Some years ago, as I started to try and understand the history of the colonial conflict period, it struck me how significant Aboriginal women were in the stories of the palawa. Sometimes I felt their presence rippling like currents through a sea. 

When I first stumbled upon a plaque bearing the name of Wauba Debar in the east coast town of Bicheno, I sensed I was participating in an encounter with an event, and a person, with a certain poignancy. I was prompted to write about it immediately. What I did not yet understand was that these were yarns that I would only ever be able to see through a certain lens, and I simply could not see or comprehend so much of the palawa story. These histories, though they passed permanently and powerfully through places I knew well, have additional dimensions that I will never fully realise, let alone be able to tell.

We know that it was common for white sealers and whalers to kidnap a few “gins” to take with them. The black women weren’t only taken to be used as paramours – they were hunters and fishers and divers too. But late at night, they could escape from beneath the blankets they shared with the seafaring drunks who had taken them, and they could steal the kangaroo-dogs too. It was said that the Aborigines had a singular power to win the loyalty of the dogs, no small advantage in those days.

Wauba had been taken, I suppose, in the same way – not of her own volition, and not without violence. What possesses a slave to save the life of her master, then? Is it love when a native girl is married against her will, and then goes and rescues him?

There were three of them on that sealing vessel when the squall appeared on the east coast waters. The boat went under. The two men were poor swimmers, and looked set to drown beneath the mountainous grey waves. Wauba could have swum ashor, leaving them to drown, but she didn’t. First, she pulled her husband under her arm – the man who had first captured her – and dragged him to shore, more than a kilometre away. Then she 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.

Only a couple of years later, in 1832, Wauba died in another storm near Flinders Island. In 1855, “a few of her white friends” erected a gravestone for Wauba Debar at Bicheno, in memory of her heroic deeds. The surname is of the man she saved: her husband. Wauba’s bones are not beneath the gravestone, though. Her skeleton was taken for science, like those of many Aborigines, and is now probably lost.

I know little more about Wauba Debar’s 40 years of life other than what is in this vignette. But this tale seems to me to be little more than a set of shapes on the surface of a bay. A great deal is missing. There is much more beneath the surface.

Bert Spinks writes poetry, and poetic prose, about wilderness. He has also played football on Queenstown’s gravel oval. In this blog, he fills in some of the space between these essentially Tasmanian extremes.