In 1997 a government inquiry found that Australia's forcible removals of Aboriginal children in previous decades “could properly be labeled ‘genocidal.’”Footnote 1 Nevertheless Prime Minister John Howard steadfastly refused to apologize or offer reparations on behalf of his government. As a result, at least 150,000 people marched across Sydney Harbor Bridge on 28 May 2000.Footnote 2 Later that year, Australian writer Keith Windschuttle's essay “The Myths of Frontier Massacres in Australian History” refocused the debate on the colonial period, during which Australia's Aboriginal population declined from 750,000 or more to fewer than 50,000.Footnote 3 The British colonial era, 1788–1901, thus became the focus of Australia's “History Wars.”Footnote 4 In 2002, Windschuttle self-published The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Van Diemen's Land, 1803–1847. His attempt to refute the idea that genocide took place on the island now known as Tasmania made the question of genocide there a central and strategic Australian “History Wars” battlefield.Footnote 5 Two issues dominate the debate: is Australia “a nation founded on genocide,” and did agents or citizens of the British Empire attempt to exterminate their Aboriginal Tasmanian subjects?Footnote 6
When Britons arrived in Tasmania in 1803, they found 4,000–15,000 Aborigines.Footnote 7 By 1835, fewer than 400 “full-descent” Aboriginal Tasmanians remained. British authorities incarcerated almost all of these survivors in camps, where all but forty-seven perished by 1847.Footnote 8 After 1876, only mixed-race survivors remained in Tasmania.Footnote 9 Despite over 170 years of debate over who or what was responsible for this near-extinction, no consensus exists on its origins, process, or whether or not it was genocide. The debate continued in 2007 with Theodore Dalrymple's “Why Intellectuals Like Genocide.”Footnote 10 This article summarizes the Tasmanian genocide debate before explaining the origins and narrating the four phases of Aboriginal Tasmanian demographic decline. It then assesses the culpability of British settlers and officials, while examining whether or not this catastrophe constituted genocide.
In the early nineteenth-century British Empire, Tasmania was probably the most terrifying place a white person could live. It ranks among the most violent of all penal colonies in history. Isolation, official neglect, forced labor, incarceration, torture, and executions traumatized convicts and free colonists and hardened both to violence. Simultaneously, officials colonized Tasmania at the expense of Aboriginal land ownership, food supplies, and lives. This article will demonstrate that Britain's Tasmanian colonial project, in combination with a culture of terror and official failure to protect Aborigines, opened the door to catastrophe.
Three nineteenth-century Britons first argued that settlers and their government were to blame for Aboriginal Tasmanians’ near-annihilation. Henry Melville reached Tasmania in 1828. As editor of the local Colonial Times newspaper from 1830 to 1839, he criticized whites in general and Tasmanian government decision makers in particular for their treatment of Aboriginal Tasmanians. In an opinionated 1836 history of Tasmania, he claimed that Aboriginal Tasmanians “had been treated worse than were any of the American tribes by the Spanish” and that “few events have tarnished the history of any Colony more than in the manner in which the civilized portions of society conducted themselves towards [Aborigines]”; furthermore, the authorities exhibited “disgraceful” conduct.Footnote 11 In 1842, Oxford political economist Herman Merivale asserted, “The nation of Van Diemen's Land [was] reduced to a few families by long maltreatment … settlers … shot them down in the woods, or laid poisoned food within their reach.” He continued, “The history of the European settlements in … Australia, presents … a wide and sweeping destruction of native races by the uncontrolled violence of individuals and colonial authorities, followed by tardy attempts on the part of governments to repair the acknowledged crime.”Footnote 12 In 1838 the Congregationalist minister John West settled in Tasmania.Footnote 13 In 1852, he described numerous violent crimes against Aborigines and “men distinguished for the malicious vigour with which they tracked and murdered the native people.”Footnote 14 Later authors further detailed and reinterpreted the Aboriginal near-extinction.Footnote 15 Then, in the 1890s, Mark Twain and H. G. Wells popularized the idea of Aboriginal Tasmanians’ “extermination.”Footnote 16
In the mid-twentieth century, Nazi mass murder refocused the discussion. In 1944, Polish jurist Raphaël Lemkin minted a new word to describe an ancient crime. He combined the Greek genos, or “race,” with the Latin -cide, or “killing,” to define genocide as any attempt to physically or culturally annihilate an ethnic, religious, or political group.Footnote 17 Four years later, the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. According to the convention, “Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such, (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” The convention also outlawed, as a separate crime, “complicity in genocide,” which involves the roles not of genocide perpetrators but of accomplices.Footnote 18
Using this new concept and the 1948 international legal treaty, writers reexamined Tasmania's colonization. In his 1948 Black War, Australian journalist Clive Turnbull compared the “extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines” to the Holocaust, while in his unfinished History of Genocide Lemkin himself devoted a chapter to Tasmania and argued that “settlers and convicts,” but not British authorities, were responsible for genocide.Footnote 19 Then in 1975, following sustained Aboriginal activism and innovative historical scholarship, even the conservative Australian journal Quadrant briefly acknowledged the genocide of Australian Aborigines.Footnote 20
During the 1980s, scholars revisited the Tasmanian genocide question. In her pioneering 1981 book The Aboriginal Tasmanians, Australian historian Lyndall Ryan emphasized nineteenth-century Aboriginal Tasmanian resistance and survival, but also described “an existing [twentieth-century] community of Aborigines who are victims of a conscious policy of genocide.”Footnote 21 That same year South African–born sociologist Leo Kuper wrote of their “systematic [nineteenth-century] annihilation.”Footnote 22 American historian Robin Winks next described “a war of genocide” against them, and Australian historian Tony Barta argued that it “[brushed the] classical mode of genocide, the direct sanctioning of violence by the state.”Footnote 23 By 1988 the Tasmanian genocide argument even appeared in the journal Natural History.Footnote 24 However, with the exception of Ryan, none of these latter authors were intimately familiar with Tasmanian history during the period in question, 1803–47.
More recently, scholars have continued to explore the genocide question. In his 1995 Fate of a Free People, Aboriginal history doyen Henry Reynolds focused on government policies to argue that “losses sustained in war,” rather than genocide, caused most of the “demographic disaster.”Footnote 25 Then, in 2000, Australian historian A. Dirk Moses argued that settlers demonstrated “radical exterminatory sentiments,” while officials tendered a “restraining hand.”Footnote 26 Later, in 2004, Reynolds modified his position: “Whether Governor Arthur strayed over the unmarked border between warfare [and] genocide cannot be answered with any certainty.”Footnote 27 Still, Reynolds did not endorse the genocide interpretation.
In 2002 Windschuttle's Fabrication took the debate in a new direction by arguing against all previous scholarship on the Aboriginal Tasmanians’ demographic decline. He posited that they had caused their own demise. Windschuttle claimed that their supposedly endemic misogynistic violence and internal warfare had made them a “precarious population” that “quickly collapsed under the dual weight of the susceptibility of its members to disease and [its] abuse and neglect of its women.” He also claimed that only 118 “plausible” Aboriginal Tasmanian deaths occurred at white hands and that because extermination “would … have gone against the predominant religious and philosophical beliefs of the time,” it would therefore have been nearly impossible for Britons to undertake genocide. Finally, he asserted, “During the so-called ‘Black War,’ more than twice as many whites were killed as blacks.”Footnote 28 Many conservative Australians rallied to these arguments. Many other Australians, from varied political viewpoints, excoriated them; Windschuttle's thesis became the subject of debate by scholars as far away as Britain and the United States.Footnote 29 In 2003, nineteen Australians published an essay collection that challenged Windschuttle's arguments by demonstrating myriad contradictions between his claims and primary sources, as well as his exclusion of many sources from the relevant period, 1803–47. Yet these essays provided no unified response to Windschuttle's claim that “Van Diemen's Land was host to nothing that resembled genocide or any attempt at it,” nor consensus on the origins or process of the acknowledged Tasmanian catastrophe, or its legal status under the Genocide Convention.Footnote 30 This article addresses these important issues, beginning with the question of origins.
Phase 1: Creating a Culture of Terror and Impunity, 1803–26
A culture of terror shaped early colonists’ lives, psyches, and behavior. As this section will demonstrate, the culture of terror was the product of geographic isolation, imperial neglect, state brutality, and exterminatory government campaigns against escaped convicts, as well as fear of Aborigines. White-Aboriginal interactions took place in the context of this severe culture. The physical and psychological stress of penal society saturated early colonists’ lives. These conditions provide insight into how whites rationalized violence against Aborigines. American geographer Yi-fu Tuan has argued that, “under stressful conditions, strong feelings of envy, hatred, and fear can easily exaggerate and distort the slight cultural and biological differences between people into polarities of good and evil, angel and beast. Strangers then become the enemy, who may be killed and their homes demolished with a clear conscience.”Footnote 31 Indeed, the trauma of early colonial Tasmania exacerbated whites’ relations with Aborigines there.
To begin with, colonists were profoundly isolated. Located over 5,500 miles from Cape Town and more than 15,000 miles from London, they existed on the British Empire's margin. The journey to Britain took four to five months.Footnote 32 Even Sydney was eight to ten days sail from Hobart, the colony's capital.Footnote 33 However, other remote British colonies, like New Zealand, did not develop a terror culture. In Tasmania, isolation generated fear and danger, but official policies—and state violence in particular—created a particularly terrifying imperial outpost.
During the colony's first five years, British administrators rarely supplied adequate imported food. Provisions arrived so infrequently and were of such poor quality that both free settlers and convicts often faced starvation. During the austral winter of 1804, the residents of Hobart suffered the effects of malnutrition, including scurvy and diarrhea.Footnote 34 In September of 1805, rations fell to two pounds of flour per person per week, or about 450 calories per day. Lieutenant Governor David Collins wrote to his superior expressing his anxiety: “On the hope of … Ships from England, I have trusted for many a day, and until finding that hope deferred has truly made my heart sick. We here have been strangely neglected at Home.”Footnote 35 By October 1806, settlers and convicts were eating seaweed, wild plants, and kangaroo; Collins posted guards to deter the eating of livestock.Footnote 36 Lieutenant Governor Arthur later referred to this period as “amounting almost to a famine.”Footnote 37 Hunger abated with the first successful harvest in 1808, but London's neglect instilled in the colonists a sense of abandonment and insecurity and resulted in five years of very precarious existence.Footnote 38
If not for Tasmania's natural bounty, early settlers and convicts might have starved. To supplement inadequate imported food, they hunted the island's emu, swan, wallaby, and kangaroo. In 1806, Collins reported that remaining imported food supplies “are next to none” but that “our Supply of Kangaroo [is] abundant as I could wish.”Footnote 39 The initial harvest was rich, but the killing rate unsustainable. Encouraged by officials and lucrative markets, white hunters stripped Tasmania of much of the wild game that Aborigines needed for food and thus provoked interracial conflict.
The increasing proportion of convicts among the white population compounded the fear generated by living in a remote, poorly supplied outpost where finding food was potentially dangerous. By 1822, of the 12,464 whites, 58 percent were convicts.Footnote 40 This “jail on a large scale” absorbed deportees directly from Britain—including “the worst offenders of England”—as well as convicts banished from mainland Australian penal settlements.Footnote 41 It was thus “a place of exile for the more felonious of felons—the Botany Bay of Botany Bay—‘And in the lowest deep, a lower deep!’”Footnote 42 Convicts made the colony extremely dangerous. In 1824, Van Dieman's Land Company official Edward Curr reported “frequent … Daring robberies [and] a continual feeling of insecurity.”Footnote 43 Lieutenant Governor Arthur likewise described “a vast deal of Crime amongst the Prisoners, murders, constant robberies, and other atrocious acts.”Footnote 44 An 1827 Land Commissioners’ journal entry warned: “In no Country in the World is circumspection and a little knowledge of the World more requisite than in this. It has been the Asylum of Sharpers, Swindlers and Blacklegs, and a Gentleman emigrating here, must be armed at all points to withstand attacks made on his Purse and Property.”Footnote 45 That year, thieves even stole “about £1,400” from the public treasury.Footnote 46 Authorities addressed crime with extreme coercion and violence. In a letter to Parliament, the governor's secretary emphasized that “they punish with inordinate severity.”Footnote 47
The routine state violence of the convict forced-labor system acclimated white Tasmanians to brutality. In 1824 Curr wrote, “The labourer is a slave, with no motive to impel him but fear.”Footnote 48 In 1827, traveler Peter Cunningham described how convicts “[commenced] labour at sunrise … leave off at sunset,” and were threatened with chain gangs.Footnote 49 To maintain what Reverend Thomas Atkins called a “system of domestic slavery,” authorities employed flogging, torture, chain gangs, internal prisons, and execution.Footnote 50 “Eighteenth-century England” was “a society with a bloody penal code … schooled in the lessons of Justice, Terror and Mercy.” In early colonial Tasmania, British administrators emphasized terror. For if in eighteenth-century England “coercion was an exceptional act, to handle exceptional deviance,” in penal Tasmania coercion was an unexceptional act used to handle many kinds of deviance.Footnote 51 Flogging was ubiquitous. “That slavish punishment the Cat o’nine tails”—a whip with nine knotted ends—caused welts.Footnote 52 With prolonged blows it stripped away skin and cut muscle. The Colonial Times criticized this “torture” as “inhuman.”Footnote 53 Fifty lashes was a typical punishment, although convicts and freemen might receive hundreds for serious offences.Footnote 54 Most convicts were not flogged, but until 1833 approximately 2,000 convicts, or one in six, received an average of thirty-five lashes each year.Footnote 55 Australian historian Lloyd Robson concluded that up to 1840, “38 percent of all prisoners were flogged at least once.”Footnote 56
Public floggings inured colonial society to brutality. In 1826, the Colonial Times argued that flogging “hardened those on whom it is inflicted.”Footnote 57 The next year Cunningham observed that flogging may “check the poor cowardly, pitiful thief; but it only hardens the bold and courageous, while it essentially debases the feelings of both.” The many witnesses to frequent flagellations became more likely to accept violence as routine, which influenced attitudes toward Aborigines. Indeed, in 1829 the Launceston Advertiser complained, “The sound of the lash and the screams of the tortured are forever ringing in our ears.”Footnote 58 Cunningham recalled, “The first time I saw a man flogged, every lash made me wince … but now I could see a back sacrificed without moving a muscle.”Footnote 59
Colonial administrators further eroded white resistance to violence by severely punishing white women. In 1803, “one woman was flogged for stealing the cap of a companion,” while the lieutenant governor “repeatedly flogged” another “for stealing the provisions of her neighbors.”Footnote 60 Solitary confinement, iron neck collars, and public humiliation in stocks were other typical punishments for white women.Footnote 61 Authorities even riveted a five-pound four-ounce iron collar around one nursing mother's neck prior to her forced departure on a thirty-five-mile journey by foot.Footnote 62
Prisons of internal exile further amplified anxiety and routinized violence. The most infamous were Macquarie Harbour and Port Arthur. Lieutenant Governor William Sorell designated Macquarie Harbour a “Place of rigid Penal restraint and coercion.”Footnote 63 Some called it a place of “terrors,” others a prison of “hell-born horrors,” where a “torrent of blood and tears … drenches its barren rocks.”Footnote 64 James Bonwick wrote: “in the dreadful season of 1822 out of 182 men 169 were punished to the frightful amount of 7,000 lashes.”Footnote 65 Quaker missionary James Backhouse added that between 1826 and 1828, 188 of the 312 prisoners received 6,280 lashes.Footnote 66 Eighty-five prisoners died there over eleven years, only thirty-five from natural causes. Another seventy-one died trying to escape.Footnote 67 Death sentences could be commuted to time at Macquarie Harbour, but Arthur wrote that some prisoners “would rather suffer death than be sent back to Macquarie Harbour.” He saw this as “proof that banishment to that station operates, as it is intended … this is the feeling I am most anxious to keep alive.”Footnote 68 However, Macquarie Harbour was remote and expensive, and many prisoners escaped, so authorities replaced it with Port Arthur. Whereas Macquarie Harbour was small and rustic, Port Arthur was a sprawling, formidable “Earthly Hell.”Footnote 69 It remains imposing. The visitors’ center overlooks forty hectares of hewn stone walls, docks, and multistoried buildings. By 1835, 36,505 whites resided in Tasmania;Footnote 70 1,181 were Port Arthur prisoners.Footnote 71 Even “young boys … of the tender age of ten” were locked up and punished with “as much as one hundred lashes.”Footnote 72 Port Arthur's trauma and violence touched thousands of colonists and convicts, presumably eroding even cultural prohibitions against torturing children.
The state's supreme contribution to the terror culture was capital punishment. Frequent public hangings hardened whites to killing. Burglary, livestock theft, rape, murder, and bushranging (by escaped convicts) were all capital offenses. From 1 January 1823 to 24 August 1827, the colony, whose white population then reached 17,000, witnessed some 134 public hangings; authorities hanged approximately one out of every 127 people over this fifty-six-month period.Footnote 73 By comparison, between 1829 and 1830, 120 people were hanged in all of England and Wales, whose population then exceeded 12 million.Footnote 74 During these two periods, approximately one out of 2,500,000 people was hanged per month in England and Wales, while one out of 7,143 people was hanged per month in Tasmania. Britain had dozens of capital statutes, but judges regularly commuted death sentences to transportation. Tasmanian capital convictions more often led to hanging. Spectacles of horror were routine. Mass executions were common and gibbeted corpses, rotting in iron cages at crossroads or on Hunter's Island in Hobart harbor, likely had a powerful psychic impact on the white community.Footnote 75
Unsurprisingly, many convicts sought to escape. Escapees often became “bushrangers,” outlaws who took to the bush as a refuge from authorities. These bushrangers intensified the terror culture by attacking settlers and eliciting increasingly violent government responses that included attempted annihilation. Artist Joseph Lycett wrote, “So far back as the year 1808 … the daring outrages of these lawless banditti had spread universal terror through the colony.”Footnote 76 In 1816 the Hobart Town Gazette reported “the depredations of the Bush-rangers” as “truly alarming.”Footnote 77 The “severe scourge” continued.Footnote 78 In 1825 Henry Wallace wrote, “The country at present is in a most deplorable state with the Bush Rangers it is impossible to travel from one Township to another without being robbed. A few days since a soldier of the 40th. Regt. was shot & one of the same Regt. yesterday by a gang of Bush Rangers.”Footnote 79 An 1826 description of Matthew Brady's bushranger gang expressed deep fear: “God only knows the number [of murders] they have committed. … It is dreadful to think of the horrid deeds.”Footnote 80 Fear of bushrangers even informed colonial architecture: houses sometimes had gun loops and/or towers with parapets.Footnote 81
To combat bushrangers, officials employed severe floggings, executions, and bounties for runaways or for their severed heads.Footnote 82 In 1807, captured bushrangers received up to 400 lashes. In 1815, Lieutenant Governor Davey imposed martial law and set up a court martial with the power to execute.Footnote 83 Then, in April 1817, Sorell succeeded Davey and repeatedly offered rewards for the killing or capturing of bushrangers.Footnote 84 By September the Hobart Town Gazette announced their “nearly total destruction.”Footnote 85 The claim proved premature. In 1824, when Lieutenant Governor Arthur took office, bushrangers remained a potent threat. Newspapers regularly reported attacks and on 14 October 1825 the Colonial Times printed a “runaway list” of eighty-five names.Footnote 86 To capture or destroy them, Arthur increased police actions, recruited volunteers, and offered new bounties.Footnote 87 His rule, from 1824 to 1836, saw “about 260 executions.”Footnote 88
Several whites described the killings of bushrangers, by police, soldiers, and vigilantes as a desirable extermination campaign. In 1824 Curr chortled that bushrangers were “now happily exterminated,” Lycett that they were “completely exterminated.”Footnote 89 In 1830, a long-term visitor celebrated how “an effective system of police cut off [the] heads” of bushranger “villains.”Footnote 90 Even the Quaker missionary Backhouse described the benefits of bushrangers’ having been “completely extirpated.”Footnote 91 This “total extinction of the bushrangers” set important precedents for the treatment of Aborigines.Footnote 92
What exactly did Curr and Lycett mean by “exterminated?” Leading Australian historian Alan Atkinson has suggested that “the exact meaning of ‘exterminate’ was less clear at that time [the 1820s and 1830s] [than] it was to be in the following century. … It then meant ‘drive out’ (its original sense) as well as ‘destroy.’”Footnote 93 However, the source Atkinson cited, the 1907 Webster's International Dictionary, lists “drive out” as an extant meaning, not on the basis of 1820s or 1830s usage of “exterminate,” but on the basis of a mid-seventeenth-century work.Footnote 94 By the 1820s and 1830s, there seems to have been little confusion over the meaning of “extermination” in Tasmania. From the Colonial Times editor to Lieutenant Governor Arthur, whites directly equated “extermination” with physical destruction. In 1827 the Colonial Times warned, “The Settler … will … omit no step whereby he may destroy the black tribes even to utter extermination,” and in 1830 Arthur reported, “The aboriginal race [will be] exterminated … if they can neither be conciliated nor taken; self-preservation will compel the inhabitants to destroy them.”Footnote 95
Before being wiped out, bushrangers contributed directly to the Tasmanian Aborigines’ demographic decline. In 1828 Arthur reported that bushrangers “have no doubt committed the greatest outrages upon the Natives” by abducting, raping, and murdering Aborigines.Footnote 96 James Hobbs told the 1830 Aborigines Committee that “Lemon and Brown, the bush-rangers, committed every species of cruelty upon the Natives; they used to stick them, and fire at them as marks whilst alive.” The committee itself reported, “A person named Carrots … is known to have boasted, that having killed a Native in his attempt to carry off his wife, he cut off the dead man's head, and obliged the woman to go with him carrying it suspended round her neck.”Footnote 97 Bonwick wrote that an ex-bushranger “confessed to me that he would ‘as leave shoot them as so many sparrows.’”Footnote 98 And Arthur himself informed London in 1830 that “they treated them with the most unnatural cruelty.”Footnote 99
Free colonists also killed Aboriginal Tasmanians. In March 1819, missionary Rowland Hassall expressed surprise at not seeing more Aborigines. He was told, “We shoot them whenever we find them.”Footnote 100 That same month Governor Sorell proclaimed, “Cruelties have been perpetrated repugnant to Humanity and disgraceful to the British Character,” and “Miscreants … sometimes wantonly fire at and kill [Aboriginal] Men.”Footnote 101 Successive governors’ almost complete failure to enforce official policies protecting Aboriginal Tasmanians compounded the issue. When Lieutenant Governor Collins first set out to govern Tasmania in 1803, British Colonial Secretary Lord Hobart had explicitly instructed him to protect Aborigines: “You are to endeavour by every means in your power to open an intercourse with the Natives, and to conciliate their good will, enjoining all persons under your government to live in amity and kindness with them; and if any person shall exercise any acts of violence against them, or shall wantonly give them any interruption in the exercise of their several occupations, you are to cause such offender to be brought to punishment, according to the degree of the offence.”Footnote 102 However, during the colony's first year, Aborigines had no legal protection. Only in 1805, more than a year after his arrival in Tasmania, did Collins proclaim Aborigines and their property to be under “the Protection of the British Laws.”Footnote 103 Later lieutenant governors repeatedly threatened to punish whites for assaulting or killing Aborigines.Footnote 104 Yet administrators hardly ever did so and rarely protected Aboriginal rights, property, or life.
According to Windschuttle, “The notion that the frontier was a place where white men could kill blacks with impunity ignores the powerful cultural and legal prohibitions on such actions.”Footnote 105 Indeed, on 23 June 1824, Governor Arthur proclaimed remaining Aborigines, later estimated to number 1,500, henceforth “under the protection of the same laws which protect the Settlers,” so that “every violation of those laws, in the persons or the property of the Natives, shall be visited with the same punishment as though committed on the person or property of any settler.”Footnote 106 There is no reason to believe Arthur was being disingenuous, and he was at least partly capable of enforcing his will on the white community, as his energetic bushranger policy demonstrated. Yet, like his gubernatorial predecessors, he chose not to enforce his own public pronouncements by protecting Aborigines. Murders and abductions continued, but no Europeans were arrested or tried. As Tasmanian historian N. J. B. Plomley asserted, “European settlers could get away with murder, whereas the Aborigines could not.”Footnote 107 Moreover, “heathen” Aborigines could not be sworn into British courts and were thus barred from giving testimony or serving as jurors. Aborigines were effectively excluded from participation in or protection by the British colonial legal system. The Hobart regime executed both Europeans and Aborigines for killing Europeans but never a European for murdering an Aborigine, despite the fact that Aborigines were frequently shot on sight. Even after the 3 May 1804 Risdon Cove killings, when whites, including soldiers, killed at least three and possibly as many as fifty Aborigines, Hobart officials charged no one and launched no investigation.Footnote 108
Just as destructive to the Aboriginal population was abduction. The shortage of European children and laborers led some whites to abduct Aboriginal children as early as 1804.Footnote 109 By 25 June 1813, Lieutenant Governor Davey publicly decried the “barbarous and inhuman … robbery of children!” However, his announcement did not stop the crime.Footnote 110 Reverend Robert Knopwood later recollected that “a number of children were forcibly taken from the Natives” in 1813 and 1814.Footnote 111 By March 1819 Sorell publicly denounced “Miscreants” who “sometimes … pursue [Aboriginal] Women for the purpose of compelling them to abandon their Children.”Footnote 112 Yet he too failed to punish child abductors. The scourge continued for decades. An 1826 poem, “The Native's Lament,” described ongoing child abduction: “And thy children must fly, or submit to his chains.”Footnote 113
The shortage of white women also contributed to abductions and rape. In 1828 Arthur reported that, among “stockkeepers and sealers … it was a constant practice to … deprive [Aborigines] of their women whenever the opportunity offered.”Footnote 114 The gender imbalance in the white community continued. As late as 1836 Melville wrote, “The Colony is yet greatly deficient in females, there being … very nearly three males to every female.”Footnote 115 Writing to the colonial secretary of New South Wales in 1815, William Stewart noted that among European sealers “they have also a custom of getting the Native Women … who they mostly obtain by force and keep … as Slaves.”Footnote 116 George Augustus Robinson, who met and spoke with more Aboriginal Tasmanians in the early nineteenth century than any other Briton, labeled sealers’ treatment of Aboriginal women “the African slave trade in miniature” and recorded multiple abductions, tortures, and murders.Footnote 117 James Hobbs reported simply that “sealers in Basse's Straits sometimes stole the native women … they shot the men and carried their wives away.”Footnote 118 Abductions by sealers had disastrous demographic effects. Besides the accompanying murders of male relatives and later of the women themselves, abductions retarded population recovery by lowering birth rates and introducing syphilis and gonorrhea.Footnote 119
Free settlers, convicts—and soldiers also—bought, raped, kidnapped, and murdered indigenous women. Both Reverend Knopwood and Robinson catalogued Aboriginal women living with white men, and Robinson recorded that they were frequently held as sexual and domestic slaves.Footnote 120 Robinson also reported cases of rape and murder.Footnote 121 In one instance, free colonists gang-raped an Aboriginal woman and left her hanging by her ankles to die.Footnote 122 In 1836, Melville described the violence of the abductions. “The stock-keepers may be considered as the destroyers of nearly the whole of the aborigines … they thought little or nothing of destroying the men for the sake of carrying to their huts the females of the tribes; and, if it were possible in a work like this to record but a tithe of the murders committed on these poor harmless creatures, it would make the reader's blood run cold at the bare recital.”Footnote 123 Extant primary sources suggest that British authorities never punished abduction or associated murder. Records indicate only one white man being officially punished for crimes against Aboriginal Tasmanian women. According to Australian historian A. G. L. Shaw, “In a case of ‘indescribable brutality’ to some females in November 1824 a convict was sentenced to twenty-five lashes (equal to the punishment he would have received for insolence to his master).”Footnote 124
Phase 2: Guerrilla War, Dehumanization, and Massacre, 1826–28
In the autumn of 1826, some Aboriginal Tasmanians began a desperate low-intensity guerrilla war, killing isolated white settlers and convicts.Footnote 125 In response, Arthur deployed troops and settlers privately organized new attacks. As losses mounted on both sides, white fears intensified, spawning dehumanization and hatred that, in turn, led to even more frequent and violent assaults.
Contemporary whites’ observations indicate that dispossession, destruction of traditional food sources, abduction, rape, and murder were the five main reasons Aboriginal Tasmanians went to war. On 1 December 1826, soon after hostilities began, the Colonial Times opined: “They look upon the white men, as robbing them of their land, depriving them of their subsistence, and in too many instances, violating their persons.”Footnote 126 In January 1828 Arthur reported, “They … complain that the white people have taken possession of their country, encroached upon their hunting grounds, and destroyed their natural food, the kangaroo.” He also conceded that “all aggression originated with the white inhabitants.”Footnote 127 Robinson concluded, “They have a tradition amongst them that white men have usurped their territory, have driven them into the forests, have killed their game and thus robbed them of their chief subsistence, have ravished their wives and daughters, have murdered and butchered their fellow-countrymen; and are wont whilst brooding over these complicated ills in the dense part of the forest, to goad each other on to acts of bloodshed and revenge for the injuries done to their ancestors and the persecutions offered to themselves through their white enemies.”Footnote 128 Backhouse added, “Who can wonder that the atrocities committed upon the aborigines should induce them to try to destroy and drive from their land, a race among whom there were men guilty of such deeds?”Footnote 129 Other evidence suggests Aborigines attacked not only to drive whites away, but to bring them to the negotiating table. Statements such as “Go away you white buggars, what business have you here!” suggest the former, while historian Henry Reynolds has suggested that some Aboriginal Tasmanians fought to obtain a sanctuary protected by British authorities.Footnote 130 Whatever their reasons, Aborigines were attacking and stealing from whites in increasing numbers.
The convict labor system, in combination with government support for rapid settlement, fueled the escalation of violence. To claim and exploit land, settlers forced convict stockmen, under threat of physical punishment, to take up remote, dangerous posts that no free laborer would have accepted. Close behind came free settlers. Both groups were threatening to Aborigines and vulnerable to attack. As Australian military historian John Connor has observed, “As settlers advanced into [Tasmanian] valleys they created farms in exposed positions almost impossible to defend from Aboriginal raids.”Footnote 131 These raids, in turn, encouraged Arthur to abandon his relatively passive Aboriginal policy, loosen official restraints on the use of force, and thus escalate the conflict.
On 29 November 1826, Arthur issued a government notice that read, in part: “If it should be apparent that there is a Determination on the Part of one or more of the Native Tribes to attack, rob, or murder the White Inhabitants generally, any Persons may arm, and, joining themselves to the Military, drive them by force to a safe Distance, treating them as open Enemies.”Footnote 132 Arthur also deployed troops. Both actions were within the rules of engagement Earl Bathurst had issued to Arthur's superior, Governor Darling, in 1825: “The manner, in which the Native Inhabitants are to be treated when making hostile incursions for the purpose of Plunder, you well understand it to be your duty, when such disturbances cannot be prevented or allayed by less vigorous measures, to oppose force by force, and to repel such Aggressions in the same manner, as if they proceeded from subjects of an accredited State.”Footnote 133 Yet the British soldiers in Tasmania could neither quickly vanquish their enemy nor adequately protect scattered European settlements and outposts. The resulting experiences, for many whites, only compounded the decades-old culture of terror.
Profound fear of Aborigines was one reason whites waged ferocious war against them. That fear had been building for decades. As early as 1804, Collins anticipated that due to the “Evil Impressions” that whites had made on Aborigines, “these indiscriminating Savages will Consider every White Man as their Enemy.”Footnote 134 Aborigines did kill whites, and in 1818 Reverend Knopwood recorded “The country on fire by the natives.”Footnote 135 In 1825, Wallace wrote, “We are very often troubled by the Aborigines … if you meet them in the bush you are sure to be speared without on horseback.”Footnote 136
The “very barbarous Murders amongst the distant Stock keepers” that Aborigines began committing in 1826 intensified this white dread.Footnote 137 Settler David Burn recalled, “This aboriginal warfare was much more dreaded by the settlers than the attacks of the bushrangers.”Footnote 138 In January 1827 the Colonial Times shrieked that Aborigines “have repeatedly said they will, sooner or later, murder every white man in the Island!!!”Footnote 139 Initially Hobart's authorities were more sober. In October 1828, executive council minutes recorded “Great and well-founded alarm.”Footnote 140 Yet, the next month, Arthur himself wrote that Aborigines intended “to destroy, without distinction of sex or age, all the white inhabitants who should fall within their power.” As late as 1831, he reported to London: “Our continued warfare with these miserable savages must continue to be a subject of anxious consideration.”Footnote 141
As Tuan's theory predicts, dread translated into hate and dehumanization, which eroded cultural barriers to violence. Several whites referred to Aborigines as “ourang outangs” and in 1827 Cunningham wondered if Aborigines might be “the connecting link between man and the monkey tribe?”Footnote 142 In 1832 Backhouse summarized white attitudes toward Aboriginal Tasmanians: “They have been considered the most degraded class of savages.”Footnote 143 Whites who seized children and dashed their brains out, or lined them up for musket practice, likely considered their victims subhuman.Footnote 144 Indeed, Atkins recalled that some “settlers … shot them as native dogs.”Footnote 145 Dehumanization—in combination with government brutality, torture, and capital punishment—helps explain how a man could boast “that he had thrown [an Aboriginal] woman upon a fire and burned her to death” and how stockmen, “not contented with taking [Aboriginal] women … have been guilty of the most horrid atrocities toward them, murdering them without scruple.”Footnote 146 Dehumanization also led to killing Aborigines “as mere beasts” in “a sport almost as common as that of kangarooing.”Footnote 147 Fear and dehumanization helped some settlers, police, and soldiers to rationalize “diabolical” violence and annihilationist attacks.Footnote 148 Beginning on 1 December 1826—four years before Melville became editor—the Colonial Times began warning, “the government must remove the natives—if not, they will be hunted down like wild beasts, and destroyed!”Footnote 149
Eighteen twenty-seven was a violent year. On 5 January a Colonial Times editorial warned: “The Settler … will … omit no step whereby he may destroy the black tribes even to utter extermination.”Footnote 150 Settler Michael Steel wrote to his brother, on 21 February: “We fell in with [Aborigines] and poured a strong fire into them and killed their leader and one more … had the country been even and clear we should have killed or taken the whole of them.”Footnote 151 On 11 May the Colonial Times reported: “Not less than 30 of the blacks … shot dead [with] the assistance of the military.” On 6 July, the paper printed a letter reporting, “The people over the second Western Tier have killed an immense quantity of blacks this last week. … They were surrounded whilst sitting around their fires, when the soldiers and others fired at them about 30 yards distant. They report there must have been about 60 of them killed and wounded!”Footnote 152 Former chief constable Gilbert Robertson reported that in 1827 “the Richmond police … killed 14 of the Natives, who had got upon a hill.”Footnote 153 Finally, in a December diary entry, settler George Hobler wrote, after an Aboriginal attack: “I have armed four men who I hope will get sight of their night fires and slaughter them as they lie round it.”Footnote 154
Killing continued in 1828. Traveler Rosalie Hare noted in her diary on 20 January, while at the Van Diemen's Land Company headquarters: “We have to lament that our own countrymen consider the massacre of these people an honour. While we remained at Circular Head there were several accounts of considerable numbers of natives having been shot by them (the Company's men), they wishing to extirpate them entirely, if possible. The master of the Company's cutter Fanny, assisted by four shepherds and his crew, surprised a party and killed twelve.”Footnote 155 The next month, four Van Diemen's Land Company shepherds ambushed a group of Aborigines and shot thirty dead.Footnote 156
Phase 3: State-Sanctioned Mass Murder, 1828–35
In 1826 and 1827 dozens of Aboriginal assaults struck at whites and their property; eighty-two were killed or wounded.Footnote 157 To halt these losses, in April 1828 Arthur adopted a peace plan, but it eventually failed. His plan had two tracks. The conciliation portion included posting notice boards, divided into thirds. The top panel depicted black and white men embracing, black and white children holding hands, and black and white women holding each other's babies. The middle panel illustrated a peaceful meeting between Aborigines and British officials. Finally, the bottom panel portrayed hangings of an Aborigine for killing a white and of a white for killing an Aborigine, thus suggesting equal justice.Footnote 158 However, after twenty-five years of injustice, Aborigines were unconvinced. Arthur's second track was forced segregation. In January 1828 he reported to London: “I am … convinced of the absolute necessity of separating the Aborigines altogether from the white inhabitants.” His April demarcation proclamation then divided the island with “a line of military posts … along the confines of the settled districts” across which “Aborigines shall not and may not … penetrate.”Footnote 159 By deploying force to contain habitually migratory people, Arthur's proclamation, Melville wrote, had “the effect of adding outrage to outrage.”Footnote 160
Despite the posters, posts, and proclamations, Aboriginal attacks escalated. In 1828 Aborigines plundered three times as many white dwellings as they had in 1827, and white casualties rose from fifty-two to seventy-one.Footnote 161 Why could professional British soldiers neither effectively protect all settlers nor vanquish Aboriginal guerillas? British troops in Tasmania were poorly trained. Reynolds has argued that the “450 soldiers … in the interior” by early 1828, “were unsuitable for fighting a guerilla war” because they were “trained for … disciplined, formal manoeuvres.”Footnote 162 John Connor countered that, “through wars with other indigenous peoples, the British had developed a repertoire of strategies and tactics which they applied as appropriate to Australian conditions,” but that “British peacetime garrisons [including those in Tasmania] were not properly trained for any kind of warfare.”Footnote 163 Whether their training was inappropriate or inadequate, an 1830 Colonial Times opined: “The military are not the most proper persons to be employed, being unaccustomed as they are to the fatigues of the bush.”Footnote 164
In contrast, Aboriginal Tasmanian warriors enjoyed internal lines of communication, intimate geographic knowledge, and the ability to live off the land. They were also excellent tacticians and skilled warriors. The Colonial Times reported, on 16 July 1830, that Aborigines’ “cunning and superiority of … [tactics] … would not disgrace even some of the greatest military characters.”Footnote 165 Superior mobility and bushcraft helped Aborigines counter white firepower.Footnote 166 Surveyor J. H. Wedge wrote in his diary, “The Natives are … very expert in eluding … White men.”Footnote 167 Ross agreed that Aborigines had “the wonderful facility … of disappearing on a sudden from the view.”Footnote 168 Another observer recalled, “I saw one, and, while in the act of leveling my gun at him, he disappeared as if by magic.”Footnote 169 Mark Twain later dubbed them “the Spartans of Australia.”Footnote 170
By burning farms, plundering and destroying private property, killing civilians, and resisting set-piece battles, Aboriginal tactics violated traditional British military rules of engagement and conduct. To Britons, such acts were unsavory, at best, as in the case of allied Spanish guerillas fighting Napoleon. Many Britons considered guerilla warfare criminal, at least when conducted by their opponents. According to the Colonial Times, Aboriginal tactics made them a “brutal and atrocious race.”Footnote 171 Arthur found them “a most treacherous race.”Footnote 172 Though their destruction of property and civilians resembled British practices toward the Aborigines, both reversed still-dominant nineteenth-century British conceptions of war as conflict between designated military forces on assigned fields. In Tasmania, as in Spain, attacks on noncombatants and property informed modes of retaliation on both sides, each of whom in turn made little attempt to distinguish between combatants and civilians.
Guerrilla warfare also compounded British dehumanization of Aborigines. Cunningham wrote, “They can always steal in upon the whites, by gliding from tree to tree [and] it is no easy matter to distinguish them from a burnt stick.”Footnote 173 Police magistrate Thomas Anstey described them to Arthur as nearly demonic: “the natives have uttered their war whoop and that it is to be a war of extermination even of defenseless women and children. Their disposition is nearer to the cold malignity of a wicked spirit than to the frailty and passion of man.”Footnote 174 The Launceston Advertiser called Aboriginal warriors simply “cunning … black devils.”Footnote 175 Even official Aborigines Committee members, often sympathetic to them, concluded: “acts of violence on the part of the Natives are generally to be regarded … as proceeding from a wanton and savage spirit inherent in them.”Footnote 176
Unable to vanquish Aborigines or protect whites from them, Arthur and his Executive Committee anticipated merchant John Sherwin's 1830 suggestion that “they must be captured or exterminated.”Footnote 177 Arthur's peace plan having failed, in November 1828 he revoked state protection of Aborigines. By removing the last, rhetorical, element of restraint, Arthur unleashed more frequent and more lethal settler assaults. On 1 November 1828 martial law unleashed settlers, police, and soldiers to slaughter Aborigines. Martial law remained in effect until February 1832. Arthur focused on Aboriginal guerrilla warfare in his martial law proclamation: “Whereas the black or aboriginal Natives of this Island have … carried on a series of indiscriminate attacks … and have … perpetrated the most cruel and sanguinary acts of violence and outrage; evincing an evident disposition systematically to kill and destroy the white inhabitants indiscriminately … martial law is [declared] against the several black or aboriginal Natives [except in certain areas].”Footnote 178 Thus, Arthur used guerrilla warfare to justify falling back on familiar tactics: violence and terror.Footnote 179 After Arthur met with his council and decided to enact martial law, the council recorded: “To inspire them with terror, the Council fear, will be found the only effectual means of security.” Arthur then reported to the British secretary of state for war and the colonies, Sir George Murray, “Terror may have the effect which no proferred measures of conciliation have been capable of inducing.” The next year, on receiving Arthur's statement and the council minutes, Murray sanctioned “terror” by approving the plan.Footnote 180
Arthur did not entirely relinquish the goal or rhetoric of protection. His martial law proclamation “[commanded] that the actual use of arms be in no case resorted to, if the Natives can by other means be induced or compelled to retire.” Further, he urged that “bloodshed be checked, as much as possible.”Footnote 181 Yet in 1830 the Colonial Times claimed that martial law had opened “the door for whatever treatment individuals chose to practice toward the Aborigines with impunity.”Footnote 182 Martial law undercut Arthur's own rhetorical restraints and also had the effect of legalizing killing. The Tasmanian solicitor general Alfred Stephen dismissed the case against a white man for the fatal 1829 shooting of an Aboriginal woman on the grounds that martial law legalized killing Aborigines. Stephen also dismissed the case against a second assailant who administered ax blows to the woman, on the grounds that she was already fatally wounded when he attacked her with the ax.Footnote 183
Beginning 1 November 1828 roving parties of “four to 11 … soldiers, district constables, field police, volunteer guides, settlers, stock keepers and black-trackers” began hunting down Aborigines.Footnote 184 Two years later, the Colonial Times reported that, as a result, “‘the dogs of war being thus let slip,’ all was ardour and emulation among many of the Whites, trying who should hunt, kill and destroy the most.”Footnote 185 Melville recalled in 1836: “At this point it was common for parties of the civilized portion of society to scour the bush, and falling in with the tracks of the natives, during the night to follow them to their place of encampment, where they were slaughtered in cool blood.”Footnote 186 British Army units, including the fortieth, fifty-seventh, and sixty-third regiments, joined in. On 13 December the Hobart Town Courier reported that a “party of the 40th regt.” had killed ten “Natives” near “the Great Lake.”Footnote 187 According to Melville, “The effect of the proclamation of martial law, was to destroy, within twelve months after its publication, more than two thirds of these wild creatures.”Footnote 188
The death toll rose through 1829. On 2 January, the Colonial Times reported that John Danvers “and his party lately attacked a tribe of natives [and] killed ten.” On 30 January, the paper printed a letter describing how “David Rayner shot a black man near Mr. Lynes's on Monday last. Nine [Aborigines] were killed … near St. Paul's River, ten days back, and about the same time ten were shot … near the Eastern Marshes.” On 18 September, the Colonial Times reported: “Mr. Batman, and the party under his orders fell in with a tribe comprising 70 in number … at Benlomond … about 15 were killed and wounded, and several taken.”Footnote 189 Unleashed by Arthur, driven by fear, and well-versed in violence, whites began to articulate even more malevolent designs.
Calls for extermination multiplied in 1830. On 26 February, the Tasmanian suggested: “Extermination seems to be the only remedy.”Footnote 190 In March, Road Inspector Rodric O’Connor told the Aborigines Committee: “Douglas Ibbens would soon put an end to the eastern mob if he were employed; he has killed half that tribe by creeping upon them and firing amongst them with his double-barrelled gun.”Footnote 191 Justice of the Peace William Barnes suggested to Arthur that unless peace could be achieved, “then the dreadful alternative only remains of a general extermination.” Landowner Temple Pearson likewise advised the Colonial Secretary in June: “Total extermination however severe the measure, I much fear will be the only means left to the Government to protect the Whites.”Footnote 192
Extermination was no secret. In February, a letter to the Launceston Advertiser proclaimed, “We have waged a war directly tending to extermination.”Footnote 193 By August, the Colonial Times warned, “The plan at present adopted will leave no other chance of obtaining peace than the annihilation of the whole race.”Footnote 194 In September, the paper printed the minutes of a Hobart meeting in which participants debated initiating “a war of extermination.” A Mr. Horne commented, “I do not see what other means of protection exist,” while a Dr. Turnbull stated that “the war would be a war of extermination. It is so already.” Solicitor General Alfred Stephen—speaking as “a private individual”—then urged his audience to protect settlers, proclaiming, “if you cannot do so without extermination, then I say boldly and broadly, exterminate!”Footnote 195 Exterminatory sentiment apparently pervaded some communities almost completely. In October, Robinson wrote to his wife, “Nothing is heard of at Launceston but extirpating the original inhabitants.”Footnote 196
The annihilationist rhetoric of 1830 was accompanied by reports of more killing. On 3 March, Gilbert Robertson reported “a party of constables and some of the 40th Regiment [killed] 70 [Aborigines] by firing all their ammunition upon them, and then dragging the women and children from the crevices in the rocks, and dashing out their brains.”Footnote 197 On 16 June, Robinson recorded a conversation in which a man named Chamberlain claimed that he and three other Van Diemen's Land Company employees had killed thirty Aborigines in one day.Footnote 198 In July, the Colonial Times editorialized: “Settlers and their servants … consider the men as wild beasts whom it is praiseworthy to hunt down and destroy, and the women as only fit only to be used for the worst purposes.”Footnote 199 In August, Robinson recorded hearing that a “stockkeeper called Paddy Heagon … had shot nineteen of the western natives with a swivel charged with nails,” while in October a man named “Parish said that twenty natives was shot” along the coast.Footnote 200 On 25 September, Robinson recorded a conversation in which a stock keeper confessed that he had “ripped up [an Aboriginal] man's belly with his knife” and on another occasion “shot nine of the natives.” Robinson concluded, “Gibson's stockkeeper, like all other stockkeepers, has massacred the natives.”Footnote 201 The results of martial law were now openly discussed. On 24 September 1830, the Independent warned, “Unless something forthwith is done by the government, the end will be, horrible as the idea is, extermination.”Footnote 202 Later, in an 1832 letter, Backhouse wrote, “It is a question of doubt whether any act of the natives is to be compared with the cruelty of the martial-law of the colony against them, by which they are liable to be shot, on being seen by the colonists, without there having any aspect of outrage at the time.”Footnote 203
The spears, wadis (wooden spear-throwing devices), and stones that had served Aborigines well in hit-and-run attacks were insufficient to hold off roving parties emboldened by Arthur's legalization of Aborigine killing to murder men, women, and children. These parties were sometimes mounted and always carried muskets and/or pistols. Few Aboriginal Tasmanians had firearms and they rarely shot whites.Footnote 204 Thus, Melville estimated, the roving parties’ “murderous warfare, in the course of a few years destroyed thousands of aborigines, whilst only a few score of the European population were sacrificed.”Footnote 205 Tested in the annihilation of the bushrangers, vigilantes now served a similar purpose against Aborigines.
Arthur was concerned about presiding over the extermination of his Aboriginal subjects. Thus, in 1829 he sent out a few men, including Robinson, to bring surviving Aborigines into custody.Footnote 206 In February 1830 he began offering “5£ … for every adult aboriginal Native, and 2£ for every child … delivered alive.”Footnote 207 These efforts failed to stop the slaughter of Aborigines or their attacks on whites. Finally, Arthur launched the massive, “farcical,” Black Line.Footnote 208 On 7 October 1830, a human chain of 2,200 soldiers, police, freemen, and convicts began sweeping across southeastern Tasmania—an island roughly Ireland's size—attempting to push Aborigines into the Tasman Peninsula for incarceration.Footnote 209 According to Connor, Aboriginal “bushcraft,” their small numbers, and “an [in]effective cordon” led to failure.Footnote 210 Just two Aborigines were captured.Footnote 211
By November 1830, Arthur recognized that the annihilation war was nearing a grim conclusion. He reported to London, “The aboriginal race [will be] exterminated … if they can neither be conciliated nor taken; self-preservation will compel the inhabitants to destroy them.”Footnote 212 Arthur defined this extermination as destruction yet seemed only mildly concerned about his prediction. Following his Black Line fiasco, Arthur still refrained from punishing whites for assaulting or killing Aborigines. He did, however, give up his program of overwhelming military force in favor of focusing solely on placing Tasmanian Aborigines on reserves through negotiation, coercion, and capture.
London decision makers were more passive. For example, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies Murray, to whom Arthur reported, foresaw potential extinction—“the whole race of these people may, at no distant period, become extinct”—and understood that some whites desired it: “Such an event may be looked forward to by … Settlers who have been sufferers by the Collissions which have taken place.” Murray also felt guilty: “it is impossible not to contemplate such a result of our occupation of the Island, as one very difficult to be reconciled with feelings of humanity or even with principles of justice and sound policy.” Finally, Murray anticipated the censure later historians would heap upon British policies in Tasmania: “The adoption of any line of conduct having for its avowed or for its secret object, the extinction of the native race, could not fail to leave an indelible stain upon the character of the British Government.”Footnote 213 Yet he failed to order Arthur to repeal martial law or stop the violence that Arthur plainly said would annihilate these subjects of the British Empire.
For remaining Aboriginal Tasmanians the results of official policy and inaction in Hobart and London were cataclysmic. Plomley has estimated that in 1824 there were 1,500 Aborigines in Tasmania.Footnote 214 In 1831 Robinson suggested a surviving population of “not more than 700”; the same year John Henderson estimated “about 600.”Footnote 215 By 1835 there were fewer than 400 “full-descent” Aboriginal Tasmanians. One Aboriginal leader recalled in an 1838 speech: “My brothers, in our own country a long time ago we were a great many men, a great number. The white men have killed us all; they shot a great many.”Footnote 216
Phase 4: Incarceration and Death, 1829–47
While the Black War raged, colonial authorities launched the final phase of the Aboriginal Tasmanian catastrophe. In 1829 they began incarcerating survivors in the first of a series of transit camps and offshore detention centers and finally at Wybalenna on Flinders Island. Removal was initially intended to protect whites from Aborigines and to provide these survivors “a country where under the protection of the Government they would be protected from hostile whites.”Footnote 217
In 1829, Robinson and others began assembling Aborigines from Tasmania's interior and relocating them. Then, on 3 February 1835, Robinson reported to Arthur: “The entire Aboriginal population are now removed.”Footnote 218 According to an editorial in the Launceston Advertiser, “The result was security of life and property throughout the island” upon which “it is certainly impossible to affix a pecuniary value.”Footnote 219 By 1835 all but seven of the last 317 full-descent Aborigines had been removed from mainland Tasmania.Footnote 220 Yet instead of saving surviving Aborigines, incarceration proved lethal. Five out of six would die in captivity.
After dozens had died in camps and detention, Arthur's administration established Wybalenna in February 1833. It was, as Reynolds has argued, “likely … by far the best equipped, most heavily funded and lavishly staffed of all colonial institutions for Aborigines.”Footnote 221 In 1835 it featured a vegetable garden, medical officer, and forty-six European staff for just 123 prisoners.Footnote 222 Yet Wybalenna has been called “a concentration camp” and in 1999 Tasmanian Premier Jim Bacon designated it “a site of genocide.”Footnote 223 Hobart administrators did not expressly design or operate Wyabalenna for mass murder. Yet they were extremely slow to provide basic services and materials they knew were necessary to maintain prisoners’ existence. Some necessities, like clean fresh water—vital to any community—officials never provided. Meanwhile London decision makers remained passive until most of the 200 or so inmates sent to Flinders Island were dead.Footnote 224 More importantly, officials held prisoners at Wybalenna by force for over fourteen years despite warnings and evidence that it was a place of death for Aborigines. Prisoners lived at the state's mercy, and until 1837–38 the state did little to alter conditions known to be lethal. When Wybalenna closed, only forty-seven prisoners remained alive.
Facing into the open ocean and the powerful winds of the Roaring Forties, which gather speed over thousands of miles of open ocean, Wybalenna is a windswept spot where waves explode against granite boulders. In 1870 Bonwick accurately described a winter day there: “The winds were violent and cold; the rain and sleet … penetrating and miserable.”Footnote 225 Keith Windschuttle is wrong to suggest that Wybalenna must have been “like a balmy holiday resort” for some inmates.Footnote 226 The dozens of Aborigines buried there attest to its grim reality.
Even before it was established, officials warned that Wybalenna would be inhospitable, if not deadly. In 1831, Tasmanian Supreme Court Chief Justice John Pedder warned Arthur's Executive Council that Aborigines held on any Bass Strait island “would soon pine away when they found their situation one of hopeless imprisonment.”Footnote 227 Later, a soldier sent to examine Flinders Island as a potential Aboriginal reservation warned, “The climate was bleak, the soil sterile, and destitute of springs.”Footnote 228 More tellingly, Robinson repeatedly advocated relocation to the Port Phillip district of New South Wales. By 1834 even Arthur proposed returning inmates to “some tract of land in their own country” but then took no action.Footnote 229 Eventually, most prisoners died. Robinson blamed “the sad mortality” on “the will of providence.”Footnote 230 Nineteenth-century author James Walker, however, suggested that Wybalenna's conditions were “only too well calculated to induce those severe pulmonary diseases which were destined to prove so fatal to them.”Footnote 231
Impure water, inadequate clothing, insufficient blankets, and poor shelter precipitated lethal respiratory illnesses, including influenza, tuberculosis, and pneumonia. In 1835, Flinders Island surgeon Dr. James Allen charged that “clothing and blankets … have been too scantily supplied” and also reported to Robinson, “the great mortality amongst the aborigines has been caused, in most instances, by the application of cold, either in exposed situations or by irregular use of improper clothing.” Allen added, “The water at this settlement is not wholesome,” and “it is highly necessary for the natives to be located in a sheltered situation … the [wattle and daub] huts … are decidedly very improper … being neither warm nor dry.”Footnote 232 In March 1836 Launceston Commandant Major Thomas Ryan visited. His official report described inmates enduring “an artificial society where most of their traditional food sources have been hunted out, and living in damp, poorly ventilated huts with impure water and inadequate provisions.” He continued, “If it is the wish of the Government to propagate the species it is our bounden duty to provide all the means that are in our possession for the accomplishment of so desirable an end—if not, I tremble for the consequences, the race of Tasmania … will … be extinct in a quarter of a century.”Footnote 233
“Inadequate provisions” in the context of incarceration bordered on institutionalized malnutrition. Adult prisoners’ set daily rations—one pound of salt meat, one and a half pounds of flour, and two ounces of sugar—were nutritionally inadequate over the long term, infrequently available, and unpalatable to Aborigines.Footnote 234 Wybalenna acquired hundreds of sheep and some cattle, but inmates were rarely allowed to eat them before 1838.Footnote 235 Inmates hunted to survive, but if they became ill due to their inadequate clothing and blankets, poor housing, or impure water, they could not hunt. Without the nutrition provided by hunting, they could not recover from illnesses.
Authorities in Hobart became increasingly aware of Wybalenna's lethal conditions. Officials’ inaction in the face of clear warnings, continual population decline, and high mortality rates suggests that they considered Aboriginal population decline, though not a defined government objective, preferable to moving survivors to a new location or providing them adequate water, food, housing, or clothing. Adding to Dr. Allen's and Major Ryan's warnings, in 1836 Melville published a History of Van Diemen's Land in which he wrote, “It is generally believed, that this race of human beings will soon become extinct altogether, as the deaths are common, and the increase nothing equal in proportion.”Footnote 236 In June of the next year, Robinson warned the colonial secretary in Hobart, “Should … His Majesty's Government still object to their removal, and continue the settlement where it now is, I have no hesitation in stating that the race in a very short period will be extinct.”Footnote 237
By 1837, inmates had spent four and a half years in these poor conditions. Dozens were dead, many others terminally ill.Footnote 238 As Plomley has observed, “There were few births, and of them nearly all died within weeks.”Footnote 239 Near 100 percent infant mortality, without evidence of infanticide, suggests extremely bad conditions. Officials improved the situation in 1837, completing thatch-roofed brick cottages in October, but five more inmates died that month.Footnote 240 On 17 November the editor of the Flinders Island Weekly Chronicle, a paper written by Aborigines and managed by Robinson, wrote: “Let us hope … something may be done for us poor people they are dying away.” The editor continued, “I am much afraid none of us will be alive by and by” and urged, “Why dont the black fellows pray to the king to get us away from this place.”Footnote 241 Officials took further ameliorative action two months later.
In January 1838 the new Tasmanian Governor, Sir John Franklin, toured Wybalenna. He agreed to move the inmates to Port Phillip. However, as Lyndall Ryan has observed, “Franklin's support came too late. The dispatch from the secretary of state for the colonies in London, Lord Glenelg, leaving the decision for removal in the hands of the governor of New South Wales, Sir George Gipps, in whose jurisdiction Port Phillip lay, had already been sent.” Gipps decided against accepting Wybalenna inmates and Franklin chose not to resettle them on Tasmania proper.Footnote 242 Officials added fresh meat to rations in 1838, but in April Robinson reported that if deaths “continue much longer no vestige of their race will be left behind.”Footnote 243
Mortality persisted, but government improvements cut the annual death rate dramatically. Between 1833 and 1838 approximately 100 Aborigines died on Flinders Island, nearly half the population, or about seventeen per year. From 1835 to 1838, forty-three to forty-six died there, or about eleven per year. During the next nine years—after changes were made—between twenty-nine and forty-eight died and Wybalenna's annual mortality rate dropped to between 3.2 and 5.3.Footnote 244 Meanwhile, eleven children were also taken away to Hobart's Orphan School.Footnote 245
In 1844 some whites tried to bring Wybalenna's few dozen inmates back to mainland Tasmania. In 1852, West recalled, “A Finance Committee of the Legislative Council proposed the restoration of the natives” to the mainland, but “the measure was delayed.”Footnote 246 Some inmates then appealed to the pinnacle of British power. They petitioned Queen Victoria in 1846, asking her to intervene.Footnote 247 Secretary of State for the Colonies Earl Grey then “instructed the colonial government to prepare for the removal of the Aboriginal community from Flinders Island.”Footnote 248 Finally, “in October of [1847] they were landed in Van Diemen's Land, and located at Oyster Bay.”Footnote 249
Only forty-seven disembarked.Footnote 250 Along with earlier camps, Wybalenna had completed the near-annihilation of Tasmania's “full-descent” Aborigines. In a conversation with Arthur, an Aborigine named Black Tom told the Lieutenant Governor: “Put him in a gaol, Mata Guberna!! You take it him own country, take it him black woman, kill’t right out, all him litta child—den you put him in your gaol. Ah, Mata Guberna, dat a very good way. ’Pose you like dat way—’pose all same dat black un! I nebber like dat way. You better kill it right out.”Footnote 251
Today, the yellow, black, and red Aboriginal Australian flag flies before the Flinders Island airport terminal. Its flutter and crack call attention to Aboriginal Tasmanian survival. Thousands now claim part–Aboriginal Tasmanian identity. “Official figures recorded 38 Aborigines in 1961 [and] 10,113 in 1994.”Footnote 252 The numbers continue to grow. In 2001, 15,773 Tasmanians claimed Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander identity.Footnote 253
Genocide
British policies and local whites’ actions almost annihilated Tasmania's Aborigines. From 1803 to 1847, settlement policies, murders, abductions, massacres, and incarceration reduced them from thousands to less than 100 “full-descent” Aboriginal Tasmanians.
The Aboriginal Tasmanians’ near-annihilation fits the two-part legal definition set froth in the U.N. Genocide Convention. First, multiple perpetrators articulated, in word and deed, “intent to destroy.” Second, they committed at least four genocidal acts listed in the convention. “Killing members of the group” has been well documented. The rapes and assaults repeatedly described up to 1833 amounted to “causing serious bodily harm” on the basis of group identity. Further, from 1833 Wybalenna employees and Hobart decision makers began receiving evidence of their wards’ mass deaths, yet took almost no corrective action until 1837–38. By holding Aborigines in detention despite years of population decline, these officials seem to have been “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” at least until 1837–38. Individual whites were also involved in “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” As with other crimes against Aborigines, the state failed to punish abduction, and some whites exploited this permissive policy. In light of the U.N. definition, sufficient evidence exists to designate the Tasmanian catastrophe genocide.
The roles of disease, decision makers in Hobart and London, and nonstate actors complicate this interpretation. Disease underpins Windschuttle's argument that “this small, precarious society quickly collapsed under the dual weight of the susceptibility of its members to disease and [its own] abuse and neglect of its women.”Footnote 254 Yet apart from some exceptions, such as venereal disease, existing primary sources conclusively document no “Old World” epidemics among Aboriginal Tasmanians prior to 1829.Footnote 255 Though it reduced the birthrate, venereal disease probably did not kill hundreds of Aboriginal Tasmanians. In contrast, Reynolds has estimated that 250–400 were killed between 1804 and 1831, and Ryan has estimated that whites killed some 700 between 1823 and 1832 alone.Footnote 256
One intellectual legacy of the Nazi Holocaust is a widespread assumption that “intent to destroy” must be articulated by a national leader like Hitler and documented in an official written plan like the 1942 Wannsee Conference Protocol. Through that lens, designating the Tasmanian catastrophe genocide is impossible. Extant sources do not document Arthur ever articulating any plan to “destroy” Aboriginal Tasmanians “in whole or in part.” From this lack of evidence, one could mistakenly conclude that colonial officials were innocent of genocide. However, prosecutors need not produce a written statement of intent to convict a party of genocide.Footnote 257
Another Holocaust legacy is the misconception that all genocide perpetrators must be state actors. There is no such requirement in international law. However, as West put it in 1852, “When [a convict] shot down the native, and acquired distinction by his butcheries, justice became scrupulous: the laws were silent—religion and humanity were silent; and the fallen black, like the uprooted forest, was thought of as an encumbrance removed!”Footnote 258 In the end, whoever the direct agents, sustained mass murder rarely takes place without government collusion.
Britons destroyed Aboriginal Tasmanians not only out of racism, but also because an official culture of terror created a white population so hardened to violence that Aborigines could be “hunted down like wild beasts.”Footnote 259 Should not London have foreseen and acted to prevent such a result of establishing a colony 58 percent of whose population in 1822 were criminals? Through the colony's early years, the culture of terror developed in tandem with ever-increasing brutality and violence against Aborigines. A succession of Hobart and London regimes spoke of Aborigines as British subjects but, in practice, gave away their land and afforded them neither protection nor rights, effectively sanctioning violence against them. Later, when British soldiers were unable to defeat Aboriginal insurgents, colonial officials responded with the same policies they had long employed to control convicts and exterminate bushrangers: terror and killing. London condoned these policies. In reservations—notably Wybalenna—officials forcibly detained Aborigines and then chose, particularly between 1833 and 1837–38, not to provide materials known to be necessary for their survival. Only after five out of six prisoners had died did administrators free survivors. Officials thus bear responsibility for destroying many of their prisoner wards.
Some Australian conservatives, Keith Windschuttle foremost among them, have attempted to rewrite Tasmanian history in order to defend a triumphal narrative of British settlement in Australia. They have tried to erase Melville's contemporary assessment that “the manner in which the Government of this Island acted toward [Aborigines] will ever be a stigma on its history.”Footnote 260 They blame Aborigines for their own near-extermination and airbrush over many indefensible acts of settlers, convicts, bushrangers, soldiers, police, and administrators in Hobart and London. Yet primary sources document a darker story. Some Britons engaged in genocidal massacres and some agents of the British Empire were complicit in or directly responsible for a catastrophe that indelibly stained Australian and British history. Some were passive bystanders, but others, like Melville, Herman Merivale, and John West, bravely publicized the catastrophe for what it was: a series of events behind which lurked human agency. It is difficult to cover this up now.
Australian historian Tony Barta has suggested that Australia is “a nation founded on genocide.”Footnote 261 Further regional studies are necessary to accurately assess this statement, but Tasmania under British rule was clearly a site of genocide.
