How many British schoolchildren ever learn of this genocide?
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Crow-hunting in Tasmania
The genocide of the Tasmanian Aboriginals is extremely challenging to write about. Not only because of the casual barbarism with which these human beings were hunted down like wild animals, but also because the killings, over thirty years or so, were primarily carried out by convict bush-hunters, settlers and farmers. There was no ‘extermination order’, as in South-West Africa, no centrally organised military massacre, indeed the British authorities were extremely careful about what they ordered, what they committed to paper. In that long tradition of hypocrisy, and ‘turning a blind eye’ to things, perhaps the extermination of the indigenous Tasmanians could be described as ‘A Very British Genocide’.
According to Mark Cocker – whose work Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold is a haunting account of Europe’s extermination of tribal peoples around the world – the best estimate we have of the original Aboriginal population of the island at the beginning of the nineteenth century is between 3,000 and 4,000 people (though some more recent estimates put this figure higher, at around 6,000). They were hunter-gatherers, who over centuries had evolved a way of life where communities moved with the seasonal availability of a rich diversity of foods – fungi and ferns, kangaroos, possums and wombats, seals and marine plants, seabirds and eggs, oysters and shellfish. Larger prey such as kangaroos and seals were killed with throwing clubs or their highly effective hardwood spears, sometimes ten to fifteen feet long. Captain Cook, who had explored part of the island in 1777, was not exaggerating when he reported that it was ‘a country capable of producing every necessity of life, with a climate the finest in the world’ – though his opinion of the inhabitants was, predictably, lower, ‘an ignorant wretched race of mortals’, as he put it. A sentiment that the indigenous people who met Cook might well have shared about him and his men, though with rather greater justification.
The first documented massacre happened on the morning of 3 May 1804, just outside the settlement of Risdon on the River Derwent. Around 300 Aboriginals, including women and children, emerged from the trees in pursuit of grazing kangaroos. The officer in charge at Risdon, Lieutenant Moore, decided that the settlement was under attack and ordered his soldiers to fire into the crowd of hunters, killing many of them. Moore commented afterwards that he had wanted rifle practice and was pleased ‘to see the Niggers run’. Over the next twenty-six years thousands more were killed, in what can be described as three phases of genocide: first, the eradication of the Bass Strait Aboriginals on the northern coast and the islands; secondly, the extermination of inland Aboriginals by bushrangers; and finally, the killing of the remainder of the population in the ‘Black War’ of 1825–31.
The northern coast of Tasmania had always been the main hunting ground of seals for the indigenous people. But by the early 1800s there were already more than 200 European sealers who had settled along the coast and on the Bass Strait islands, and the industry in sealskins was growing rapidly, with 100,000 seals killed for their skins between 1800 and 1806. This not only had a disastrous impact on traditional Aboriginal food sources, but the sealers also destroyed the familial bonds of the local people, by ‘acquiring’ Tasmanian women, who were the most skilled seal catchers, sometimes through barter, sometimes by kidnap. But effectively they became slaves to the European sealers, used for labour and sex, and treated appallingly. And if the women attempted to return to their communities, the violence was brutal. One runaway was tied to a tree by a group of sealers, had her ear cut off, and flesh from a thigh, and was then forced to eat these. Not surprisingly, such behaviour resulted in all-out conflict between the European sealers and the northern Tasmanians, but the Europeans’ guns meant that the fight was never going to be equal; the north-east coast became a killing ground, where corpses and skeletons of Aboriginals were soon everywhere. By 1830, we learn from Cocker that only seventy-five natives remained in the entire northern region, seventy-two of these being men, and not a single child to continue the line.
The second wave of extermination happened inland, and was triggered by kangaroo hunting. Kangaroo meat soon became the mainstay of the Hobart and Launceston settlers, but with the population of these settlements growing rapidly, and demand for meat increasing, within a few years kangaroos had become scarce, especially near the coastal areas. This in turn led to a push to hunt the marsupials inland – the territory that had always been the main hunting grounds for the Aboriginals. The most successful hunters were known as ‘bushrangers’, who used hunting dogs, and were mostly escaped convicts who survived by selling meat and skins to the settlers; they were some of the most hardened and violent men imaginable, regarded as ‘the lowest of the low’ in the colony. Competition over the dwindling stocks of kangaroos gave these bushrangers the perfect excuse to use limitless violence against the Aboriginals inland, and between 1808 and 1824 nearly half of all the remaining indigenous Tasmanians were killed – more than 1,000 people.
The psychopathic nature of many of these bushrangers is notable in contemporary accounts of their repellent behaviour. One boasted to a historian of the time that he ‘liked to kill a black fellow better than smoke a pipe’. Mostly, they weren’t even thought of as human beings but rather ‘black crows’ or ‘black vermin’. Another bushranger compared shooting Aboriginals to ‘so many sparrows’, another one used them as target practice, while a third shot Tasmanians so he could feed them to his dogs. Others enjoyed torturing those who had been ‘spared’; Robert Hughes recounts a bushranger called Carrot who forced a woman to watch her husband being slaughtered, then raped her, and subsequently made her carry her husband’s severed head around her neck ‘as a plaything’.1
The British authorities officially denounced such behaviour; however, the fact that they had depended upon the bushrangers for years to provide meat for the colony rather undermined the moral righteousness of their words. The other significant reality is that the Aboriginals were clearly not treated as ‘citizens’, indeed many of the European settlers didn’t even regard them as fully human, but rather the last living link between men and apes. So the idea that they would have had any kind of human rights was laughable, and their nomadic lives and lack of permanent dwellings also meant they could not claim any rights of land ownership. All this was well understood by the bushrangers, and indeed any other group of settlers who wanted to kill or mistreat the Aboriginals – they knew there would almost certainly be no serious consequences. Throughout the years of genocide, not a single person was ever put on trial for murdering an Aboriginal.
By 1824 the European population of Tasmania had grown to 12,643, with the majority of these people living around the towns of Hobart, on the east coast, and Launceston on the north coast. Sheep farming had now established itself as the main industry on the island, which again made great inroads into the landscape, reducing the forest, and further impacting on the hunting of the indigenous Tasmanians. By 1823 there were already 200,000 sheep on the island, and by 1830 this number had leapt to 1 million – 1,000 sheep for each Aboriginal still left alive.