Tasmania's Aborigines occupy a grim chapter in modern British history. Their homelands, originally known as Van Diemen's Land, were hastily colonized by the British during the Napoleonic wars to forestall a possible French claim; and in the aftermath, when Aboriginal hunting grounds were opened up to British settlers without their permission, they violently resisted to such an extent that the British governor deported them to an island in Bass Strait, where many of them died. Was it a deliberate decision to bring about their virtual extinction, or were the mass deaths an accidental outcome?

Tom Lawson is the latest historian to consider the question. He contends that the British government from the outset placed settler rights well above Tasmanian Aboriginal rights and never contested the governor's decision to make Tasmania “native free.” These facts alone, he argues, make the British government guilty of genocide. But it does not stop there. He further contends that in the aftermath of deportation and the realization that the Tasmanian Aborigines were fast disappearing, British officials devised new genocidal ideologies to justify their dreadful act. These included the view that the Tasmanian Aborigines had not made productive use of their homeland and thus had no right to occupy it and that their culture was too primitive to withstand British civilization. The most persistent ideology, however, was the belief that Tasmanians were the “missing link” between ape and man and thus were on the road to extinction even before the British colonized their homelands. It was this ideology, Lawson argues, that became so firmly embedded in the British psyche in the twentieth century that even today it is almost impossible to dispel.

Australian historians of the Tasmanian Aborigines like me have addressed the deportation and extinction questions from a postcolonial perspective. In our view, the Tasmanian Aborigines were among the first indigenous peoples in the nineteenth century to violently contest settler rights, thus forcing the British government to place indigenous rights on the agenda. Further, contrary to widespread belief, Tasmanians did not die out in the aftermath of deportation or at any other period in Tasmania's history. Rather like other indigenous peoples driven from their homelands across the British Empire, some of them survived deportation and established new communities (in this case, on the Bass Strait islands). Following the resurgence of indigenous peoples worldwide in the 1970s, the people of this community asserted their rights and identity as Tasmanian Aborigines. The campaign for recognition includes the return of stolen land and ancestral remains held in cultural institutions across the world.

Lawson embraces the survival of the Tasmanian Aborigines, but, as pointed out above, he contests our view that the British government initially had no defined policy towards Tasmanian Aboriginal rights and left the governor to make the awful decision of deportation. Rather, he argues that the governor operated within the parameters of clearly defined British policy of settler rights at the expense of indigenous rights. He also contests the view of British historian Bernard Porter that knowledge of what happened to the Tasmanian Aborigines was barely known to most people in Britain. The examples he offers are compelling and form the most original and important part of the book. They include the influential exhibition in London in 1835 by respected English artist John Glover, who migrated to Tasmania in 1830. His paintings revealed Tasmania before and after it became “native free.” One set showed a group of Tasmanian Aborigines on the eve of deportation, enjoying the last moments of freedom, and the other showed Tasmania in the aftermath as a “native free” English landscape. Other examples include John West's History of Tasmania (1852), which argued that the Tasmanian Aborigines by virtue of their inferior culture were destined to make way for the superior British settler, and James Bonwick's Last of the Tasmanians (1870), which Lawson considers was “both an anguished cry at indigenous people's fate and yet in essence a defence of the colonial idea and the system that has precipitated that destruction” (155). By far the most pervasive ideology, however, was scientific racism, which, Lawson argues, emerged in the aftermath of the death of the alleged last Tasmanian man, William Lanne, in 1869. A key tenet of the ideology was that on the far side of the world there could be the “missing link” between ape and man. From the outset, he argues, the Tasmanian Aborigines, by virtue of their alleged extinction, were leading candidates. As Britain's leading museums vied for vestiges of the “missing link,” they commissioned the looting of Tasmanian Aboriginal skeletal remains for ownership and permanent display, thus reinforcing the genocidal belief that they were extinct. He contends that over the next century the myth of extinction became so embedded in the British that when it was contested in the 1990s by the people of the resurgent Tasmanian Aboriginal community in their quest for the return of their ancestral remains, many museum directors simply could not countenance the fact that they were never extinct.

As the first British historian to place the extinction myth within genocidal discourse and how it resonates in British society today and in focusing on the ideologies invented by the victors to justify their exterminatory behaviour, Lawson has produced a powerful and confronting text. This is certainly hard territory for British historians to negotiate, but it is vitally important they do so. In this book Lawson has made a brilliant start.