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The pitiful and horrific fate of the people of Tasmania was due as much to well meaning anthropologists as it was to primitive racism. Their situation was made worse by the whim of Nature which had set them up as ripe targets for careless and ill informed science, and as defenceless victims for any colonialists with a greedy eye on their land.
The real story begins around 10,000 BC, when Tasmania was cut off from the Australian mainland by the flooding of the Bass Strait. For most of the next 11,600 years there was virtually no contact with any other people. The various technological exchanges, which are part of the history and development of most other cultures, were unavailable to the Tasmanians, and in comparison with the rest of Australia, they actually regressed. It seems that the development of fire making never reached the island a fire keeper had to guard an eternal flame to make sure it never went out and many other common human skills either died out, or failed to be passed on there.
The first Europeans to arrive were mostly uneducated hunters and prospectors, who judged the Aborigines simply on their nakedness and lack of technology. As well as hunting the seals, they hunted Tasmanians for sport, regarding them as little more than animals. The atrocities they committed were appalling: men were enslaved, the women raped and killed, a baby’s head was used as a football, flesh was cut from living people and fed to dogs in front of them. The list goes on.
A systematic cull of the whole Aboriginal population of the island was organised, and over a period of about five years, they were virtually annihilated.
One man, a self appointed missionary named George Robinson, set out to save the remaining people, and to try to improve their lot. He began rounding them up to take them to places of safety. Over five years he found a total of 300 odd, the only survivors of an estimated 4000 or more at the time of the European arrival. But, these survivors began dying in dozens from alien diseases. The last 220 Tasmanians were removed to Flinders Island nearby, where they continued to die. In 1847, there were just 44 left, but no children had survived, and of the very last two, the man, who had been named William Lanney, died in 1869. His body was violated for so called scientific purposes, but more for souvenirs: his head was cut off and skinned by a surgeon the day he died, as were his hands and feet, and after his funeral, the grave was robbed for the rest of his body. The last woman left was Truganini, a chief’s daughter, who was brought for show to London to meet Queen Victoria, and who eventually died in Tasmania in 1876.

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