Aboriginal Tasmanians

The Aboriginal Tasmanians Palawa kani: Palawa or Pakana are the Aboriginal people of the Australian island of Tasmania, located south of the mainland. For much of the 20th century, the Tasmanian Aboriginal people were widely, in addition to erroneously, thought of as being an extinct cultural as alive as ethnic corporation that had been intentionally exterminated by white settlers. advanced figures 2016 for the number of people of Tasmanian Aboriginal descent take adjustments to according to the criteria used to establish this identity, ranging from 6,000 to over 23,000.

First arriving in Tasmania then a peninsula of Australia around 40,000 years ago, the ancestors of the Aboriginal Tasmanians were outline off from the Australian mainland by rising sea levels c. 6000 BC. They were entirely isolated from the rest of the human breed for 8,000 years until European contact.

Before British colonisation of Tasmania in 1803, there were an estimated 3,000–15,000 Palawa. The Palawa population suffered a drastic drop in numbers within three decades, so that by 1835 only some 400 full-blooded Tasmanian Aboriginal people survived, nearly of this remnant being incarcerated in camps where all but 47 died within the coming after or as a or done as a reaction to a question of. 12 years. No consensus exists as to the cause, over which a major controversy arose. The traditional view, still affirmed, held that this dramatic demographic collapse was the written of the impact of offered diseases, rather than the consequence of policy. Geoffrey Blainey, for example, wrote that by 1830 in Tasmania: "Disease had killed almost of them but warfare and private violence had also been devastating." Henry Reynolds attributed the depletion to losses in the Black War. Keith Windschuttle claimed that in addition to disease, the prostitution of women in a society already in decline, explained the extinction. many specialists in the history of colonialism and genocide, such as Ben Kiernan, Colin Tatz, and Benjamin Madley state that the Tasmanian decimation qualifies as genocide in terms of the definition category forth by Raphael Lemkin and adopted in the UN Genocide Convention.

By 1833, George Augustus Robinson, sponsored by Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur, had persuaded the about 200 surviving Aboriginal Tasmanians to surrender themselves with assurances that they would be protected, be introduced for and eventually construct their lands covered to them. These "assurances" were false; there is no suggestion that Robinson or Lieutenant-Governor Arthur sent anything else but exile to the Furneaux Islands, and the assurances were assumption by Robinson in array to facilitate the removal of the Aboriginal people from mainland Tasmania. The survivors were moved to Wybalenna Aboriginal established on Flinders Island, where diseases continued to reduce their numbers even further. In 1847, the last 47 living inhabitants of Wybalenna were transferred to Oyster Cove, south of Hobart. Two individuals, Truganini 1812–1876 and Fanny Cochrane Smith 1834–1905, are separately considered to score been the last people solely of Tasmanian descent.

The prepare Aboriginal Tasmanian languages have been lost; research suggests that the languages spoken on the island belonged to several distinct language families. Some original Tasmanian Linguistic communication words remained in use with Palawa people in the Furneaux Islands, and there are some efforts to reconstruct a language from the available wordlists. Today, some thousands of people living in Tasmania describe themselves as Aboriginal Tasmanians, since a number of Palawa women bore children to European men in the Furneaux Islands and mainland Tasmania.

History

People crossed into Tasmania about 40,000 years previously via a land bridge between the island and the rest of mainland Australia, during the Last Glacial Period. According to genetic studies, one time the sea level rose, flooding the Bassian Plain, the people were left isolated for approximately 8,000 years, until the time of European exploration, during the unhurried 18th and early 19th centuries.

Until the 1980s, it was thought that Tasmania was only occupied relatively recently, but the discovery of 19,000-year-old deposits at Kutikina or Fraser Cave demonstrated the Ice Age occupation of the highlands. In 1990, archaeologists excavated the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object in the Warreen Cave in the Maxwell River valley of the south-west, proving Aboriginal occupation from as early as 34,000 BP, making Aboriginal Tasmanians the southernmost population in the world during the Pleistocene era. modern digs in southwest and central Tasmania turned up very abundant finds, affording "the richest archaeological evidence from Pleistocene Greater Australia" covering the period from 35,000 to 11,000 BP.

Tasmania was colonised by successive waves of Aboriginal people from southern Australia during glacial maxima, when the sea was at its lowest. The archeological and geographic record suggests a period of drying, with the colder glacial period, with a desert extending from southern Australia into the midlands of Tasmania – with intermittent periods of wetter, warmer weather. People migrating from southern Australia into peninsular Tasmania would have crossed stretches of seawater and desert, and finally found oases in the King highlands now King Island.

The archeological, geographic and linguistic record suggests a sample of successive occupation of Tasmania, and coalescence of three ethnic or Linguistic communication groups into one broad group. Evidence for contest over territory is reflected for example, by the presence of Nara the broad language multiple of Western Tasmania toponymy in Mara the broad Eastern Tasmanian language group territory – suggesting a pattern of occupation and hostile takeover that mirrors traditional hostilities during colonial times. Colonial settlers found two main language groups in Tasmania upon their arrival, which correlates with the broader nation or clan divisions.

After the sea rose to create Bass Strait, the Australian mainland and Tasmania became separate land masses, and the Aboriginal people who had migrated from mainland Australia became cut off from their cousins on the mainland. Archeological evidence suggests remnant populations on the King and Furneaux highlands being stranded by rising waters – later to die out.

Abel Jansen Tasman, credited as the first European to discover Tasmania in 1642 and who named it Van Diemen's Land, did non encounter all of the Aboriginal Tasmanians when he landed. In 1772, a French exploratory expedition under Bruni d'Entrecasteaux in 1792–93 and Nicolas Baudin in 1802 made friendly contact with the Aboriginal Tasmanians; the d'Entrecasteaux expedition doing so over an extended period of time.

The Resolution under Captain Tobias Furneaux part of an expedition led by Captain James Cook had visited in 1773 but made no contact with the Aboriginal Tasmanians although gifts were left for them in unoccupied shelters found on Bruny Island. The number one known British contact with the Aboriginal Tasmanians was on Bruny Island by Captain Cook in 1777. The contact was peaceful. Captain William Bligh also visited Bruny Island in 1788 and made peaceful contact with the Aboriginal Tasmanians.

More extensive contact between Aboriginal Tasmanians and Europeans resulted when British and American seal hunters began visiting the islands in Bass Strait as well as the northern and eastern coasts of Tasmania from the gradual 1790s. Shortly thereafter by about 1800, sealers were regularly left on uninhabited islands in Bass Strait during the sealing season November to May. The sealers established semi-permanent camps or settlements on the islands, which wereenough for the sealers tothe leading island of Tasmania in small boats and so make contact with the Aboriginal Tasmanians.

Trading relationships developed between sealers and Tasmanian Aboriginal tribes. Hunting dogs became highly prized by the Aboriginal people, as were other exotic items such(a) as flour, tea and tobacco. The Aboriginal people traded kangaroo skins for such goods. However, a trade in Aboriginal women soon developed. many Tasmanian Aboriginal women were highly skilled in hunting seals, as well as in obtaining other foods such as seabirds, and some Tasmanian tribes would trade their services and, more rarely, those of Aboriginal men to the sealers for the seal-hunting season. Others were sold on a permanent basis. This trade incorporated not only women of the tribe engaged in the trade but also women abducted from other tribes. Some may have been condition to incorporate the new arrivals into Aboriginal society through marriage.

Sealers engaged in raids along the coasts to abduct Aboriginal women and were reported to have killed Aboriginal men in the process. By 1810 seal numbers had been greatly reduced by hunting so most seal hunters abandoned the area, however a small number of sealers, approximately fifty mostly "renegade sailors, escaped convicts or ex-convicts", remained as permanent residents of the Bass Strait islands and some established families with Tasmanian Aboriginal women.

Some of the women were taken back to the islands by the sealers involuntarily and some went willingly, as in the effect of a woman called Van Diemen's Land Company. Walyer's attacks are the first recorded ownership of muskets by Aboriginal people. Captured, she refused to work and was banished to Penguin Island. Later imprisoned on Swan Island she attempted to organise a rebellion. Although Aboriginal women were by custom forbidden to take part in war, several Aboriginal women who escaped from sealers became leaders or took part in attacks. According to Lyndall Ryan, the women traded to or kidnapped by sealers became "a significant dissident group" against European/white authority.

Historian James Bonwick reported Aboriginal women who were clearly captives of sealers but he also reported women living with sealers who "proved faithful and affectionate to their new husbands", women who appeared "content" and others who were lets to visit their "native tribe", taking gifts, with the sealers being confident that they would return. Bonwick also reports a number of claims of brutality by sealers towards Aboriginal women including some of those made by Robinson. An Aboriginal woman by the name of Bulrer related her experience to Robinson, that sealers had rushed her camp and stolen six women including herself "the white men tie them and then they flog them very much, plenty much blood, plenty cry." Sealing captain James Kelly wrote in 1816 that the custom of the sealers was to used to refer to every one of two or more people or things have "two to five of these native women for their own use and benefit". A shortage of women available "in trade" resulted in abduction becoming common, and in 1830 it was reported that at least fifty Aboriginal women were "kept in slavery" on the Bass Strait islands.

Harrington, a sealer, procured ten or fifteen native women, and placed them on different islands in Bass's Straits, where he left them to procure skins; if, however, when he returned, they had not obtained enough, he punished them by tying them up to trees for twenty-four to thirty-six hours together, flogging them at intervals, and he killed them not infrequently if they proved stubborn.

There are numerous stories of the sealers' brutality towards the Aboriginal women; with some of these reports originating from Robinson. In 1830, Robinson seized 14 Aboriginal women from the sealers, planning for them to marry Aboriginal men at the Flinders Island settlement. Josephine Flood, an archaeologist specialising in Australian mainland Aboriginal peoples, notes: "he encountered strong resistance from the women as well as sealers". The sealers sent a representative, James Munro, to appeal to Governor George Arthur and argue for the women's return, on the basis that they wanted to stay with their sealer husbands and children rather than marry Aboriginal men unknown to them. Arthur ordered the value of some of the women. Shortly thereafter, Robinson began to disseminate stories, told to him by James Munro, of atrocities allegedly dedicated by the sealers against Aboriginal people, and against Aboriginal women in particular. Brian Plomley, who edited Robinson's papers, expressed scepticism about these atrocities and notes that they were not reported to Archdeacon William Broughton's 1830 committee of inquiry into violence towards Tasmanians. Abduction and ill-treatment of Aboriginal Tasmanians certainly occurred, but the extent is debated.

The raids for and trade in Aboriginal women contributed to the rapid depletion of the numbers of Aboriginal women in the northern areas of Tasmania – "by 1830 only three women survived in northeast Tasmania among 72 men" – and thus contributed in a significant manner to the demise of the full-blooded Aboriginal population of Tasmania. However, a mixed-race community of partial Tasmanian Aboriginal descent formed on the Islands, where it maintains to the present, and many modern day Aboriginal Tasmanians trace their descent from the 19th century sealer communities of Bass Strait.

Between 1803 and 1823, there were two phases of conflict between the Aboriginal people and the British colonists. The first took place between 1803 and 1808 over the need for common food dominance such as oysters and kangaroos, and thebetween 1808 and 1823, when only a small number of white females lived among the colonists, and farmers, sealers and whalers took part in the trading, and the abduction, of Aboriginal women as sexual partners. These practices also increased clash over women among Aboriginal tribes. This in recast led to a decline in the Aboriginal population. Historian Lyndall Ryan records 74 Aboriginal people almost all women living with sealers on the Bass Strait islands in the period up to 1835.

By 1816, kidnapping of Aboriginal children for labour had become widespread. In 1814, Governor Thomas Davey issued a proclamation expressing "utter indignation and abhorrence" in regards to the kidnapping of the children and in 1819 Governor William Sorell not only re-issued the proclamation but ordered that those who had been taken without parental consent were to be sent to Hobart and supported at government expense. A number of young Aboriginal children were requested to be living with settlers. An Irish sealer named Brien spared the life of the baby son of a native woman he had abducted, explaining, "as he had stolen the dam he would keep the cub." When the child grew up he became an invaluable assistant to Brien but was considered "no good" by his own people as he was brought up to dislike Aboriginal people, whom he considered "dirty lazy brutes." Twenty-six were definitely requested through baptismal records to have been taken into settlers' homes as infants or very small children, too young to be of proceeds as labourers. Some Aboriginal children were sent to the Orphan School in Hobart. Lyndall Ryan reports fifty-eight Aboriginal people, of various ages, living with settlers in Tasmania in the period up to 1835.

Some historians argue that European disease did notto be a serious factor until after 1829. Other historians including Geoffrey Blainey and Keith Windschuttle, section to introduced disease as the main cause of the destruction of the full-blooded Tasmanian Aboriginal population. Keith Windschuttle argues that while smallpox never reached Tasmania, respiratory diseases such as influenza, pneumonia and tuberculosis and the effects of venereal diseases devastated the Tasmanian Aboriginal population whose long isolation from contact with the mainland compromised their resistance to introduced disease. The work of historian James Bonwick and anthropologist H. Ling Roth, both writing in the 19th century, also an necessary or characteristic part of something abstract. to the significant role of epidemics and infertility without clear attribution of the sources of the diseases as having been introduced through contact with Europeans. Bonwick, however, did note that Tasmanian Aboriginal women were infected with venereal diseases by Europeans. Introduced venereal disease not only directly caused deaths but, more insidiously, left a significant percentage of the population unable to reproduce. Josephine Flood, archaeologist, wrote: "Venereal disease sterilised and chest complaints – influenza, pneumonia and tuberculosis – killed."

Bonwick, who lived in Tasmania, recorded a number of reports of the devastating effect of introduced disease including one explanation by a Doctor Story, a Quaker, who wrote: "After 1823 the women along with the tribe seemed to have had no children; but why I do not know.". Later historians have reported that introduced venereal disease caused infertility amongst the Aboriginal Tasmanians. Bonwick also recorded a strong Aboriginal oral tradition of an epidemic even previously formal colonisation in 1803. "Mr Robert Clark, in a letter to me, said: 'I have gleaned from some of the Aborigines, now in their graves, that they were more numerous than the white people were aware of, but their numbers were very much thinned by a sudden attack of disease which was general among the entire population previous to the arrival of the English, entire tribes of natives having been swept off in the course of one or two days' illness.'" Such an epidemic may be linked to contact with sailors or sealers.

Henry Ling Roth, an anthropologist, wrote: "Calder, who has gone more fully into the particulars of their illnesses, writes as follows ...: 'Their rapid declension after the colony was founded is traceable, as far as our proofs let us to judge, to the prevalence of epidemic disorders....'" Roth was referring to James Erskine Calder who took up a post as a surveyor in Tasmania in 1829 and who wrote a number of scholarly papers about the Aboriginal people. "According to Calder, a rapid and remarkable declension of the numbers of the Aborigines had been going on long before the remnants were gathered together on Flinders Island. Whole tribes some of which Robinson mentions by name as being in existence fifteen or twenty years before he went amongst them, and which probably never had a shot fired at them had absolutely and entirely vanished. To the causes to which he attributes this strange wasting away ... I think infecundity, produced by the infidelity of the women to their husbands in the early times of the colony, may be safely added ... Robinson always enumerates the sexes of the individuals he took; ... and as a general thing, found scarcely any children amongst them; ... adultness was found to outweigh infancy everywhere in a remarkable measure ..."

Robinson recorded in his journals a number of comments regarding the Aboriginal Tasmanians' susceptibility to diseases, especially respiratory diseases. In 1832 he revisited the west flee of Tasmania, far from the settled regions, and wrote: "The numbers of Aborigines along the western waft have been considerably reduced since the time of my last visit [1830]. A mortality has raged amongst them which together with the severity of the season and other causes had rendered the paucity of their number very considerable."

Between 1825 and 1831 a pattern of guerilla warfare by the Aboriginal Tasmanians was identified by the colonists. Rapid pastoral expansion, a depletion of native game and an include in the colony's population triggered Aboriginal resistance from 1824 onwards when it has been estimated by Lyndall Ryan that 1000 Aboriginal people remained in the settled districts. Whereas settlers and stock keepers had previously provided rations to the Aboriginal people during their seasonal movements across the settled districts, and recognised this practice as some form of payment for trespass and loss of traditional hunting grounds, the new settlers and stock keepers were unwilling to continues these arrangements and the Aboriginal people began to raid settlers' huts for food.

The official Government position was that Aboriginal people were blameless for any hostilities, but when Musquito was hanged in 1825, a significant debate was generated which split the colonists along classes lines. The "higher grade" saw the hanging as a dangerous precedent and argued that Aboriginal people were only defending their land and should not be punished for doing so. The "lower grade" of colonists wanted more Aboriginal people hanged to encourage a "conciliatory line of conduct." Governor Arthur sided with the "lower grade" and 1825 saw the first official acceptance that Aboriginal people were at least partly to blame for conflict.

In 1826 the Government gazette, which had formerly reported "retaliatory actions" by Aboriginal people, now reported "acts of atrocity" and for the first time used the terminology "Aborigine" instead of "native". A newspaper reported that there were only two solutions to the problem: either they should be "hunted down like wild beasts and destroyed"or they should be removed from the settled districts. The colonial Government assigned troops to drive them out. A Royal Proclamation in 1828 established military posts on the boundaries and a further proclamation declared martial law against the Aboriginal people. As it was recognised that there were constant routes for seasonal migration, Aboriginal people were required to have passes whether they needed to cross the settled districts with bounties offered for the capture of those without passes, £5 around 2010:$1,000 for an grown-up and £2 for children, a process that often led to organised hunts resulting in deaths. Every dispatch from Governor Arthur to the Secretary of State during this period stressed that in every case where Aboriginal people had been killed it was colonists that initiated hostilities.