On the other side of the world, in Derbyshire, England, archives manager Sarah Chubb was walking through the kilometres of shelves, stuffed with relics and records, when she discovered something unusual.
“So [I’m] wandering down in the stores and I found this box,” she said.
Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this article contains images and names of people who have died.
Inside, she found a small doll with black skin and a pin cushion, both from another era.
“The doll’s quite small, black, has a little dress. It’s quite tattered. There’s an arm coming a bit loose,” Sarah said.
“It was definitely well-loved. It was a doll that belonged to a child.”
Sarah was puzzled.
But what really got her attention was the label on the pin cushion which held a clue. It said: “Pincushion, made by Methinna a Tasmanian girl.”
With that lead, in 2018 she reached out to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, who in turn reached out to pakana elder Theresa Sainty from the Tasmanian Aboriginal community.
“We received an email from the UK that had attached to it a couple of images and the email was asking, ‘Is this important?'” Theresa told ABC iview’s Stuff The British Stole.
“We thought, ‘Hell yeah’. I think there was some falling off office chairs.
“We were floored … to find out that these items existed and so, the mystery began to unfold right at that moment.”
The items shed more light on the life of a young Aboriginal girl called Mithina, whose story is nearly 200 years old.
“This story is a tragic, tragic story,” Theresa said.
Who is Mithina?
While the name meant nothing to Sarah Chubb, for Theresa and her colleagues Mithina — also spelled Methinna, Methina or Mathinna — was no stranger.
“We are all familiar here in lutruwita [Tasmania] with the portrait of the little girl, a little black girl in a red dress,” she said.
Mithina was an Aboriginal girl born at the Aboriginal settlement of Wybalenna on Flinders Island in 1835.
It was there that over 200 Tasmanian Aboriginal people were incarcerated and left to die.
“Wybalenna was sort of a forced settlement, a mission, a place of incarceration for our people,” palawa and walpiri woman and history expert Nunami Sculthorpe-Green said.
“They were taken there, many taken to die.”
In 1837, Sir John Franklin is made the Lieutenant Governorship of Tasmania, and he, his wife Lady Jane and their daughter Eleanor moved to Hobart.
Their presence in Tasmania changed Mithina’s life forever.
“Through Lady Jane’s diaries, we know that it was a pet project of a lot of higher-up people in society, but especially Lady Jane, to show that they could civilise our people through assimilating and raising them as children,” Sculthorpe-Green said.
“And so Mithina is taken from Wybalenna, separated from her people, and brought to live at Government House.”
She was six.
“Lady Jane wanted a name that sounded Aboriginal but didn’t learn her real name so they called her Mithina,” Sculthorpe-Green added.
The Franklins’ own daughter, Eleanor, talks about Mithina in her diary, describing her as “affectionate and intelligent”.
She also quotes Mithina, talking about her life — including her doll — which, it appeared, the Franklins had made for her.
‘She wasn’t useful’
Only two years after removing her from her family and cutting her connection to her culture and language, the Franklins were recalled back to England, but left Mithina behind.
“I think they never intended to take her because it was a project about civilising, assimilating her,” Sculthorpe-Green said.
“And they weren’t able to, so they left her behind.
“She wasn’t useful or fun to them anymore.”
In the time she was with the Franklins, Mithina’s parents both died.
“[The Franklins] dumped her at the Queen’s Orphan school, and they went back to their homelands,” Theresa Sainty said.
“But they took her doll, and her little pin cushion that she made, and take it back to England.
“I wonder why would they do that? Why would you take a little girl’s doll?”
Mithina’s life after the Franklins was a difficult one.
After leaving the orphanage she was sent to a disused convict station in the south of Tasmania, now known as putalina.
While the final details of her life are hard to pin down, it was reported that she drowned in a puddle in 1852 when she was 17.
Doll loaned back
Despite her short life, Mithina’s story has lived on for nearly 200 years.
Archives manager Sarah Chubb said it was clear to her and her team that the doll belonged back in Tasmania.
“When we found the doll … we could tell that she was really important,” she said.
“That was the point where we thought, ‘Well, this is kind of not really our history, and this is of very great significance to people in Tasmania, and it’s something that we should be sharing with people over there.'”
In 2022 the doll was sent back to Tasmania on loan from the descendants of the Franklins.
For Theresa Sainty and the other staff involved at both the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and in the the Aboriginal community, the story isn’t over yet.
“It was emotional to first see Mithina’s doll back home. We did it, we got it here,” Theresa said.
“Then it hit us that, ‘Oh, but they’re not here for good’.
“They’re not home for good. The legislation says they have to go back.”
“We want these things and anything else that is out there in institutions or in peoples estates to be returned to the rightful people for good, not just on holiday, on loan — who borrows their own stuff?”
The ABC asked the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery about the state of the loan but did not receive a reply.
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