Timme, hanged in Melbourne in 1842, rides a canoe home in spirit
He was a young Aboriginal man taken from his people in Tasmania during the colonial wars and eventually brought to Victoria for what was supposed to be a new beginning.
Instead, his life ended by a thread when two Aboriginal men were jointly executed in Melbourne in January 1842.
The bodies of the young man and his friend, the first people to be hanged in Victoria, are believed to have been buried in an area now occupied by Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Market.
But his soul?
According to Patsy Cameron AO, a much-respected Tasmanian elder, artist and writer, she returned across the Bass Strait to live with her ancestors and people in Tasmania.
That’s the inspiration behind a new traditional canoe sculpture at the farthest point of north-east Tasmania, known as Portland Point but called Tebrakunna by its original people.
The name of the statue that was unveiled in December in the presence of Tasmanian governor Barbara Baker, AC Timme’s Canoe.
“The canoe is a representation of our people’s means of travel, but it also symbolizes bringing the spirit of Timme home from the Bass Strait,” says Aunt Patsy.
He says that when the wind blows from the throat, the canoe creates its own song by whistling in and around the statue.
Aunt Patsy says Timme is the right name for the young man who went by a number of other names throughout his short life.
He was referred to as Maulboyheenner in history books and was also known as Robert, Bob, Timmy and Jimmy to colonial officials and early reporters.
But Aunt Patsy says even Maulboyheenner was never Timme’s real name; it was just a corruption of the language meaning “he’s a little boy.”
Timme was just 16 years old when he was captured by a colonial raiding party in 1830 and taken to Launceston prison.
Aunt Patsy says she is the sole survivor of a massacre that occurred at a time when Aboriginal people were rounded up from Tasmania, then known as Van Diemen’s Land, for the purpose of extermination.
Timme was taken from prison by the controversial Aboriginal Protector George Augustus Robinson, who orchestrated the deportation of around 200 of Tasmania’s surviving Indigenous people to Flinders Island, the largest of the Furneaux group of islands in the Bass Strait.
The settlement on Flinders Island eventually went bankrupt; its dying inhabitants suffered European diseases, homesickness, and cultural displacement.
Robinson left the settlement in 1839 and moved to the Port Phillip District, later to become Victoria, as the first Chief Protector of Aborigines.
He took with him 15 Tasmanian Aborigines, including Timme/Maulboyheenner and a man from northwestern Tasmania named Tunnerminnerwait, also known as Jack.
However, Robinson soon lost touch with “his” Tasmanian Aboriginal people.
Timme/Maulboyheenner and Tunnerminnerwait set out for Westernport, accompanied by the legendary Indigenous woman Truganini and two other Tasmanian Aboriginal women, Planobeena and Pyterruner (all three of whom had previously been kidnapped and brutalized by sealers).
They raided huts and police stations and created a small arms cache. Finally, in 1841, they killed two whalers, William Cook, and a man identified only as a “Yankee.”
The three women were found not guilty, but Maulboyheenner and Tunnerminnerwait were sentenced to death because they were denied the right to testify at their trials.
They were hanged on an open-air scaffolding called “Gallows Hill” in front of approximately 5,000 people, many of whom were reportedly in a festive mood. A group of Aborigines watched silently from nearby trees.
A monument to Maulboyheenner and Tunnerminnerwait can be found near the present-day corner of Franklin and Victoria streets.
Jury appealed for mercy but Judge Walpole Willis said executions were designed to “inspire terror” [and] to deter similar violations”.
The hanging was absolutely horrific. The scene in which the men were forced to climb the scaffolding with their hands tied behind their backs was “a great affront to public morals”, according to a reporter later.
Timme went to his death, visibly petrified.
The execution itself was unsuccessful: According to newspaper reports, the men did not initially fall through the length of their ropes, and the crowd abused the executioner as Tunnerminnerwait was slowly strangled to death.
Aunt Patsy says she was repatriated by the creation of a sculptural canoe that sits above the sea near a high point from which, on a clear day, the Bass Strait islands, including Flinders Island, are visible.
Laura Murray, an artist from the nation of Tebrakunna, had cultural control over the building’s construction and design. Timme’s Canoe. Professor Emma Lee provided most of the funding through a grant from Federation University.
“The canoe is more than a sculpture,” says Aunt Patsy. “This is a story as big as the land.
“This is a commitment to those who were taken, to those who were silenced, and to those whose spirits still walk.”
In northwestern Tasmania, at Circular Head, the spirit of the Tunnerminnerwait is also commemorated by an impressive painting on a rock on their traditional land.
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Tony Wright is associate editor and feature writer for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email.
