'Good people always crackney in heaven.'

‘Good people always crackney in heaven’ discusses Tasmanian Aboriginal spirituality and the impacts of colonial disruption in lutruwita/Tasmania. Grant Finlay considers how First Nations and colonial languages, as well as mythologies, interacted with each other in the first generations of colonisation and today.

Blurb: ‘We die we go to heaven, good people always crackney in heaven.’

– Druemerterpunner/ Alexander (Big River people)
Wybalenna, Flinders Island, 21 April 1838

‘Crackney’ means to ‘sit down’. Druemerterpunner lived through the first generation of colonial disruption in lutruwita / Tasmania. He expresses the interplay of his language with the colonists’ English and the different mythologies in dialogue between them. Powerful mythologies continue to shape how we speak of the past and imagine our future.