Aboriginal Tasmanians

Aboriginal Tasmanians, who call themselves Palawa or Pakana, are the Aboriginal people of Tasmania, the large island south of mainland Australia. Their ancestors reached the island tens of thousands of years ago and lived there in isolation for some 8,000 years before Europeans arrived. British colonisation from 1803 brought disease, frontier war and removal that came close to destroying them, but Tasmanian Aboriginal communities survived and today number thousands of people.

People walked into Tasmania about 35,000 years ago, when low Ice Age sea levels exposed a land bridge, the Bassian Plain, linking it to the mainland. Sites such as the Jordan River levee near Hobart, Warreen Cave and Kutikina Cave in the south-west show that they lived through the coldest phases of the last glacial period. As the ice melted, rising seas flooded the plain and formed Bass Strait, cutting the island off from other Aboriginal Australians. Around 4,000 years ago scaled fish largely disappeared from the diet in favour of land mammals and shellfish, a change archaeologists still debate.

Before colonisation the island's population is usually estimated at 3,000 to 15,000 people, though some genetic studies suggest it may have been larger. According to the historian Lyndall Ryan, they were grouped into nine nations, each made up of several clans of perhaps 40 to 50 people, which moved through defined territories with the seasons, hunting kangaroos, wallabies and possums, gathering shellfish and plants, and using fire to manage the land. Several languages were spoken, recorded only in fragmentary colonial wordlists. Women gathered ochre and made shell necklaces from iridescent maireener shells, a craft at least 2,600 years old that has never been interrupted. Rock engravings survive at Preminghana on the west coast.

French and British explorers made mostly peaceful contacts in the late eighteenth century, but sealing began in 1798, sealers went on to abduct many Aboriginal women, and a British post was founded at Risdon Cove in 1803. In May 1804 soldiers and settlers there fired on a large hunting party; witnesses gave death tolls ranging from three to about fifty. As pastoral settlement spread in the 1820s, Aboriginal resistance grew into the Black War of 1828 to 1832, part of the wider Australian frontier wars. Martial law was declared, bounties were offered for the capture of Aboriginal people found in the settled districts, and in 1830 colonists mounted the large campaign known as the Black Line. Introduced diseases, including respiratory and venereal infections, also killed many and reduced births.

Between 1830 and 1835 the missionary George Augustus Robinson persuaded most survivors to move to Wybalenna on Flinders Island, promising that they could later return home. Most died there of disease and poor conditions. In 1847 residents petitioned Queen Victoria, the first such petition from an Aboriginal group in Australia, and later that year the 47 survivors were moved to Oyster Cove near Hobart. Colonial writers wrongly declared the people extinct once Truganini had died in 1876 and Fanny Cochrane Smith in 1905. Many scholars, among them Ben Kiernan, Colin Tatz and Lyndall Ryan, describe the destruction as genocide, while others, such as Geoffrey Blainey and Keith Windschuttle, put more weight on disease; the question remains debated.

Tasmanian Aboriginal people survived above all through the families of Aboriginal women and sealers on the Bass Strait islands. Since the 1970s, activists have campaigned for recognition and for the return of ancestral remains taken by museums; Truganini's remains were cremated in 1976, and other remains have since been returned from Britain. In 2016, estimates of how many people have Tasmanian Aboriginal ancestry ranged from about 6,000 to over 23,000, depending on the criteria, and who counts as Aboriginal is itself debated within the community. Palawa kani, a language reconstructed from historical records, is being revived.

Our maps draw the island's territory on every map from 2000 BCE to 1800 except the 300 BCE one, an approximate outline of the land of Tasmania's Aboriginal nations rather than a single polity.