Louisa Briggs (; 14 November 1836 – 6 September 1925) was an Aboriginal Australian rights activist, dormitory matron, midwife and nurse. She is officially recognised by the Victorian Government and the Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Council as one of five apical ancestors from whom Boonwurrung descent is established.
Variations exist in the origin accounts of Louisa. Her own account was that she was the daughter of a woman from the area around Port Phillip Bay named Mary and an English sealer, John Strugnell. In an interview, she said that her mother was biracial and her grandmother Marjorie (Margery) was a full-blooded Indigenous woman from the area of Melbourne. Louisa may have been born in Victoria, but other accounts indicate it was likely that she was born on Preservation Island in Tasmania. She and her husband John Briggs had nine children. They took part in the Australian gold rushes of the 1850s and between prospecting, lived on the privately owned Eurambeen Station, where they did farm labour and worked as shepherds. When the gold boom economy slowed, they were unable to find work and in 1871, moved to Coranderrk Aboriginal Station, a reserve which the government had created for the resettlement of the Boonwurrung and Woiwurrung people.
At Coranderrk, Louisa worked as a nurse and midwife. She replaced a European staff member as a paid dormitory matron in 1876. Louisa participated in an inquiry that year over mismanagement of the station. After she and her minor children were evicted from Coranderrk in 1878, they moved to the Ebenezer Aboriginal Station, where she was hired as a nurse and laundress. She protested the treatment of Aboriginal people on the government reserves, repeatedly sending letters about the lack of rations and low wages. Her activism resulted in officials' decisions to keep her family separated between the two stations until 1882, but also eventually caused rations and wages at both reserves to be equalised. When she and her children were allowed to return to Coranderrk, Louisa was reinstated as dormitory matron. Because administrators wanted to sell the land for the stations, they began to enforce a policy of assimilation for biracial people. Louisa's son Jack relocated to the Maloga Mission and she joined him there 1885. When Jack's wife died and Louisa took over the care of his children, she sought to return to Coranderrk but her request was denied.
In 1889, Louisa and the family moved to the Cummeragunja Reserve, but she continued petitioning to return to Coranderrk without success. The policy of excluding biracial people from the government stations was extended to Cummeragunja in 1895, and the family was forced to remove to a makeshift camp near Barmah. Although a request for rations was denied to her in 1903, she was at some point allowed to return to Cummeragunja, where she was residing in 1923. She died and was buried there in 1925. She was honoured with a bronze plaque in the Pioneer Women's Memorial Garden in Melbourne and at Site 31 on the Bayside Coastal Indigenous Trail in Victoria. Two theatrical productions have included interpretations of her life.
Conflicting origin accounts Background Anthropological and historical attention to Aboriginal biographies did not emerge until the last-half of the twentieth century, when the anthropologist Diane Barwick began exploring their lives. Barwick acknowledged in 1985, that Australian interest in Aboriginal history was still lacking, despite pioneering work done by William Edward Hanley Stanner in the 1960s. Government policy, rather than the choice of Aboriginal people to define themselves, dictated identity and status. As a result, allegiances were often ignored and an official policy of forced assimilation was followed. Time lapses in publishing reports, scarcity of official records, misinterpretation of oral reports, lack of literacy of Aboriginal people and knowledge of Aboriginal languages, and biases of interviewers, all distorted the surviving records, making it difficult to collect and interpret the sourcing. The custom of omitting names of recently deceased persons in some Indigenous cultures and the renaming of Aboriginals with European names, also compounds identification of subjects. All of these issues led to variations in the history of Louisa Strugnell Briggs.
Variants Laura Barwick, who wrote the entry for the Australian Dictionary of Biography, stated that Louisa Strugnell was born on 14 November 1836 at Preservation Island, Tasmania, Australia, to Mary "Polly" (née Munro) and John Strugnell. In this version of events, John was a sealer who had been transported to Australia from London as a convict in 1818. Mary was the daughter of a Woiwurrung woman, Doog-by-er-um-bor-oke (known as Margery Munro), who had been kidnapped from Port Phillip, Victoria, and married the sealer James Munro. Historian, Marie Hansen Fels disputed that Doog-by-er-um-bor-oke was Margery Munro because the colonial official George Augustus Robinson's 1837 report to the Colonial Secretary indicated that after the 1833 abduction, Doog-by-er-um-bor-oke was living in Melbourne and still mourning her two kidnapped daughters. The woman living with John Munro on Preservation Island did have two daughters, but according to Fels, these could not have been Doog-by-er-um-bor-oke's children because she was separated from her daughters. The account is also disputed by Crawford Pasco's record of a meeting with Louisa at Coranderrk Station in which she told him that she and her mother had been abducted by Munro from Point Nepean and transported in his boat to Preservation Island, where she grew up. Diane Barwick reported that her death certificate showed that Louisa was born in Launceston, Tasmania, noting that information given by relatives in distress may be unreliable.
Other sources state that Louisa Esmai Strugnell was born in Point Nepean in Victoria to Truganini, an Indigenous woman from the Bruny Island people in Tasmania, and John Strugnell. As bounties were offered for capturing Aboriginal people, Truganini hid Louisa with Kulin nation people, before her abduction and exile. The child grew up with the Kulin people and married John Briggs in Victoria, Australia. Newspapers at the time of Louisa's death widely reported she was born around 1818 in Tasmania to "Queen Truganini" and "King John" and moved to Victoria after her marriage, but just two years before they had reported she was born in 1823. Diane Barwick refuted ties to Truganini based upon reports that Truganini was childless according to 1974 research by historians who were involved in a proposed legal action of the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service. She also stated that because of widespread belief that the Tasmanian Aborigines were extinct and Truganini was one of the few named Tasmanians widely known, links to her were common in the media.
In another version of Louisa's origin, Carolyn Briggs, a Boon Wurrung elder and founder of the cultural preservation association, the Boon Wurrung Foundation, tells that her grandfather William Briggs was the son of Louisa, who was born in Melbourne, the traditional home of the Boon Wurrung people. Their family history holds that Louisa, her mother, and her mother's sister and mother were all kidnapped from Port Phillip Bay and transported by sealers to Furneaux Islands in the Bass Strait. While living in Tasmania, Louisa met John Briggs, whom she married before returning in 1858 to her people. John was a Native Tasmanian and the son of chief Manalagenna. Diane Barwick concluded that Louisa was probably the three-week-old child living with John Strugnell in 1837 on Preservation Island and whose death certificate showed she was born in Launceston. Barwick also stated that Louisa and John were participating in gold digs by 1853 or 1854. The Indigenous researchers Maggie Walter and Louise Daniels state that John Briggs was the grandson of Mannalargenna.
Historical analysis Fels analyzed the various versions of Louisa's history and identified discrepancies between published reports and the previous scholarly examinations. For example, one version of Briggs's life said she returned to Melbourne when she was eighteen, but that there were only three houses there. Europeans arrived in 1835 and by 1836, thirteen homes had been built, so her arrival would have had to occur before that time and would be at odds with her reported birth year of 1836. Fels read notes by Diane Barwick of an interview with Louisa from 1924, which showed Louisa's testimony was that she returned to Melbourne after having married, when the city was smaller than the Cummeragunja Reserve, but had more than three houses – not only three houses, and not necessitating her return in 1836.
Looking at abductions, Fels concluded that between March and May 1833, eight women and one boy named Yankee Yankee (or Yaunki Younker) were abducted from Arthurs Seat and taken to the islands in the Bass Strait. Among the women were wives of headmen Betbenjee, Big Benbow, Budgery Tom, and Derrimut, another woman who escaped, and at least two or three young girls. Yankee Yankee identified in 1841 the woman who escaped at Wilsons Promontory as Toutkuningrook. An investigation was launched in 1836 by the authorities, who made a plan to identify and rescue the women. An Aboriginal woman from Tasmania known as Matilda (also Maria, or May-te-pue-min-ner), advised Robinson, that she had helped George Meredith Jr., son of George Meredith the wealthy settler, and sealers aboard his schooner Defiance lure women who were hunting kangaroos, who were then kidnapped and taken to the Furneaux Islands.
Robinson's rescue mission stopped on 9 January 1837, on Preservation Island where he identified a Native woman from Port Phillip who was living with James Monro. She was the mother of an infant born on the island and two daughters, aged fourteen (born around 1823) and sixteen (born around 1821), who had been born in Port Phillip. The older daughter had two biracial children by John Strugnell. She and Strugnell were living on Gun Carriage Island with their children, a two-year-old and three-week-old baby. A fifth woman from Port Phillip, who arrived with Richard Maynard from Clarke's Island, was pregnant with Maynard's child. Robinson failed to recover any of the women either because they were ill or did not want to return. He recorded names for two women involved in the abductions – Doog-by-er-um-bor-oke and Nan-der-gor-ok – and two girls who were kidnapped – Nay-nar-gor-rote and Bo-ro-dang-er-gor-roke. According to Fels, Diane Barwick concluded that Doog-by-er-um-bor-oke was Margery Munro and that Nan-der-gor-ok, wife of the headman Derrimut, was Elizabeth Maynard, but did not indicate how she connected the names. Both Clark and D'Arcy questioned the identification because of the lack of evidence on how the authentication was made. Fels postulated that Doog-by-er-um-bor-oke's daughters might be Maynard's wife and another woman reported to be living with Abysinnia Jack, since they were in Tasmania and Doog-by-er-um-bor-oke was in Melbourne when she spoke to Robinson about her missing daughters.