Monthly Archives: December 2019
Hidden women of history: Wauba Debar, an Indigenous swimmer from Tasmania who saved her captors
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Megan Stronach, University of Technology Sydney and Daryl Adair, University of Technology Sydney
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains images and names of deceased people.
Aboriginal women and girls in lutruwita (Tasmania or Van Diemen’s Land) were superb swimmers and divers.
For eons, the palawa women of lutruwita had productive relationships with the sea and were expert hunters. Scant knowledge remains of these women, yet we can find fleeting glimpses of their aquatic skills.
Wauba Debar of Oyster Bay’s Paredarerme tribe was stolen as a teenager to become, according to Edward Cotton (a Quaker who settled on Tasmania’s East Coast), “a sealer’s slave and paramour”.
Servitude and rescue
Foreign sealers arrived on the Tasmanian coastlines in the late 18th century. The ensuing fur trade nearly destroyed the seal populations of Tasmania in a matter of two decades.
At the same time, life became extremely difficult for the female palawa population.
Slavery was still legal in the British Empire, and so the profitability of the sealing industry was underpinned by the servitude of palawa women.
Sporadic raids known as “gin-raiding” by sealers rendered the coastlines a place of constant danger for female palawa.
National Library of Australia
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Noted works: The Black War
Little is known of Wauba Debar other than tales of a daring rescue at sea. Though variations to her story can be found, it most frequently details her long swim and lifesaving efforts in stormy conditions. As one version tells it:
The boat went under; the two men were poor swimmers, and looked set to drown beneath the mountainous grey waves. Wauba could have left them to drown, and swim ashore on her own. But she didn’t.
First, she pulled her husband under her arm — the man who had first captured her — and dragged him back to shore, more than a kilometre away. Wauba next swam back out to the other man, and brought him in as well. The two sealers coughed and spluttered on the Bicheno beach, but they did not die. Wauba had saved them.
Death at sea
Sadly, no one was there to rescue Wauba when she needed it. Her demise during a sealing trip, was at the hands of Europeans.
According to a sailor’s account to Cotton, Wauba was one of the “gins” captured to take along on a whaleboat sailing from Hobart to the Straits Islands (Furneaux Group) as “expert hunters, fishers, and divers, as in most barbarous tribes, the slaves of the men”.
The sailing party camped at Wineglass Bay but woke to find the women and dogs had vanished. A group set off to pursue those who’d taken them. In his 1893 account, Cotton speculated in The Mercury newspaper on the likely cause of her death:
Wauba Debar had, I suppose, been captured in like manner … and possibly died of injuries sustained in the capture, which no doubt was not done very tenderly.
The crew interred Wauba at Bicheno, and marked her grave by a slab of wood with details inscribed.
Accounts differ as to when this actually took place. In 1893, elderly Bicheno residents said Wauba was buried 10 years before the date on the headstone, placing her death around 1822.
However, in his diary entry on 24 January 1816, Captain James Kelly described how he hauled up in Waub’s Boat Harbour due to the heavy afternoon swell. Considering the area was already named after her, it can be concluded that Wauba was likely buried before 1816.
Cotton’s report imagined her burial:
Wauba Debar did not live to be a mother of the tribe of half-bred sealers of the Straits, which became a sort of city or refuge of for bushrangers in aftertime … But she, poor soul was buried decently, perchance reverently, and I suppose other of the captured sisters would be present by the graveside on the shores of that silent nook near the beached boat.
Here lies Wauba
Wauba’s reputation was such that in 1855 the public of Bicheno decided to commemorate her by erecting a railing, headstone, and footstone (paid for by public subscription) at her grave, with “Waub” carved into it.
John Allen, who had been granted land nearby, donated ten shillings towards the cost of the gravestone – notwithstanding his involvement in a massacre at Milton Farm, Great Swanport, 30 years earlier.
The inscription reads:
Here lies Wauba Debar. A Female Aborigine of Van Diemen’s Land. Died June 1832. Aged 40 Years. This Stone is Erected by a few of her white friends.
Whether prompted by a sense of loss, guilt, or admiration, the community memorialised Wauba, and by extension, the original inhabitants of the land.
Yet by the late 1800s, European demand for Aboriginal physical remains for “scientific investigation” was high. In 1893, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery was determined to procure the remains of Wauba.
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The prevailing ethnological theories believed that the study of Australian Aboriginal people, and particularly Indigenous Tasmanians, would reveal much about the earliest stages of human development and its progress.
Wauba’s grave was exhumed, put into a box, labelled “Native Currants”, and dispatched to Hobart.
The locals were outraged. An editorial in the Tasmanian Mail newspaper condemned the act as “a pure case of body snatching for the purposes of gain, and nothing else” that “the name of Science is outraged at being connected with”.
Snowdrops bloom
Wauba’s memorial is the only known gravestone erected to a Tasmanian Aboriginal person during the 19th century, and she is the only palawa woman known to have been buried and commemorated by non-Indigenous locals.
In 2014, Olympic swimmer and Bicheno resident Shane Gould dedicated a fundraising swim to Wauba Debar’s swimming abilities and memory.
The European styled memorial serves as a reminder of the more turbulent interactions between the two peoples that shaped Tasmania’s history from the 1800s onwards.
Wauba’s empty grave is Tasmania’s smallest State Reserve. Her remains were returned to the Tasmanian Indigenous community in 1985. Snowdrops are said to bloom around the grave every spring.
Megan Stronach, Post Doctoral Research Fellow, University of Technology Sydney and Daryl Adair, Associate Professor of Sport Management, University of Technology Sydney
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Knights Templar: still loved by conspiracy theorists 900 years on
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Patrick Masters, University of Portsmouth
On Christmas Day, 1119, the king of Jerusalem, Baldwin II persuaded a group of French knights led by Hugh de Payne II to save their souls by protecting pilgrims travelling the Holy Land. And so the Order of the Knights Templar was formed.
This revolutionary order of knights lived as monks and took vows of poverty and chastity, but these were monks with a difference – they would take up arms as knights to protect the civilians using the dangerous roads of the newly conquered Kingdom of Jerusalem. From these humble beginnings, the order would grow to become one of the premier Christian military forces of the Crusades.
Over the next 900 years, these warrior monks would become associated with the Holy Grail, the Freemasons and the occult. But are any of these associations true, or are they just baseless myth?
The Crusades ended in 1291 after the Christian capital of Acre fell to the Mameluke forces of Egypt and the Templars found themselves redundant. Despite their wealth and European holdings, their reason for existence had been to wage war in defence of the Holy Land.
But the French king Philip IV was in debt to the Templar order and, with the Holy land lost, he capitalised on their vulnerability and had the Templars arrested in France on Friday October 13, 1307 in a dawn raid on their Paris Temple and residences. In 1312, the order was abolished by papal decree and in 1314 the last grand-master, Jacque de Molay, was burned at the stake in Paris with three other Templars. With the order destroyed, any surviving former members joined other orders or monasteries.
Giovanni Villani, Nuova Cronica – ms. Chigiano L VIII 296 – Biblioteca Vaticana
Despite the arrests and charges of heresy being laid against the order, a document known as the Chinon Parchment was found in 2001 in the Vatican’s archives which documents that the Templars were, in fact, exonerated by the Catholic Church in 1312. But, despite clearing them of heresy, Pope Clement ordered that they be disbanded.
Appropriation of a legend
The suppression of the Templars meant that there was nobody to safeguard their legacy. Since then, the order has been appropriated by other organisations – most notably as ancestors to the Masonic order in the 18th century and, more recently, by right-wing extremist groups such as the Knights Templar-UK and mass-murdering terrorist Anders Behring Breivik.
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Alt-right claims to march in step with the Knights Templar – this is fake history
The Knights Templar’s association with Freemasonry is not so much a myth as it was a marketing campaign by 18th-century Freemasons to appeal to the aristocracy. Historian Frank Sanello explained in his 2003 book, The Knights Templars: God’s Warriors, the Devil’s Bankers, that initially it was Andrew Ramsey, a senior French Freemason of the era, who first made the link between the Freemasons and the Crusader knights.
But he originally claimed the Freemasons were descended from the crusading Order of the Knight Hospitaller. Of course, the Hospitallers were still operational, unlike the Knight Templar, so Ramsey quickly changed his claim to the Templars being the Freemasons’ crusading ancestry.
The Knights Templar had actually been mythologised in popular culture as early as the 13th century in the Grail epic Parzival by German knight and poet Wolfram von Eschenbach. In this Grail epic, the Knights Templar were included in the story as the guardians of the Grail. After the order’s sudden fall, these warrior monks became associated with conspiracies and the occult.
For some, a mystery still surrounds the fate of the Templar fortune (which was in reality seized by Phillip IV, with the majority of their property redistributed to the Hospitallers) and the Templar confessions (extracted under torture) to worshipping an idol dubbed Baphomet. The link between the Templars and the occult would resurface again in the 16th century in Henry Agrippa’s book De Occulta Philosophia.
Modern-day myth
Modern fiction continues to draw upon the widespread mysteries and fanciful theories. These mythical associations are key themes for many popular works of fiction, such as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code in which the Templars guard the Grail. The Templar myth has also found its way into the digital gaming format in the globally successful Assassin’s Creed franchise, in which the player must assassinate a villainous Templar.
Nine centuries after they were formed, the Templars remain the most iconic and infamous order of knights from the Crusades. The Templar legacy has grown beyond their medieval military role and the name has become synonymous with the occult, conspiracies, the Holy Grail and the Freemasons. But these are all false narratives – fantastical, but misleading.
The real legacy of the Templars remains with the Portuguese Order of Knights, Ordem dos Cavaleiros de Nosso Senhor Jesus Cristo(Order of the Knights of Jesus Christ). This order was created by King Diniz in 1319 with Papal permission due to the prominent role the Templars played in establishing the kingdom of Portugal. The new knighthood even moved into the Templars’ former headquarters at Tomar.
For historian Micheal Haag, this new order “was the Templars under another name” – but it pledged obedience to the king of Portugal and not the Pope like their Templar predecessors.
And so the essence of the Templar’s successors still exists today as a Portuguese order of merit for outstanding service – and the Templar myth continues to provide a rich source of inspiration for artistic endeavours.
Patrick Masters, Lecturer in Film Studies, University of Portsmouth
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Vikings didn’t just murder monks and pillage monasteries – they helped spread Christianity too
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Caitlin Ellis, University of Oxford
Vikings are often seen as heathen marauders mercilessly targeting Christian churches and killing defenceless monks. But this is only part of their story. The Vikings played a key role in spreading Christianity, too.
Norse mythology has long captured the popular imagination and many today have heard stories about the pagan gods, particularly Odin, Thor and Loki, recently reimagined in Marvel’s comic books and movies. Some now even follow reconstructed versions of these beliefs, known as Ásatrú (the religion of the Aesir).
Our main source for this mythology, the Prose Edda, was written by a 13th-century Christian, the Icelandic politician Snorri Sturluson. Scandinavia converted to Christianity later than many parts of Europe, but this process is still an important part of the Vikings’ real story. Indeed, there are fascinating works of Norse literature with a Christian theme, including sagas of bishops and saints.
It would be wrong to minimise Viking violence, but raiding – hit and run attacks for plunder – in the medieval period was not confined to these Scandinavian seafarers. The Irish annals, such as the Annals of Ulster, record far more attacks by Irishmen on other Irishmen, including the raiding and burning of churches, than attacks by Scandinavians.
An ideological clash is one suggested cause of the “Viking Age”. This line of thinking suggests that pagan Scandinavians sought to avenge Christian attacks, such as the Frankish emperor Charlemagne’s invasion of Saxony from 772AD to 804AD. This 30-year conflict involved forced mass baptism, the death penalty for “heathen practices” and included the execution of 4,500 Saxon rebels at Verden in 782AD.
It seems more likely, however, that Christian monasteries were initially targeted because they were poorly defended and contained portable wealth in the form of metalwork and people. Settling in richer Christian lands also offered better prospects for some than remaining in resource-poor Scandinavia.
The rise of Christianity
The conversion of Scandinavia was gradual with Christian missionaries preaching intermittently in Scandinavia from the eighth century. While there was some resistance, Christianity and Norse paganism were not always fundamentally opposed. A 10th-century soapstone mould from Trendgården in Jutland, Denmark, allowed the casting of metal Thor’s hammer amulets alongside crosses. The same craftsman clearly catered for both pagans and Christians.
The first Scandinavian king to be converted was the Danish exile Harald Klak. He was baptised in 826AD with the Carolingian emperor Louis the Pious as his sponsor, in exchange for imperial support for an (albeit unsuccessful) attempt to regain his throne.
Guthrum, a king from the Viking Great Army which attacked England in the ninth century, was also baptised as part of his agreement following defeat by the West Saxon king Alfred “the Great” in 878AD. Indeed, coming into contact with Christian kingdoms which were more politically centralised arguably led to greater unification of the Scandinavian realms.
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One of the most significant turning points in the Christianisation of Scandinavia was the conversion of the Danish king Harald Bluetooth in the 960s. Bluetooth technology is named after Harald because he united disparate parts of Denmark, while the technology unites communication devices.
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Harald proudly proclaimed on the now iconic Jelling stone, an impressive monument with a runic inscription, that he “made the Danes Christian”. And this connection between kingship and Christianity continued.
Norway was converted largely due to two of its kings: Olaf Tryggvason and Olaf Haraldsson. The latter was canonised shortly after his death in battle in 1030AD, becoming Scandinavia’s first native saint.
Future Norwegian kings benefited from their association with Olaf Haraldsson, who became Norway’s patron saint. Other royal Scandinavian saints would follow, notably Erik of Sweden and Knud the Holy of Denmark. The Norse earldom of Orkney also produced a martyr from its ruling family: St Magnus, who was killed in around 1116 in a dynastic squabble.
The 2018 Danish Eurovision entry (Rasmussen’s song Higher Ground) portrays Magnus as a pacifist viking refusing to fight. Saga sources do suggest that Magnus refused on one occasion to raid with the Norwegian king and fled from the fleet, but his career was not without violence.
Scandinavians who settled abroad in Christian lands were also converted to the dominant religion. While Scandinavian settlers initially buried their dead in traditional pagan ways, they soon adopted the customs of those living around them. And their settlements became part of the political and cultural makeup of their host societies.
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Viking migration left a lasting legacy on Ireland’s population
Some of the most celebrated pieces of medieval Irish ecclesiastical art were likely made by Hiberno-Scandinavian craftsmen from Viking-founded towns like Dublin. These objects also feature stylistic elements which had spread from the Scandinavian homelands.
For example, the 11th-century Clonmacnoise crozier is decorated in the Scandinavian art style of Ringerike, with snake-like animals in figure-of-eight patterns. Clonmacnoise in County Offaly, associated with the sixth-century St Ciaran, is one of Ireland’s oldest and most important ecclesiastical sites. And the ancestors of these craftsmen might have been the very raiders who had attacked Irish churches.
Soldiers of God
Even Scandinavian settlers in the remote islands of the North Atlantic joined the European mainstream with some enthusiasm. Partly due to pressure from Norway, Iceland officially converted to Christianity in the year 1000. Following consultation at their national assembly (the Alþing) it was decided that the country would convert but that some pagan practices would still be tolerated.
The settlements on Greenland eventually failed in the 14th and 15th centuries, but even when the inhabitants were starving they still devoted precious resources to importing luxury goods for the church, including wine and vestments.
Scandinavians also joined the Crusades; now they were the Christians attacking the so-called heathens. The Norwegian king Sigurd “Jerusalem-farer” – named for his visit to the Holy Land – was, in fact, the first European king to participate in the Crusades personally, making a journey from 1108 to 1111, a short while after the First Crusade culminated in the Christian reoccupation of Jerusalem in 1099.
Crusading was, after all, not so different from Viking raiding, but this time the killing and looting had Christian backing. Instead of an afterlife of feasting in Valhalla as a reward for dying in battle, those who died on Crusade would go straight to Heaven.
Indeed, the Viking world was as much populated by missionary kings, bishops and saints as it was by raiders, gods and giants.
Caitlin Ellis, Stipendiary Lecturer in Medieval History, University of Oxford
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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