Tasmania's mournful bicentenary
Keith Windschuttle
Launch speech for John Bowen and the Founding of Tasmania by Reg Watson
Masonic Building, Hobart, September 13 2003

I'm from Sydney, where I've lived all my life. However, I have visited Hobart more times than I can count and feel a great affinity for this city. Sydney and Hobart have a lot in common. They are both harbour cities in beautiful settings – indeed, they are two of the most beautiful cities in the world. They were the first two cities to be established in Australia, only fifteen years apart in 1788 and 1803.

So the very radical difference in the way that both celebrated their 200th birthdays is most surprising. In 1988, Sydney put on a fabulous show. More than a million people attended street parties and harbour parties. The fireworks display cost millions of dollars and was one of the best ever seen anywhere. The Lord Mayor, the Premier the State Governor and their ladies danced until dawn. The Aboriginal community occupied the best position on the harbour and, although they had a march to protest the occasion, they also had a great party and they and their kids thoroughly enjoyed the fireworks.

In 2003, Hobart could not have been more different. Only about one hundred people attended a church service in Hobart where they were admonished for the sins of their forbears by Henry Reynolds, dressed appropriately in black. The Premier took a holiday, only one politician attended and the Queen's representative, the Governor, was nowhere to be seen. The gates of the site of the first settlement at Risdon Cove were closed to everyone except for the small, minority faction of radical Aborigines who now control the place. The only really positive ceremony was at Risdon Vale where Kaye McPherson and the Liah Pootah community joined with the descendents of the original settlers at Risdon Cove to commemorate both sides of their heritage, Aboriginal and British. Fittingly, this was the best-attended function on the day with about 200 people there. That night I also attended a meeting of the Lindisfarne Historical Society, which put on one of the most impressive performances I have seen for many a year, combining music, poetry and a visual display of the Derwent River .

So all was not lost. Moreover, some of the Sydney bicentenary spirit is alive here in Hobart tonight. We are having our own party here – and there are plenty of fireworks in Reg Watson's book.

There are actually two books being published to mark the bicentenary of John Bowen and Risdon Cove. One is by Phillip Tardif. That is the version whose writing and printing were both funded and authorized by the government. It takes an insufferable politically correct line about the whole business. And there is Reg's book, which has received no government funding of any kind, which is far more historically accurate, especially about the Aborigines, and which is by far the better buy. As well as the early history, Reg gives you a final chapter in which he traces the shameful modern history of Risdon Cove when politicians decided to hand over the founding site of British settlement on this island to a small, unrepresentative group of political activists.

At the end of the book, Reg says they should give the site back so that all Tasmanians, indeed all Australians, whether they are descended from the Aborigines, the early British settlers or are recent immigrants from Europe or Asia or anywhere else, can once again regard it as a site of their own heritage. Obviously, the current activists are unlikely to return the site to public ownership in the short term but Reg is right to make his demand because in the long run that is what should happen.

In conducting his campaign to save the site, and in producing this book about it, Reg has shown himself a man of great determination and courage. I was proud to have been asked to write a foreword for his book and I have great pleasure in declaring it launched.