Genocide of Tasmania

[Chaigidel]

I recently read some about the complete extermination of the aboriginal tasmanians-- and that austrailians maintain that no genocide occured

but from what I understand the natives bodies were sold and traded like animal corpses, and that it was a complete extermination (in tasmania)

provide relevant links; I know its hotly disputed about the facts of the "genocide"
but I wouldnt put something like this past my fellow man, all our deeds being known fairly.

[boofhead]

Good thread Chaigidel.

One of the only recent recorded examples of a "successful" or "complete" genocide, ever, and by that I mean the complete destruction of a race.

Trugannini was the last, poor woman. She knew she was the last, and she was too old to breed.

Very sad, and very shameful.

[Chaigidel]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_War

it was apparently called the black war.

[boofhead]

so these people were distinct from austrailian aboriginals?

No, they were/are "Australian", as Tassie is a part of Australia. AFAIK they had their own distinct genetic history. They still live in the bloodlines of others, but the story of Truganini is the story of the last full-blood of her people. It is a very sad thing.

Genocide has historically involved more than just killing everyone. Having sex with the women (against their will) and mixing bloodlines has always featured prominently.

[Chaigidel]

exactly; whats so strange is that I have never heard a word about this, not one peep.

unlike the armenian, and jewish genocides

I suppose its all about volume.

[Gaidin]

exactly; whats so strange is that I have never heard a word about this, not one peep.

unlike the armenian, and jewish genocides

I suppose its all about volume.

Didn't you get the memo? Genocide is all about the statistic, not the tragedy.

[Richard]

Probably because there were far fewer Tasmanians (and indeed aborigines in general). They numbered in the tens-of-thousands, not the millions. Though unlike Jews and Armenians, their annihilation was total. At least when talking about full-blooded ones anyway. This is important in the case of Tasmania and Australia, as these people had been isolated for 50,000 years.

[Burnum]

I recently read some about the complete extermination of the aboriginal Tasmanians

Yes, a whole Unique culture wiped out.

and that Australians maintain that no genocide occurred

They're same people who Stolen generation didn't happen or it wasn't an attempt to wipe out Aboriginal population.

Trugannini was the last, poor woman. She knew she was the last, and she was too old to breed.

Then, they had the nerve to steal her corpse and parade it around Britain.

No, they were/are "Australian", as Tassie is a part of Australia. AFAIK they had their own distinct genetic history

They had there own culture, which was only distantly connected to mainland Australia, Language ect.

I suppose its all about volume.

It was more about people thinking aboriginals were animals at the time.

The genocide was done as cruelly as possible.

"Tactics for hunting down Tasmanians included riding out on horseback to shoot them, setting out steel traps to catch them, and putting out poison flour where they might find and eat it. Shepherds cut off the penis and testicles of aboriginal men, to watch the men run a few yards before dying. At a hill christened Mount Victory, settlers slaughtered 30 Tasmanians and threw their bodies over a cliff. One party of police killed 70 Tasmanians and dashed out the children's brains."

"We make no pompous display of Philanthropy. The Government must remove the natives--if not, they will be hunted down like wild beasts and destroyed!"

"On Flinders Island Robinson (a Christian missionary) was determined to civilize and Christianize the survivors. His settlement--at a windy site with little fresh water--was run like a jail. Children were separated from parents to facilitate the work of civilizing them. The regimental daily schedule included Bible reading, hymn singing, and inspection of beds and dishes for cleanness 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 government reduced expenditures in the hope that the native would die out. By 1869 only Truganini, one other woman, and one man remained alive."

[boofhead]

and that Australians maintain that no genocide occurred

Very wrong. Australians admit it because there is no party to compensate *ahem*cough*

Truganini was taught to me as a boy. And as a shameful thing to have occured. And in a white school. About 30 years ago.

We all know.

[Burnum]

Very wrong. Australians admit it because there is no party to compensate *ahem*cough*

Truganini was taught to me as a boy. And as a shameful thing to have occured. And in a white school. About 30 years ago.

We all know.

Perhaps you don't know, an annoying minority that disagree with you. Most of them think the stolen generation was a good thing.

[boofhead]

Perhaps you don't know, an annoying minority that disagree with you. Most of them think the stolen generation was a good thing.

Yeah, just like......is a good thing. You've gotta know what you're talking about first.

[Tankbuster]

Very wrong. Australians admit it because there is no party to compensate *ahem*cough*

Truganini was taught to me as a boy. And as a shameful thing to have occured. And in a white school. About 30 years ago.

We all know.

Yeah I heard that the British gave money to everyone who killed a Tasmanian, but when they were almost completely annihilated, the British thought that actually, they were a nice little thing to put in the zoo. So they caught the last FIVE.
Of course they were too traumatized, and they weren't really motivated to make children anymore.

Anyway, whoever said that it was the statistics that mattered, that's wrong. During the Belgian colonisation of Congo, more than 10 million Congolese were killled. Probably more than the Holocaust. Yet, in my history books, there is NOTHING about it. And in the "Belgium in Congo" museum in my country, there is NOTHING about it either.

[Exarch]

Yeah I heard that the British gave money to everyone who killed a Tasmanian, but when they were almost completely annihilated, the British thought that actually, they were a nice little thing to put in the zoo. So they caught the last FIVE.
Of course they were too traumatized, and they weren't really motivated to make children anymore.

Anyway, whoever said that it was the statistics that mattered, that's wrong. During the Belgian colonisation of Congo, more than 10 million Congolese were killled. Probably more than the Holocaust. Yet, in my history books, there is NOTHING about it. And in the "Belgium in Congo" museum in my country, there is NOTHING about it either.

ur righbt about that. the armenians were massactred, and stalin and mao commited a sort of genocide, yet we hear heaps about the jews being gassed, so much so, that the genocide of the jews dwarfs everything else, despite the fact that more ppl were killed in more horrifying ways (nanjing) in more quantities (as u said, the congo).

why this preoccupation with how bad the jews have had it?

[ThiudareiksGunthigg]

Yeah I heard that the British gave money to everyone who killed a Tasmanian, but when they were almost completely annihilated, the British thought that actually, they were a nice little thing to put in the zoo. So they caught the last FIVE.
Of course they were too traumatized, and they weren't really motivated to make children anymore.

Umm, this is not how things were at all. Firstly there was no Government policy regarding the extermination of the Aborigines at any time. The original intention of the Governors of Van Diemen’s Land (as Tasmania was known then) was to live peacefully with “the natives”, though this proved increasingly difficult as numbers of settlers increased and the area of settlement encroached on Aboriginal land.

The policy then became to “pacify” the Aborigines in “the settled areas of the colony”. This assumed that Aborigines could simply move out of “the settled areas” (largely the Derwent and Tamar valleys and parts of the Midlands) and back into “the bush”. This thinking didn’t take into account the fact that other tribes lived in those unsettled areas and those pushed out couldn’t just decide to live in another tribe’s territory. This was one of the reasons the tribes in the settled areas had to fight back.

And they fought back very effectively. The Tasmania Aborigines were a warrior people and made very skillful guerilla fighters. They knew the country intimately, could live off the land and seemed, to the whites, to be able to appear and disappear almost like ghosts. They quickly learned that muskets were inaccurate and slow to load and a number of warriors with spears usually had an advantage over even several whites with guns. The press in Hobart-Town soon became filled with lurid accounts of “depredations and outrages” as war parties fought back by attacking outlying settlers’ cottages and isolated shepherds’ huts.

Eventually this sequence of killings and revenge attacks by both sides escalated into the “Black War” of the 1830s, which saw the whole colony under martial law for several years. Soldiers and settlers quickly found that Aboriginal raiding parties vanished into the bush long before they could be pursued or tracked. Their frustration at this hit-and-run war by enemies they rarely even saw led to reprisal attacks on any Aboriginal bands they did come across. This in turn led to revenge attacks by the clans of the victims of white vengeance, which led to more massacres of Aborigines when they could be found.

The most farcical example of how difficult the Government found this conflict was the notorious “Black Line” of 1830. This was after five years of fighting and was a huge effort to clear the remaining “hostiles” out of the “settled areas” once and for all. After months of preparation and planning hundreds of troops, settlers and convicts – a sizable percentage of the entire white male population of the colony – deployed in a continuous line across a front spanning forty kilometers and began working their way south and east. The plan was for this vast line of 5000 armed men to drive the “hostiles” before them and finally concentrate and contain them on the narrowest point of the Tasman Peninsula where they would be forced to surrender, be disarmed and then removed at gunpoint to some point far from white settlement.

It was a massive and highly expensive operation that required the supply and support of hundreds of men in rough country for weeks on end. And it was a total failure. In the end they managed to capture one sick old man and one young boy.

It was the lack of progress against “the hostiles” and the general ineffectiveness of British military tactics against people who knew the terrain better and could use it skillfully that led to the clumsier tactic of simply offering bounties for the capture or death of any armed Aborigine (that effectively meant any male Aborigine) found in “the settled areas” of the colony. Exactly how many Aborigines were killed as a result of these bounties and other actions is hard to judge, with estimates ranging from as low as 100 to higher estimates of 200-300. The total native population of the island was only about 4-6,000 when whites arrived and had already been ravaged by disease which killed most of them before they’d even seen a white, let along a white with a gun. By the time of the “Black Line” in 1830 it was estimated that there were only 500 or so Aborigines left.

But if the British tactics were ineffective against the Aborigines, it was soon becoming clear that the Aboriginal resistance campaign was also unsustainable. Attrition from disease and the conflict was making tribal structures break down. More importantly, the fighters couldn’t take the time to hunt or cook food in the traditional manner (cooking fires attracted attention), so they became increasingly dependent on white man’s food that they stole during raids.

It used to be thought that the Aborigines realised that they couldn’t win and so effectively surrendered to George Augustus’ Robinson’s “Friendly Mission”, which had been sent out to convince the Aborigines to give up their lands and be resettled on Flinders Island. Henry Reynolds in his book The Fate of a Free People makes a strong case, however, that it wasn’t a surrender – it was, as far as the fighters were concerned, a negotiated settlement under a treaty. They later considered that this treaty had been violated by the whites and even wrote a letter to the King protesting their condition.

Whatever the reason, the vast majority of the surviving Aborigines – about 200 of them, not 5 – were resettled on Flinders Island. Instead of being allowed to live their under their own terms, as they had been promised, they were forced to live in European-style houses, learn to farm and stop using their language or performing their traditional dances and songs. Not surprisingly, a combination of disease and despair meant they died like flies in these conditions. In the end there were no long enough of them left to maintain the mission on Flinders Island, it was closed down and the remnant moved back to mainland Tasmania.

By this stage it was clear that “full-blood” Tasmanian Aborigines would not survive another generation. That’s when the ghoulish practice of harvesting their bodies for scientific specimens really took off. The last male full-blood was William Lanney who died in 1860. Within hours of his death his skull had been surreptitiously removed and sold to the Royal Society. Truganini was the last full-blood Tasmanian, who died in 1876. Her skeleton was kept on display in the Museum of Tasmania in Hobart until 1949 and was finally cremated in 1976, with her ashes ceremonially scattered in the channel near her tribal homelands on Bruny Island. The last known speaker of any of the Tasmanian Aboriginal languages was Fanny Cochrane-Smith, who made some recordings of songs from her childhood before she died in 1905.

Hundreds of people today can trace their ancestry back to Tasmanian Aboriginal forebears – most of them the descendants of sealers who took Tasmanian Aboriginal wives. The remains of their 40,000 years of living in Tasmania can still be see today. Huge midden heaps of shells can be seen on beaches, especially on the western coast of Tasmania, marking the places where bands camped in summer and feasted on abalone. The headland near my childhood home in Devonport is dotted with rock carvings of emus (also now extinct in Tasmania) and shellfish and abstract designs. I also used to live next door to the Dog and Partridge Hotel in Hobart, which is where William Lanney died.

[Burnum]

Yeah, just like......is a good thing. You've gotta know what you're talking about first.

I can give you a list of people that are perfectly intelligent people who, in some Right wing Academic groups, say that Full blooded Aboriginals abandoned there Half-caste children in huge numbers because of some Anti-white sentiment and the government had too support them or that the Massacres didn't happen because they were Christian and it was unchristian like.

[Chaigidel]

I just saw alot of articles by some guy named whitehurst or some such; who maintains the natives were wiped out unintentionally by disease :O

this really is horrible

[jankren]

So is Tazmanian Devil based on these people?

[Ragabash]

So is Tazmanian Devil based on these people?

The animal? If that was your question; simple no will do for an answer. Or what did you mean?

[Beiss]

I think the tazmanian devil is based on the tazmanian devil... so no.

[Beiss]

"North American Aboriginals"?