First Nations People

Evidence indicates the presence of First Nations people in Tasmania about 42,000 years ago. Rising sea levels cut Tasmania off from mainland Australia about 10,000 years ago.  By the early 1800s, the First Nations people in Tasmania had nine major nations or ethnic groups. At the time, the indigenous population was estimated at between 3,000 and 10,000.

They lived at one with their environment. They engaged in fire-stick farming, hunted game including kangaroo and wallabies, caught seals, mutton-birds, shellfish and fish and lived as nine separate “nations” on the island, which they knew as “Trouwunna”.

You can read more on this here. It’s a terrible story.

European arrival

The first reported sighting of Tasmania by a European was on 24 November 1642 by Dutch explorer Abel Tasman, who landed at today’s Blackman Bay. More than a century later, in 1772, a French expedition led by Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne landed at (nearby but different) Blackmans Bay.

The following year Tobias Furneaux became the first Englishman to land in Tasmania when he arrived at Adventure Bay, which he named after his ship. Captain James Cook also landed at Adventure Bay in 1777. Matthew Flinders and George Bass sailed through Bass Strait in 1798–99, determining for the first time that Tasmania was an island.

Sealers and whalers based themselves on Tasmania’s islands from 1798, and in August 1803 NSW Governor Philip King sent Lieutenant John Bowen to establish a small military outpost on the eastern shore of the Derwent River in order to forestall any claims to the island by the French, who had been exploring the southern Australian coastline. Several months later a second settlement was established. Thus began the English colonisation of the Island

Several other convict-based settlements were progressively set up, including the particularly harsh penal colonies at Port Arthur in the southeast and Macquarie Harbour on the West Coast. Tasmania was eventually sent 75,000 convicts—four out of every ten people transported to Australia. By 1819 the First Nations and English population reached parity with about 5,000 of each. However, among the colonists, men outnumbered women four to one.

Free settlers began arriving in large numbers from 1820, lured by the promise of land grants and free convict labour. Settlement in the island’s northwest corner was monopolised by the Van Diemen’s Land Company, which sent its first surveyors to the district in 1826. By 1830 one-third of the English population lived in Van Diemen’s Land and the island accounted for about half of all land under cultivation and exports

Decimation of First Nation people

Tensions between Tasmania’s First Nations people and English settlers escalated, partly driven by increasing competition for kangaroo and other game. Explorer John Oxley in 1810 noted the “many atrocious cruelties” inflicted on First Nations people by convict bushrangers in the north, which in turn led to reprisal attacks on solitary English hunters.

Hostilities increased further with the arrival of 600 colonists from Norfolk Island between 1807 and 1813. They established farms along the River Derwent and east and west of Launceston, occupying 10% of Van Diemen’s Land.

By 1824 the colonial population had swelled to 12,600, while the island’s sheep population had reached 200,000. The rapid colonisation transformed traditional hunting grounds into farms with grazing livestock as well as fences, hedges and stone walls, while police and military patrols were increased to control the convict farm labourers.

Violence spiralled rapidly from the mid-1820s in what became known as the “Black War”. While First Nation inhabitants were driven to desperation by dwindling food supplies as well as anger at the prevalence of abductions of women and girls, English settlers carried out attacks as a means of exacting revenge and suppressing the native threat.

Van Diemen’s Land had an enormous gender imbalance, with male colonists outnumbering females six to one in 1822—and 16 to one among the convict population. Historians have suggested the “voracious appetite” for native women was the most important trigger for the explosion of violence from the late 1820s.

From 1825 to 1828 the number of Aboriginal attacks more than doubled each year, raising panic among the English settlers. Over the summer of 1826–7 clans from the Big River, Oyster Bay and North Midlands nations speared stock-keepers on farms and made it clear that they wanted the settlers and their sheep and cattle to move from their traditional hunting grounds. Settlers responded vigorously, resulting in many mass-killings.

In November 1826 Governor George Arthur issued a government notice declaring that colonists were free to kill Aborigines when they attacked settlers or their property, and in the following eight months more than 200 First Nations people were killed in the Settled Districts in reprisal for the deaths of 15 colonists.

After another eight months the death toll had risen to 43 colonists and probably 350 First Nations people. Almost 300 English troops were sent into the Settled Districts, and in November 1828 Arthur declared martial law, giving soldiers the right to shoot on sight any First Nations people in the Settled Districts. Martial law would remain in force for more than three years, the longest period of martial law in Australian history.

In November 1830 Governor Arthur organised the so-called “Black Line”, ordering every able-bodied male colonist to assemble at one of seven designated places in the Settled Districts to join a massive drive to sweep First Nations people out of the region and on to the Tasman Peninsula. The campaign failed and was abandoned seven weeks later, but by then Tasmania’s First Nations population had fallen to about 300.

By 1833, approximately 200 surviving First Nation Tasmanians had been persuaded to surrender themselves with assurances that they would be protected, provided for and eventually have their lands returned to them. These “assurances” were false.

The survivors were moved to Wybalenna Aboriginal Establishment on Flinders Island, where diseases continued to reduce their numbers. 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 considered to have been the last people solely of Tasmanian descent.

  

The complete First Nation peoples’ Tasmanian languages have been lost; some original 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 First Nation Tasmanians since a number of Parlevar women bore children to English men in the Furneaux Islands and mainland Tasmania.

Geography

Note that a map of Tasmania can be seen here.

Tasmania lies about 240 km south of Victoria, from which it is separated by the relatively shallow Bass Strait. Structurally, Tasmania constitutes a southern extension of the Great Dividing Range.

The state comprises the main island of Tasmania; Bruny Island, nestling close to the southeastern coast of the main island; King and Flinders islands in Bass Strait; numerous smaller islands off the coast of the main island; and subantarctic Macquarie Island, about 1,450 km to the southeast. The main island is roughly heart-shaped, with a maximum length and width of about 320 km, and its latitude and climate are broadly comparable to those of northwestern Spain. With an area slightly larger than that of Sri Lanka, Tasmania is the smallest of Australia’s states. Hobart is its capital.

The state owes its name to the Dutch navigator-explorer Abel Janszoon Tasman, who in 1642 became the first European to discover the island. Until 1856, however, the island was known as Van Diemen’s Land, named for Anthony van Diemen, the governor of the Dutch East Indies who had sent Tasman on his voyage of exploration.

Tasmania contains some of the most spectacular mountain, lake, and coastal scenery in Australia, and much of its land is protected in national parks and reserves. The state also produces a major portion of Australia’s hydroelectric power and possesses a great diversity of natural resources. Despite this, Tasmania has remained among the poorest of Australia’s states, with a steadily decreasing share of the country’s population. Although insularity renders much of its political, economic, and social life distinctive, proximity to Melbourne and air travel make Tasmania less isolated and more cosmopolitan than is often assumed.

Tasmania has an area of 68,401 square km and in 2016 the population was 509,965.