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Last of the Tasmanians

Aborigines on Tasmania were slaughtered for sport

By David Cocksedge

TASMANIA IS a large island located two hundred miles off Australia's southeast coast. The indigenous Aboriginal inhabitants of the island are no longer there. They probably came to the island by crossing an ancient land bridge that connected Tasmania to the continent of Australia. Historians speculate that the Aborigines of Tasmania came to the island around 35,000 years ago. With the passage of time, the gradual rising of the sea level submerged the land bridge and the Tasmanian Aborigines then experienced more than 10,000 years of solitude and physical isolation from the rest of the world – perhaps the longest period of isolation by a race of people in human history.

These natives were relatively short in stature and had tightly curled hair with skin complexions ranging from black to reddish-brown. They had no written language and thus did not bequeath a history of their time on the island. We do not even know what they called themselves or their land. All modern historians have are small fragments of evidence and the records and documents of European settlers who first sighted the island in 1642. The natives of the island were nomadic hunter-gatherers with an exceptionally simple technology. They made only a few types of simple stone and wooden tools. They lacked agriculture, livestock, pottery and basic projectile weapons such as bows and arrows.

Their isolation ended in December 1642 with the arrival (and intrusion) of the first Europeans. Abel Jansen Tasman, the Dutch navigator after whom the island is named, anchored off the Tasmanian coast, and named the island ‘Van Diemen's Land' after Anthony Van Diemen, the governor-general of the Dutch East India Company. The island continued to be called Van Diemen's Land until 1855.

On 5 March 1772, a French expedition led by Nicholas Marion du Fresne anchored off the island, and a landing party of boatmen rowed ashore to search for fruit and drinking water. A large group of Aborigines, unable to contain their curiosity, gathered to watch the proceedings. They were so primitive and naïve that they didn't even have any fear of the strange white men, and stood by to be shot down by musket fire. Even when the French sailors realized that the locals were not a threat, their officer ordered them to continue shooting. This was too good to pass up: target practice on strange looking ape-like people who were too stupid to even run away!

Following the coast of what was to become New South Wales, a British expeditionary force made landfall on the island on 28 January 1777, and Tasmania was established as a British penal colony (a convict settlement) in 1803. From then on the Stone Age Aborigines of Tasmania were doomed. An estimated total population of 12,000 of them was entirely wiped out by 1876. After 35,000 years of peaceful living, it took just 73 years for western settlers to massacre the entire Aboriginal population of Tasmania. This heartless policy of casual genocide remains a bloody red stain on Australian history.

The convicts placed on Tasmania had been badly traumatized, which made them exceptionally brutal. In addition to soldiers, administrators and missionaries, more than 65,000 men and women convicts were settled on Tasmania. A grossly inefficient penal system allowed many convicts to escape into the Tasmanian hinterland where they were free to exercise the full measure of their blood lust on the Aborigines. According to social historian Clive Turnbull, the activities of these criminals included shooting, clubbing and burning the natives alive. As the Aborigines were considered sub-human, they were never awarded any legal rights or social status. It was considered fun to saddle up and go ‘Abbo hunting', which might involve killing an entire Aborigine family: riding down and shooting the men and boys, then clubbing the women and children to death and finally cutting up the corpses for dog meat. Aborigine children were often burned alive, and the roasted meat tossed to the hunting dogs. Scholars of the day discussed civilization as a process of natural selection with white people at the top of the evolutionary tree and blacks firmly at the bottom. It was decided by some that Aborigines were even below ‘Negroes' in social standing!

To the Europeans in Tasmania the natives were fit only to be exploited in the most sadistic manner. UCLA history professor Jared Diamond wrote, ‘Tactics for hunting down native Tasmanians included riding out on horseback to shoot them, setting steel traps to snare them and putting out poisoned flour where they might find and eat it. Shepherds cut off the penis and testicles of Aboriginal men, to watch their victims run a few yards before collapsing and bleeding to death. This was considered to be very amusing. At a hill named Mount Victory, settlers slaughtered thirty natives and then threw their bodies off a cliff for carrion birds to feast on. In 1833 one detachment of police massacred an extended family of 70 native Tasmanians.'

No settler was ever censured for these crimes, though one European was fined for using the preserved finger of an Aborigine as a tobacco stopper for his pipe because this offended white women who saw it! The ‘civilised' settlers thought nothing of tying natives to trees and using them for target practice. And native women were kidnapped, chained and exploited as sexual slaves.

Historian James Morris graphically noted: ‘We hear of children kidnapped as pets or servants, of a woman chained up like an animal in a shepherd's hut, of native men castrated to keep them off their own women. In one foray about 70 Aborigines were killed: the men shot, the women and children dragged from crevices in the rocks to have their brains dashed out. A man named Henry Carrotts, desiring a native woman, shot and decapitated her husband, hung his head around her neck on a string and drove her back to his shack where he repeatedly raped her'.

‘The Black War of Van Diemen's Land' was the name of the campaign of terror directed against the natives of Tasmania, and between 1803 and 1830 their numbers were reduced from around 12,000 to seventy-five. An article published on 1 December 1826 in the ‘Tasmanian Colonial Times' declared that, ‘We make no pompous display of Philanthropy. The government must remove these black devils – if not, they will be hunted down like the wild beasts that they are and totally destroyed!' From this self-righteous and chilling prose, perhaps the name ‘Tasmanian Devil' was originally coined.

With the declaration of martial law in November 1828, settlers were authorized to kill Aborigines on sight. Although some of the native men offered heroic resistance, their wooden clubs and sharpened sticks were no match against the firepower and savagery of the settlers hunting them down. In time, a bounty was declared and ‘Black Catching' as it was called soon became big business: five pounds was offered for each adult Aborigine and two pounds for each child. The Aborigines also lacked the organization to group together as one tribe against the threat to their continued existence. This was possibly the most one-sided war in history.

For political expediency after the ‘Black War' the status of the Aborigines was reduced to that of a ‘nuisance'. With loud and pious exclamations that it was ‘for the benefit of the blacks themselves' the remaining Aborigines on Tasmania were rounded up and placed in what was effectively a concentration camp.

In 1830 George Augustus Robinson, a Christian missionary, was hired to take the remaining Tasmanian aborigines to Flinders Island. Several died on the journey. By 1843 only fifty of them survived. Jared Diamond recorded that: ‘On Flinders Island Robinson was determined to civilize and ‘Christianise' the survivors. His settlement, at a windy site with little fresh water, was run like a prison. Children were separated from parents to facilitate the work of ‘civilising' them. The regimental daily schedule included Bible reading, communal hymn singing and inspection of beds and dishes for cleanliness and neatness. However the jail diet caused malnutrition, which combined with illness to make the natives die. Few infants survived more than a few weeks.'

The Tasmanian Government cynically reduced expenditure on the settlement in the hope that all of the inhabitants would eventually die. This bureaucratic ploy was effective. By 1869 only the famous Truganini, one other woman and one other man remained alive.

White settlers now began to take a bizarre interest in the native aborigines of Tasmania, much as Victorians did with circus freaks. In 1859 Charles Darwin's book, ‘On the Origin of the Species' popularized the theory of biological (and social) evolution. The Aborigines were pompously portrayed as a race of people ‘doomed to die out according to natural law, like the dodo, and the dinosaur.'

William Lanney, also known as ‘King Billy' was the last full-blood male Tasmanian. He was born in 1835 and grew up on Flinders Island. At the age of 13 Lanney was removed with the remnants of his people to a reservation called Oyster Cove. He grew up to become a sailor and then a whaler and anthropologists came to regard him as a priceless living relic. In January 1860 he was even introduced as a curiosity to Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria. He returned ill from a whaling expedition in February 1868 and on 2 March that year he died alone in his room at the ‘Dog and Partridge' public house in Hobart, the capital of Tasmania.

Poor William Lanney, the subject of ridicule in life, became a desirable object in death. Even as his body lay in the Colonial Hospital at least two experts were determined to steal his bones, claiming to act in the interest of the Royal Society of Tasmania. On 6 March 1868, hundreds gathered at Lanney's funeral in Hobart. Rumors were circulating that the body had been mutilated, and, to satisfy the ‘mourners', the coffin was opened. When everyone had stared at the corpse, the coffin was closed and sealed. Meanwhile it was reported that, on the preceding night, a surgeon had entered the mortuary where Lanney's body was lying and had skinned the head and removed the skull. It was said that the head of a patient who had died in the hospital was similarly skinned, and the skull was placed inside Laney's scalp and the skin drawn over it.

Members of the Royal Society were said to be ‘greatly annoyed' at being thus forestalled and, as body snatching was suspected, it was decided that nothing should be left worth taking. So Lanney's hands and feet were cut off and removed. In keeping with tradition no one was ever charged with violating the body of ‘King Billy'.

On 7 May 1876, Truganini, the last full-blood Aborigine in Tasmania, died at the age of 73. Her mother had been stabbed to death by an English convict. His sister was kidnapped and sold into slavery. Her intended husband was drowned by two western settlers who then raped her. It could be said that Truganini's numerous ordeals typify the tragedy of the Aborigines of Tasmania as a whole.

“Don't let them cut me up”, she pleaded to her doctor as she lay dying. But it was not to be. After burial, Truganini's body was exhumed, and her skeleton, strung on wires and placed upright in a box, became for many years a popular exhibit in the Tasmanian Museum where it remained on display until 1947. Eventually, in 1976, on the centenary year of her death (and despite the objections of officers of the museum), her skeleton was cremated and her ashes scattered at sea. She had finally been afforded some measure of dignity in death.

Today there are a number of mixed-race descendants of the original Aborigines of Tasmania. Perhaps the most prominent is Professor Errol West, now based at the University of Southern Queensland, and an authority on his ancestors. “The Aborigines of Tasmania were unable to withstand the onslaught of civilization.” He says. “Instead of being left alone, they were wiped out. Thankfully, we now live in more enlightened times. But a cruel, racist view of Aborigines still persists among a few white Australians today. Thankfully these people are in the minority, just as the original Tasmanians were.”

This is a harrowing story, but I think it needs to be told. Most Australians today are friendly, outgoing people who love their country and passionately cherish the diplomacy of sport to promote friendship and understanding among nations. I suspect that many of them are unaware of the fate of the Aborigines of Tasmania. You are unlikely to find any reference to it in official Australian history books. If this shameful episode is mentioned at all, it is nothing more than a sanitized footnote.

(Research: rashidi/destruction_aborigines.htm).

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