Other Kinds Of Islands

At the entrance of Australia’s Bass Strait, off the north eastern tip of Tasmania, lie the Furneaux Islands—wind-swept, gale-lashed, inhabited by migratory Shearwaters (mutton-birds) from September to April each year and by the part-Tasmanian part-European islanders the whole year round. In Moonbird People Patsy Adam Smith combines people, islands and birds into one unusual story.

THE writer is still on the right side of middle-age but has managed to crowd into her life a list of jobs, interests and accomplishments so varied that they probably account for her somewhat undisciplined writing style.

Although at present she is an adult-education officer in Hobart and she has been a journalist and feature writer, as a writer of books she swerves, back-tracks, mixes in history with her own current activities and, although the result has a certain

naive charm about it, it can also be aggravating.

Some years ago—when, is not clear—she went to the Furneaux Islands to gather material for a documentary on the islands and the mutton-birds. She was accompanied by a photographer—who gave the place away after three days. Patsy Ann Smith remained for six years, sailing as a cook and spare helmsman on a coastal trader, and for another similar period maintaining her in terest in the Group by long periods living with the islanders.

Although her unorthodox adven tures as a sea-cook are amusing, it is her record of the feathered and human inhabitants of the islands that is of special interest.

Most Australians are aware, in a vague sort of way, that there are inhabited islands down there between Melbourne and the north coast of Tasmania but few know more. It will be news to most that the islanders —Cape Barreners—are descendants of six Tasmanian aboriginal women, three Australian aboriginal women, one Maori woman and nine white men who, almost 150 years ago, were engaged in sealing in the Group.

"Plunderers"

The author calls these people “hybrids” and today they range in appearance from blue-eyed blonde to almost black, but all, she says, are more self-conscious of their white blood than their black.

For the first 40-odd years of the 19th century, the Furneaux Islands were plundered by white men for the thousands of seals which lived in the off-shore waters.

Mostly the sealers came in their ships for a season and departed, but such was the wanton destruction that the valuable animals they sought

were finally exterminated. The islande rs descendants of the nine sealers who had remained permanently on the islands and their women—then fell on hard times until it was noticed that the grey birds that arrived in milhons each September lived on the Sa s^meone of ,

EHHErHrn

local name.

The commercial value of the birds continued for a long time to be in their feathers, which were sold for mattresses and pillows. “Birding”— for the oil, the feathers and the flesh of the birds—developed as an in dustry only slowly “T* l6 whole season,” sa V s ‘ he author,

ad oi nss^ToUi

farmers, but primitive hunters.”-

JT.

‘ (moonbird people. Rigby. 39/6).