The remarkable life of Patsy Cameron starts on Flinders Island at Lady Barron. In the 1940s and ‘50s, it was a community of about 50 people  most of whom she was related to through her mother. There was no church-going, no Christian influence, and she had no sense of having a European or part-European identity.

Her people called themselves “the islanders”.

She was one of them.

Not then or later in her life, did she ever doubt who she was or where she came from. She listened to the stories of her grandfather, Silas Mansell. She learned that she was descended from an Englishman Edward Mansell and Poller-elberner, a Tasmanian Aboriginal woman Silas called Black Judy.

Edward Mansell married Poller-elberner in 1846, and, some years later when she died, he rowed her body to a remote Bass Strait island and buried it beneath wild shamrock so body-hunters couldn’t find it. 
There was no cruel white ancestor in Grandfather Silas’s stories.  

Patsy loved place she grew up in, and she loved those she called “the old people”. The ones who had come before her and lived in this place for thousands of years…. She – literally – could not imagine her life without them. 

Patsy didn’t know her father, Joe Greeno, was Italian until she was seven or eight. A group of dark-haired men appeared in Lady Barron and her father burst into another language and started throwing his hands about.

Patsy used to say Joe Greeno spoiled his daughters. He sang Que Sera Sera to them and each time he took his fishing boat to Launceston he would return with jars of boiled lollies from Gourlays and a box of fresh apples from an orchard on the Tamar river.

Patsy said she got her culture from her mother and her ambition from her father. Joe Greeno believed in education; so did Patsy. She went back to university as a mature age student and acquired a masters’ degree. She was highly educated whitefella way, and highly educated blackfella way. 

In Trouwerner, the book we wrote together, I said that entering the bush with Patsy for the first time was like entering a room where you are a stranger and your companion seems to know everyone.

She took me to a place in the Blue Tiers where, on her previous visit, she’d enountered the biggest tiger snake she’d ever seen. She showed me a photograph – it was a monster.

I said, “What do we do if we meet it again?”

She said, “Stay calm, stop, then walk slowly backwards”.

Patsy was calm. She was kind and wise. I loved her happy laugh, and the way she always greeted me warmly on the phone. But she also had what the Romans call gravitas. She could carry life’s heavy loads. Her people had survived genocide. She carried that consciousness.

I once asked how she handled the sadness. She said, “We must commemorate and we must celebrate. We must commemorate what happened. We must celebrate that we survived”. 

Like other great Aboriginal elders I have met – despite having cause to be racist - she had not a shred of racism in her. It is no coincidence, I think, that Patsy was also one of the least insecure people I’ve ever met.

Of the many stories she told me for our book, I’ll relate but one, because it goes to the formation of her beliefs as a writer.

She’s in her twenties, a member of the National Aboriginal Educational Committee. She visits Australia’s Red Centre for the very first time, drives for hours through the desert heat to what was then called the Santa Theresa mission. Arrente country. An old Arrente man is fascinated by her, this Aboriginal woman from an island to the south, and takes her hand. 

Something passes between them.

She described the experience by saying, “Being accepted as a Tasmanian Aboriginal woman meant so much”.

She travels Australia, meets Afghan Aboriginal people, Chinese Aboriginal people, Macassan Aboriginal people. 

Of this experience, she said, “I learnt such a lot about the diversity of Aboriginal Australia, that we could live in both worlds and still be whole…”

All this finds expression in her first book, Grease and Ochre.

We live in an age of identity politics. People wear their identities like suits of armour. A measure of Patsy’s strength was that she didn’t wear any armor at all. Some awful insults came her way but she was undaunted.

She was a visionary. She looked at Tasmania and saw this other place – Trouwerner. She never stopped seeing Trouwerner, not, I believe, for a single moment.

In the words of song-writer Shane Howard, "Patsy made history present."

Her book, Grease and Ochre, is unique. It changes the camera angle on Tasmanian history. To a story that was routinely being told in black and white terms, she added a whole range of greys and other colors too.

I believe Patsy Cameron was one of the great spirits. I have met others in my life, not many, but they are out there. Archie Roach was one, Patrick Dodson is another. They leave the world a larger place. They enhance our sense of life’s possibilities.

Patsy had grace, she had judgment. She had a message for the whole of Australia:

She said, “When the guilt is acknowledged, the guilt stays in the past”.

She could have been a national figure, had destiny presented her with the opportunity. Instead, she worked at a local level. She was a friend, a teacher, a mentor. An elder. How many lives did she touch? Hundreds? Thousands? And while she was doing all this, she was a wife, a mother, a grandmother.

She met her husband Graham at Lady Barron when she was an 18-year-old islander and he was a reserved young English policeman.

Graham described that first meeting to me in these words: “Sometimes things happen in your life that light you up inside”. 

They married in 1967 and while Patsy was touring Australia with the National Aboriginal Educational Committee, Graham got the kids off to school every day, went to sea in his fishing boat, laid his cray pots, and came home to cook dinner for the kids.

Behind every great woman, it seems, is a great man. They were together for six decades and watching them in the hospital during Patsy’s last week I was reminded of Archie Roach’s song about the old devoted couple and their final parting scene in a hospital ward, particularly the lines:

“You and I have had some fun
And our love has touched everyone”.

Patsy’s legacy doesn’t end today. One of the reasons I believe that is because I know her four children - Melissa, Nick, Matt and Jo. 

When I asked them to describe their mother, the words they gave were: 
Beautiful energy, 
warmth, 
cultural authority, 
fearless, 
knowledge sharer, 
tenacious, 
resilient.

They remembered growing up in a home that had an open front door, where “someone was always there or someone was coming”. One man, who came because he didn’t have a bed that night, stayed two years. 

Patsy’s son Matt says, “We always knew we had to share Mum”.

Then there was the joy of being with her on country, collecting shells or mutton birding.

Matt says, “That’s when you saw Mum in her element, when you saw the real connection to Country”. 

Melissa remembers inspecting a midden on the west coast with her, Patsy explaining its different levels, then putting a stone axe in her hand, connecting her. Jo remembers Patsy holding her while she gave birth the first time.

“She was very grounded,” Nick says, “Mum was always prepared to answer your questions, and not with a one-sentence answer…you’d go on a journey”.

It is not for me to describe what her loss means to the Tasmanian Aboriginal community but I can say that one of the first messages I received after Patsy passed was from a Tasmanian Aboriginal woman. 

It simply read. “Aunty Patsy has finished up...Country crying today”.  

I have some idea of how much she gave to non-Indigenous people. I remember seeing in her home a pile of manuscripts people had asked her to read that was literally one metre high. She was rarely paid for such work. She did it because she believed she had a duty to ensure that false or misleading versions of the old people’s stories were corrected.

I also witnessed her relationship with former Tasmanian governor Kate Warner, and the part it played in Kate delivering a speech at Mannalargena Day 2021 which is the closest thing to an apology that the Tasmanian Aboriginal community has ever received from the British government.

Patsy’s son Matt says three words sum up his thoughts about his mother over this past week:

"What a life! We must commemorate and we must celebrate."

Photos by Millie Crouch.