ABSTRACT
Julie Gough’s artwork, Some of our women kidnapped by sealers, is a stark catalogue of names. In this work, Gough commemorates the Indigenous Tasmanian women, including her own foremothers (Gough n.d.), who were taken by sealers to serve as enforced sexual and manual workers. A contemporary report to the Colonial Secretary describes this practice:
they have also a custom of getting the Native Women of Van Diemen’s Land among them, who they mostly obtain by force and keep them as Slaves or Negroes, hunting and foraging for them, who they transfer 81and dispose of from one to another as their own property; very few of whom ever see their Native Home, being away for numbers of years, and, if they do not comply with their desires or orders in hunting, etc., they by way of punishment half hang them, cut their heads with Clubs in a Shocking Manner, or flog them most unmercifully with Cats made of Kangaroo Sinews; several of them have from two to six women, who they claim as their own private property in this Manner.
(Stewart 1815)