Burned Hot and Bright: Walyer

Kez Mayıs 28, 2022

In the painting by Julie Dowling, the Tasmanian warrior woman Walyer holds a colonialist's flintlock as she gestures towards her Country. She has another fowling piece tucked into her belt. Perhaps her voluminous skirt once belonged to a white woman and maybe her cape is of kangaroo skin or woven stuff, but her breasts are most definitely bare. She wears necklaces of marineer shells - ropes of tiny, pointed shells, shiny blue with sand-worn nacre. Pallawah women collected them every year on the northern beaches and strung them into body art with the stringy sinew of wallaby tail.

Walyer is a problematic sort of woman to have in the history books.

Jorgen Jorgenson wrote that because Van Diemonian journals and letters had been recorded with 'such fidelity', nobody, absolutely nobody, given the evidence, would ever be given enough creative leash to compare Walyer to the Boadicea, even if she "... as a heroine, as the defender of her native woods against the aggressions of the British ... placed her on a level with the British Queen who, it is said, resisted the Roman arms for nine years. Speculation as now regards Van Diemen’s Land is quite out of the question – and for ever so."*

Jorgenson must have anticipated romantic academics popping up in the future. I doubt he anticipated the internet. He never mentioned the Red Queen's name in that paragraph but really, I think he was being a bit of a tease ...

One of Walyer's names was Tareenorerer, which is very close to Tyreelore or 'Island Wife'. She was stolen by sealers when she was a teenager around 1817 and taken to the islands of Bass Strait. In the Australian Dictionary of Biography, it is said that she was initially abducted by Aboriginals and sold to the sealers.*

Walyer learnt English quickly. But more crucially for this particular girl's career, she learnt from the sealers all about black powder - how to handle guns, how to pour shot and that vulnerable time in battle between firing and reloading.

In 1828, Walyer returned to her country in the north of Tasmania. With some of her brothers and sisters, she mounted attacks against the white men luta tawin, whom she likened to black snakes. Apparently she would stand on a hilltop, organising the warriors and goading the potential victims to come and get speared! Walyer began getting into strife with rival clans as well.

"When we came to Cape Grim we took two male natives and one female. We asked where were all the rest of the tribe. They told us that a woman named Walloa, a female chief, came to Cape Grim with three tribes and surrounded the tribe when sitting at their fires, killed them all with the exception of the three we spoke to. Walloa when running away said she would return and kill them all. She was however not seen afterwards until we put in at Port Sorell. We had previously taken the three poor creatures to Swan Island. Walloa, strange to say, was actually the chief of the ferocious Sorell tribe who killed Captain Thomas and Mr Parker. The same woman and her mob chased Mr Robinson and the Doctor in September last, with five of the tame natives we had with us, for nearly five miles."*

Some sealers collected Walyer up again. They took her to Hunter and Bird Island where she worked muttonbirding and sealing. She also lived with Norfolk Island Jack in the Furneaux Group for a while.

When Walyer returned from the islands to Van Diemen's Land the next time she was a wanted criminal; murders and misdeeds from her last rampage had caught up with her. Resistance was useless in the face of British law and she'd upset a lot of Pallawah people too. She was captured through the advice of some Pallawah women. They recognised her dog Whisky - he answered their call.

George Augustus Robinson of 'Friendly Mission' work, was elated at her capture. He had been trying to 'conciliate' the Pallawah for some time. He blamed Walyer for inciting them to violence and other unsavoury methods of survival. He believed that all the 'mischief perpetuated upon the different settlements' could be traced to Walyer and her warriors.

Walyer was indeed a chaotic, angry entity; an uncomfortably visceral example of the fraying traditions of culture and sex in Pallawah society, and a rather frightening wild card for the colonisers. She killed people black and white. She went back to her original sealer abductors for refuge when things got too hot for her in VDL. She may have been an Antipodean Boadicea but there was no final scene of a woad-smeared warrior woman screaming naked down a grassy battlefield.
Walyer was simply moved to Gun Carriage Island with Robinson's other 'charges'. She died on the 5th of June, 1831, of the 'flu.