Michael Roberts
In step with David Sansoni’s email questioning Victor Melder has categorically challenged my speculative suggestion that NOVA PERIS may possibly have had a grandparent who was a Sri Lankan pearler/trader/seaman in the north-western reaches of Australia .
VICTOR: “No, Nova Peris is not of Sri Lankan heritage; she is a prominent Indigenous Australian from the Gija, Yawuru, and Muran/Iw
371732 05: Australian gold medalist Peris-Kneebone autographs the “Nova” watch she designed for Swatch Watches June 27, 2000 in Santa Monica, CA. Peris-Kneebone, the first Olympic torch bearer on Australian soil and a member of the Aboriginal Muran Clan was on hand to discuss her part in the 17,000-mile journey the olympic tourch will make. (Photo by Jason Kirk/Online USA)
While I have passed this issue on to a renowned Genealogist on Sri Lankan families, Kyle Joustra in Melbourne, and while acknowledging the corrections, the reference to Nova’s Filipino heritage promotes further speculations from within the depths of an aging mind.
The Filipino. Tahitian and Pacific island connections with the northern coastline areas of Australia were developments during the vast maritime and colonial operations of the two nations in the Iberian Peninsula of Europe, namely, Spain and Portugal, from the 15th/16th century onwards. The male personnel who were parties in these vast enterprises are likely to have indulged in sexual intercourse with local populations.
This was true in medieval Sri Lanka as well. Witness the proliferation of such names as De Silva, De Soysa, De Zoysa, Fernando, Mendis, Medonza, Peiris, etc. So, pursuing the long historical trajectory, I move to the SPECULATION that the presence of “Peris” in this great Australian’s heritage is an outcome of the early Western imperial ‘footprints’ in northern Australia.
HOWEVER: the MEMO from Kyle Joustra is quite revelatory and places my speculations in the larger context in a definitive manner
VICTOR MELDER: “No, Nova Peris is not of Sri Lankan heritage; she is a prominent Indigenous Australian from the Gija, Yawuru, and Muran/Iwatja peoples. While her surname, “Peris,” has European origins, and she has documented Scottish, Irish, and Filipino heritage, her Indigenous identity comes from her family’s connections to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander traditions and cultures in Australia.”
KYLE JOUSTRA: “There is no indication that she is tied to Ceylon/ Sri Lanka directly. However, because she has Aboriginal bloodlines, she will have connection through the group that left South India and moved to Australia thousands of years ago. As my grandmother’s line is the same haplotype that became Australian Aboriginal, my grandmother’s line went and settled in Ceylon and became Singhalese.
To correct another piece of information the Portuguese didn’t just go to Ceylon and force conversion giving Portuguese surnames, this occurred in a great many places and variants of the surname took place.”
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A THOUGHT: I have been smacked on my bum by two experts. Thanks, Guys ……….However let me pose a PICTORIAL ASIDE:
Look at this picture.
370615 03: From right, Nicola Severino, Nova Peris-Kneebone, Evonne Cawley, Ernie Dingo, Lowitja O”Donoghue and Nicky Winmar hold the Olympic torch, June 7, 2000, ”Uluru” prior to the torch arrival at Uluru on June 8, 2000, Northern Territory, Australia. (Photo by Matt Turner/Newsmakers)
IF one replaced the famous faces of Evonne Goolagong, Ernie Dingo and Nova Peris with unknowns of the same complexion and replaced Ayers Rock in the background with Sigiriya, would you not …. as dinky-die Sri Lankans …. lean towards the contention that this cluster was a group of Sri Lankans from the colonial era (as distinct from Vaddas and pukka Demala or pukka Sinhalayo)?
AND …. reflect on this photograph of a cluster of Burghers ….. https://thuppahis.com/2019/02/05/long-live-the-burghers-anecdotes-from-the-past/
Hello, Michael. While the main subject of discussion here is of little interest to me, my attention was caught by a comment posted above by Kyle Joustra:
‘However… she will have connection through the group that left South India and moved to Australia thousands of years ago.’
This statement overreaches quite a distance beyond the actual science on which it appears to be based: to wit, a paper titled ‘Genome-wide data substantiate Holocene gene flow from India to Australia,’ published in the (US) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a highly reputed scientific journal. Please see https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1211927110
The paper deserves close reading by anyone interested in these matters. It is, be warned, somewhat technical.
It says nothing about a single group leaving South India and moving to Australia. That’s pure speculation and in fact the least likely of all possible scenarios. The mechanism of gene transfer might be direct between India and Australia or via other locations in SE Asia (though this is thought relatively less likely), but it is far more likely to have resulted from a series of transfers over time than from one. The idea of a great fleet of pirogues setting sail for Darwin from Kanyakumari is as unlikely as it is amusing. There was plenty of maritime intercourse between South and SE Asia in prehistory – we know this, for example, from the distribution of technologies such as the outrigger canoe and the Polynesian sail – but that is not how it happened. The vector of these technologies (and the genes that went with them) was the so-called ‘Austronesian expansion,’ which emanated from the island of Taiwan within the timeframe of the gene transfers discussed in the paper.
It was common in the twentieth century for anthropologists to speculate that Australian aboriginals and Lankan Veddas were of common were of common origin. Such speculation has been thoroughly exploded by genetic studies.
It has, however, been established that the Veddas of Lanka are more closely related to the indigenous tribes of India than to either the Sinhalese or Tamils; see ‘The genetic identity of the Vedda: A language isolate of South Asia’ in the microbiological journal *Mitochondrion* (see https://tinyurl.com/2wjtm26s).
To sum up; if there was gene transfer between India and Australasia during the temporal window of the Austronesian expansion, it had nothing to do either with modern Indians and their culture, but with a Neolithic predecessor people who left their genes in both places. If there is a Lankan connexion here, it is through the Veddas.
Finally, I should add that physiognomy (physical features), on which Victorian anthropologists implicitly relied, is a poor indication of genetic, ie ‘blood’, relationships. Just because someone looks like someone else doesn’t mean they share a common ancestry, except in the very near term, ie a couple of generations. The of ‘race in the face’ turns out to be a myth.
The people who became the Sinhalese and Tamil inhabitants of Lanka did not arrive in the country until well after the Austronesian migration was over. These latter groups are closely related to modern-day Indians, as the Veddas are not. Neither are modern Lankans even remotely related to the Aboriginals of Australia except through gene transfers in the colonial and post-colonial eras, ie the last 500 years or so.