Tasmania recently witnessed an extraordinary event, the handing back of Kings Run – a 338-hectare property north of Arthur River on the wild Tarkine coast – to traditional ownership. It’s a fabled land no less fabled for the generations of King family occupation.
It took me six hours to drive from my home in Hobart to Kings Run. It was worth every minute of it.
I had taken up the offer of camping space the night before the handover ceremony with the Aboriginal community on their land at preminghana. This stunning 500-hectare property just north of Marrawah was handed back to Aboriginal ownership in 1995.
From Hobart, I took the scenic route over the Central Highlands, over land seasonally visited by Aboriginal people who tapped the cider gums for their sweet sap. By the time I stopped for a stretch at Rocky Cape, the weather was wild. Through some form of alchemy, a sea eagle, never once beating its wings, converted the aggressive wind into something calm and graceful as it surveyed the coastline.
I walked to North Cave, where in 1826, Henry Hellyer (like me, a surveyor) met local Aboriginal people and mapped their caves. The great geological entrance to North Cave looks like a cathedral door, and inviting. As I looked out on an angry Bass Strait, into a wind that threatened to blow my eyelids off, it wasn’t hard to see why the cave was an important place.
Such a long drive deserves a good audio book, so I was listening to Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America. I couldn’t help but think of the similar impacts the people of the Americas and the people of Australia endured after the arrivals of Columbus and Cook. Thousands of years of one reality replaced in a relative instant – via disease, violence and environmental destruction – with another.
I arrived at preminghana mid-afternoon to find about 50 tents and perhaps 150 members of the Aboriginal community setting up or sheltering from the rain. I put up my tent then the rain cleared long enough to go for a short walk to the crest of a hill where Sharni Everett, a north-western Tasmanian indigenous heritage guide, described the landscape and its human history, and pointed out the location of petroglyphs.
As dusk descended, adults stood by the fire talking as children played nearby. There was a sense of great anticipation for the handover of Kings Run the following day. I stared into the flames and thought how important fire was to the hundreds of generations of Aboriginal people who passed through this land, and indeed how fundamental it is to being human. I thought about how mastering fire arguably began humanity as distinct from the animal kingdom. Staring into the flames, as all people from all places have for millennia, I thought perhaps little was different thousands of years ago when, perhaps close to this very spot, a group of people shared shelter, food, story and community.
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To many over the past 200 years, including Geoff King once, this part of Tasmania was seen as cattle country; not only the green pasture inland but even the fragile coastline and marshland that is home to numerous threatened species. The cows here have even grown accustomed to eating kelp from the shore.
This is not, however, how the Aboriginal community sees this land.
In many parts of Australia, Aboriginals were forcibly removed from their land to make way for cattle, often subsequently forced to work as farm labourers, taking part in the destruction of their own land. In Tasmania, they were simply expelled.
“Aboriginal people lived freely here until the early 1820s when their removal became a government priority in the area,” says Andry Sculthorpe, of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC). “Many atrocities occurred at the hands of white men, pastoralists and government agents. This ultimately led to complete removal by George Augustus Robinson on behalf of the government in the 1830s.”
The King family ran cattle on their land from the 1880s, until Geoff King began to realise the profound importance of his land in terms of both Aboriginal culture and environmental value. He removed the cattle and began restoring the environment and receiving visitors instead. Geoff King died in 2013, aged just 58. In accordance with his wishes, the Aboriginal community was given first right of refusal to purchase the property, and so, as at preminghana previously, Kings Run cattle have been replaced with natural environment and Aboriginal culture.
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Late morning, in a clearing sheltered by trees and scrub but within earshot of surf pounding the rugged shore, about 200 people gather. A smoking ceremony is held. Two young men, bodies painted with ochre, dance around the fire and the audience before inviting everyone to walk slowly through the thick white smoke, rich with the incense of fresh eucalyptus leaves, to cleanse their spirits. The onlooking faces beam. Several groups and individuals have come together here with a common vision. This ceremony is the realisation of that vision.
The event is the second collaboration between the Tasmanian Land Conservancy (TLC) and the Aboriginal community. The first was at Trawtha Makuminya (formerly known as Gowan Brae) in the Central Highlands in 2013. “It is hopefully not the last,” says Stuart Barry, chairman of TLC.
The Indigenous Land Corporation (ILC), which is a legislated body tasked with acquiring land for Aboriginal benefit, granted $680,000 to the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania (ALCT), while the Bob Brown Foundation (BBF) and the TLC secured $385,000 from donations (including $325,000 from Wotif founder Graeme Wood) to enable ALCT to buy the property.
Rangers from the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre who manage preminghana will now also manage the 338 hectares of Kings Run.
“It was impossible for me not to get involved in this project,” said Wood, who first met Geoff King on a hiking tour of the west coast. “The impact of that environment was deeply memorable.” For Wood, the most lasting impact of his trips to the area, however, is the effect Geoff King had on him. “He was an inspiration for me. He showed that the courage of one’s convictions can make a demonstrable change in one’s own lifetime, despite personal attacks from the less aware.”
Above all, though, Wood’s readiness to help comes from his disgust at the treatment of Aboriginal people since the arrival of Captain Cook. “Physical Aboriginal massacres don't happen in 2017, but the spiritual and political desecration of Aboriginal history continues unabated,” Wood said.
Kings Run is rich in shell middens, seal-hunting hides and the remains of hut villages, written about in early colonial literature – huts that had multiple rooms, fire hearths and could house up to 40 people. It was part of a seasonal hunting area carefully managed with fire. “These places have helped to correct the misconception that our people just wandered around aimlessly without settlement or structures,” said Andry Sculthorpe of TAC.
Wildlife biologist Nick Mooney, a visit from whom King once credited as beginning his “wake-up call”, opened the speeches on behalf of Geoff King’s wife, Margo Jones, pointing out that Kings Run has only ever had two owners: Aboriginal people and the King Family. Geoff and Margo wished it returned to its first owners.
As children played on the land of their forebears, the former leader of the Australian Greens, Bob Brown, described the handback as a “small step in recovering, for all Australians, a loss we have in our hearts at what was done in our past. On a planet that desperately needs its eight billion people to reconnect with the land, Aboriginal people are our leaders in this, both in body and in mind.”
Alignment of respect for indigenous culture and conservation should be no surprise and nor is it a Tasmanian concept. Just days before the ceremony in October, UN special rapporteur Victoria Tauli-Corpuz urged world leaders attending climate talks in Bonn to do more to defend indigenous communities, claiming that they are the most effective custodians of the environment worldwide and that this will be essential for dealing with climate change.
In recent years, when Bolivia and Ecuador gave greater political power to their indigenous people, constitutional change soon followed, to recognise the “rights of nature”. The Australian Constitution was written when many were unaware of environmental issues we now face, and the laws that cascade down from the Constitution put matters like property rights far above the need to create environments that can sustain humans.
The Constitution was also written long before our first people were granted any rights at all.
It felt like a rare thing then, to hear indigenous voices celebrating the environmental legacy of a “white fella”. “We have waited 200 years for this. Today we once again become custodians of this land. It is part of us, we need it,” said Clyde Mansell, before committing to perpetuate King’s legacy of conservation.
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As people explored Kings Run after the speeches, along the jagged and raucous shore, past the seal-hunting hides, to Geoff King’s famous little cabin where he treated his visitors to dinner, and back through the hinterlands, it was obvious the land will now inspire people for many years to come.
It is powerful to think of the hundreds of generations spending time on this land: being born, living, loving, dying, enduring ice ages and changing sea levels, whilst other civilisations around the world came and went. At Kings Run, this story is once again being written, with the hopes and fears of future generations to paint the unwritten pages and a feeling of permanence has returned. A feeling of permanence has returned.
Not long after leaving to begin the long drive home, Eduardo Galeano finished his masterpiece with words that seemed to be written not for the past of Latin America but for the ceremony at Kings Run: “In the history of humankind, every act of destruction meets its response, sooner or later, in an act of creation.”
A publisher once told James that when he is asked for his bio, he should say: “James writes subversive essays about important things.” James felt a bit awkward about saying this publicly, but secretly he liked it. He has written for many publications. His books are Essays from Near and Far, Walleah Press, 2014 and The Balfour Correspondent, Bob Brown Foundation, 2017.
