he is representing up to 100 people's views and he's brought them all forward, such a significant change should have been brought to council for a workshop, discussion and collaborations with the community and the key stakeholders, the Aboriginal communities," she said. Denise Gardner, who represents the Cape Barron Island Aboriginal Association and Aboriginal people on Truwana/Cape Barron Island, was one of many in the public gallery who cheered and clapped after the motion stalled. "We were quite elated but not surprised at the outcome," Ms Gardner said. "We had half a dozen people fly over from Truwana Island to attend and had people on Skype watching the proceedings." She said many had been "flabbergasted" the motion was being put forward, especially during National Reconciliation Week. "It's just amazing that it would be a motion at what is quite a sensitive time for people when we're all trying to go forward," she said. "Flinders Council have done a lot of work with communities on Flinders and Truwana/Cape Barron to get work together, get on with business and work together on common causes and for the best part that has been happening. "We move forward on that." Flinders Island Mayor Rachel Summers said it was "a good move" of councillors to not second the motion. "Councillors spoke out in support of our community rather than the motion, so it was really good to see that," Cr Summers said. But she said the motion had caused damage. "Unfortunately, damage has been done out of this and I really hope council can work with our Aboriginal community, with the organisations that represent those communities and find a way to walk forward together." Cr Blenkhorn has been contacted for comment.
