A 2022/23 revision of one of the South Coast’s most disreputable historical characters
Introduction, Contemporary Assessment and Historiography
Above: The identity of ‘John William ‘Black Jack’ Anderson and the story of his arrival along Western Australia’s South Coast is slowly being pieced together. Long a figure of intrigue and mystery, Anderson was perhaps the most hostile and cruel of Albany’s fringe-dwelling sealer community. Post military era, he and his contemporaries came to use Albany town as its commercial base once the economy took hold. This image, popularly used to depict Anderson over the years, has been modified and adapted to an emerging narrative he was not Negro, but of South Asian origin. Image: Colour-modified graphic depiction of an Indian origin ‘Black Jack’ Anderson commissioned specifically for Robertson’s Sealed Souls. Inspired by an alternative image created by Norman Aisbett of The West Australian Magazine, published in a 1974 article titled “The Once And Only Pirate” by Alex Harris. Source: Sealed Souls – Self Published 2022 – Page 91.
Introduction
The South Coast’s history conscious have always been aware of their relationship with the dissolute sealing gangs which ranged Australia’s southern littoral from around 1800 to around 1840. The practise of hunting fur seals spread from New Zealand and the Bass Strait all the way to King George Sound, indeed in isolation as far as the Swan River, years before the administrative wheels of the western-most colony were set in motion. In this post, in the wake of another important book launch, we examine how our interest in this subject has evolved over the last 180 years, what’s missing, and where we are now in terms of understanding who Black Jack Anderson was and how he fits in to the reality of actual events.
Stories of the sealers who exploited our section of coast are as awful as those belonging to other sections, most notably Northern Tasmania; Morninton Peninsula and Portland Bay in Victoria; Cape Jervis near Adelaide, and Port Lincoln, on the opposite side of South Australia’s Spencer Gulf. Which is to say, the prevelance and menace of these gangs and their alpha leaders impacted widely and continuously, providing good reason why the stories survived through generations as lore, why academics and artists alike continue to be seduced by them, and why I am once again setting my fingers to the keyboard with the same subject in mind.