A Mixed up Family
I dedicate this research to my family, and to the Aboriginal elders of lutruwita, past and present, in the spirit of truth-telling.
From time to time it comes up in the news in Tasmania/lutruwita that non-Aboriginal people are wrongly claiming Aboriginal identity. It can be hard to understand why people would do this and how it even happens. Here is a story from my family that illustrates it. Central to this story is my grandmother’s Gran, Ada Amelia.
Ada’s birth family
Ada Amelia Bessell (nee Harris) was one of nine children born to Janet Jamieson. Ada grew up in Launceston and Burnie. Her childhood was tumultuous with her mother, Janet, sometimes running into trouble with the law and her father, Henry Harris, no longer around by the time she was three. She had siblings and half-siblings in foster care and state care as well as at home. Following her mother’s re-marriage, the family moved to Emu Bay (Burnie).
Ada’s married life
In 1873 Ada, aged 17, married John Bessell, aged 28, at St Barnabas Church in Launceston. In 1879 John Bessell’s cousins discovered gold at Lisle, north-east Tasmania. Although Ada and John had already been living in the Ringarooma district, their more permanent move to the north-east was probably related to this as John’s future electoral roll records list him as a miner at Lisle. Ada and John went on to have three children.
As a side-note, Ada’s half-sister Mary married Alfred Henry George. Alfred was the son of Jessie George, a black woman transported as a convict from Scotland. Jessie George has descendants who have claimed Aboriginal identity, and other descendants who have used DNA testing to show that their non-Anglo ancestry is African, consistent with Jessie’s convict records from Scotland.
Another of Ada’s half sisters — Annie — married John Moody, brother of Charlotte Moody, who it is also claimed is an Aboriginal woman without her being descended from any known Aboriginal people.
Ada’s separation
In 1887 Ada went to live with her half-brother (probably Luke Robins) in Scottsdale after being granted protection from her husband by the court. After three months she began a relationship with John Baker. Their first child, Ellen, was born on 4 May 1888, and registered at Ringarooma.
Ellen’s birth registration lists Ada’s husband, John Bessell, as her father, and her mother as Edith Bessell (nee Harris) rather than Ada Bessell (nee Harris). No records have been found of an Edith Bessell nee Harris and it is believed that this is a mistaken interpretation of the name Ada in the letter sent by Ada from Ringarooma Rd to register the birth. Someone may have written the letter for her and mistook “Ada” for “Edith”, as Ada did in fact have a daughter named Ellen. It is likely that she used the name of her husband as the father because Ellen was born ‘out of wedlock’.
Ada and John also had a son Charles Baker and another daughter, Annie Baker. Ada returned to live with her husband John Bessell in April 1894 and had her seventh and last child, Samuel Baker, later that year.
In 1897 Ada sued John Baker for maintenance for his four children. This is detailed in the court reports of the Launceston Examiner on 30 August 1897, the Hobart Mercury on 31 August 1887 and the Launceston Examiner on 28 September 1897. Although John Baker at one stage claimed that he “had never admitted paternity” of the children, by the next day the case proceeded on the basis that he was the father of all but the youngest child and was found liable for the maintenance of Janet Ellen, Charles Thomas and Anna Catherine.
My great grandmother was Annie Catherine Baker/Bessell. She was Ada’s sixth child, and her third child with John Baker. She went on to marry Jack Partridge of Nabowla and they raised their children in the home that Jack’s parent’s built at Greeta Rd, Nabowla. Many of Annie’s grandchildren have spoken with me about Granny Partridge, and how loved and respected she was. I appreciate her mother Ada Amelia and the work she did to lovingly raise her children after such a difficult life herself.
One of Jack and Annie’s children was my grandmother Gladys Partridge. Gladys married Eric Johnson and they raised their family in a home they built further down Greeta Rd, closer to the township of Nabowla. This is where my father grew up.
When I was a child my mother researched our family history. She knew and spoke with Granny Partridge. I grew up knowing that Granny Partridge “never liked to talk about her family”. This of course creates a sense of mystery, but was likely due to the fact that she was born out of wedlock, and other difficulties in her childhood family.
Annie’s older sister Ellen Baker, married Arthur Johnson (who is a cousin of my grandfather Eric Johnson) and they also raised their family in Nabowla, until they moved to Launceston in about 1936. By the time of her marriage, Ellen’s last name was the name of her actual father, Baker, rather than the name she’d been given at birth of her mother’s husband, Bessell.
Claim of Aboriginal ancestry
At some stage in the early 1980s two daughters of Ellen and Arthur’s son George declared that they were Aboriginal, despite their father telling them it was “a load of old rubbish”. After he died, they claimed to have researched their father’s family, and to have ‘discovered’ that his family were Aboriginal. They wrote a book, published in 1995, where they had Arthur Johnson placed as a grandson of Dolly Briggs, an Aboriginal woman, and Thomas Johnson, a non-Aboriginal man. In fact Arthur was the son of George Johnson (my great grandfather Percy Johnson’s brother) and his wife Mary Ann Murrell (my great, great grandmother Charlotte Partridge’s sister), neither of whom were Aboriginal or descended from Dolly and Thomas. The authors of the book now accept as true that Arthur is not descended from Dolly and Thomas Johnson.
In the book they state that “Looking back on our childhood we cannot recall knowing anyone who acknowledged being Aboriginal” (p x).
In 2001 the daughter of one of the authors, Marianne Watson, appealed to the Supreme Court of Tasmania against the Chief Electoral Officer’s acceptance of objections to her name being on the Tasmanian Aboriginal Land Council Electoral Roll. In other words, she wanted her assertion of Aboriginality accepted. In that case, she claimed that the Aboriginality was now through Ellen (rather than Ellen’s husband Arthur) and that Ellen’s mother, Ada Amelia Harris (my great, great grandmother), was Aboriginal. Marianne’s research at that time was unable to identify the location of Ada’s mother Janet Harris (nee Jamieson) for a period of time and so she speculated that Janet had gone to Cape Barren Island and that Ada’s father was someone from the Aboriginal community there.
Evidence is now available (through the National Library of Australia’s digitalized newspaper collection — Trove) of Janet’s continuing residence in Launceston through many newspaper articles of her escapades, and either birth certificates or baptism records exist identifying the parentage of all of her children (except the first infant who died at the female factory). There is apparently a story of Ellen’s family having come from the “islands” in an open boat, which is cited as possible evidence of living on one of the Bass Strait Islands. Ada’s mother Janet came from a seafaring family in Scotland, and her father Henry worked as a stoker on steam ships. So it is not unexpected that there would be family stories about seafaring. Janet and her young family lived for a number of years in Emu Bay (Burnie) in an era when they would have traveled by sea rather than by road if they went anywhere.
At a family history gathering it was conveyed to me verbally that the family now think the Aboriginal ancestry is through Ellen (and her siblings including my great grandmother) having an un-named and unknown Aboriginal father. The newspaper accounts of the court case for maintenance make it clear that their father was John Baker.
In 2002 Ms Marianne Watson was one of a number of applicants to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal seeking to have the objection to their enrollment for the ATSIC Tasmanian Regional Council elections set aside. Ms Watson presented photos of family such as her great grandmother Mrs Ellen Johnson (nee Bessell/Baker) and some of Ellen’s sons, and letters from members of the Aboriginal community to say that they believed the photos looked like Aboriginal people. Ms Watson presented oral evidence that her mother had told her that Ellen was Aboriginal. However Ms Watson’s mother also wrote in 1995 “Looking back on our childhood we cannot recall knowing anyone who acknowledged being Aboriginal” and also that her father had told her that her queries about Aboriginality in the family were “a load of old rubbish”. In the book they say that they were not able to identify their father as “Aboriginal” until after he had died, and even then, there was no documentary evidence (and in fact substantial documentary evidence that he was not).
In this case the Tribunal decided that the “community recognition and the strong self-identification” was enough to find that Ms Watson was “a person of the Aboriginal race of Australia”. As Ellen’s mother and father are both known, and neither of them are Aboriginal people, this is a strange decision.
There are family stories of Ellen having visitors who were “dark”. As documented by historian Cassandra Pybus in Black Founders: The Unknown Story of Australia’s First Black Settlers, and in the Convict Women’s Press 2015 publication From the Edges of Empire: Convict Women from Beyond the British Isles, there were many colonisers in the 1800s who were “dark-skinned” who presumably went on to have children. Ada’s younger sister (Ellen’s aunt) married a man who was the son of a black convict woman. Simply having “dark” people visit the house doesn’t make someone Aboriginal.
During the 1880s-1950s there was an Aboriginal community on Cape Barren Island Aboriginal Reserve, who had a continuous history of identifying as, and being identified as, Aboriginal. This community also had a continuous history of insisting on their rights as Aboriginal people and are known as today’s Tasmanian Aboriginal community. Descendants of Dalrymple (Dolly) Briggs Johnson and Fanny Cochrane Smith make up the rest of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community.
This community have fought very hard for everything they have and have been at the forefront of national campaigns for Aboriginal rights. They are a strong community, who know who they are. They are also a community recovering from a near genocide, and living under the impact of colonisation. People from outside the community sometimes claim Aboriginal identity, with no connection to the community, or as in this case with no actual ancestry. When people mount campaigns against the Aboriginal community to be “recognised” as Aboriginal, they consume valuable time and resources that could be better used improving the situation for Aboriginal people.
Although these claims of my third cousins to Aboriginality are mistaken, there is no doubt that the people who made them were, or in some cases maybe still are, very strongly attached to identifying themselves as Aboriginal. How a person identifies themselves is a very personal decision and ultimately a decision for that person. If they so choose, it does not even need to be based in fact. A personal identification is different to a claim for rights. A claim for rights needs to have a factually correct basis. In this case, so far as ancestry has been determined, it’s a mix up.
Author’s note
Readers may wonder why I am telling this story about my family. Is it disloyal or hurtful to my relatives? Perhaps. But the hurt to the Aboriginal community is far greater than hurt feelings for having a mistake exposed. Who will speak up if it is not family, who know these stories are not true? I have however, not named living people who have not put their name to a legal claim of Aboriginality.
Linda Seaborn (nee Johnson) 2013
