Dr Shayne Breen is a Research Associate (honorary), School of Geography and Environmental Studies, University Of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania (see: http://www.academia.edu/2474043/Extermination_Extinction_Genocide_British_Colonialism_and_Tasmanian_Aborigines ) .
Dr Shayne Breen on the Tasmanian Aboriginal Genocide (2008): “The island of Tasmania is separated from the south coast of Australia by the stormy waters of Bass Strait. Similar in size to Ireland, Tasmania’s present shape was formed some 10,000 years ago when the last ice age ended and global sea levels rose by some 130 metres and flooded the land bridge thatconnected the island to continental Australia. Long before the flooding, some25,000 years earlier, Aboriginal people walked across the land bridge from southeast Australia and became the island’s first people. They practised a dynamic hunter-gatherer economy that successfully weathered dramaticclimate change, major topographical transformations, and 10,000 years of isolation from all outside contact until French sailors briefly landed on the island’s east coast in early 1772.
The ancient Aboriginal society was catastrophically disrupted by theBritish invasion that began in September 1803, twenty five years after theBritish invasion of continental Australia began at Botany Bay in New SouthWales. The invaders included military and free colonists intent on establishing an agricultural economy, transported convicts to provide slave labour, andsmall numbers of sealers and whalers. At first few in number, the invaders hadgrown to 3,000 in 1818, 13,000 in 1824, and 23,500 by 1830, of whom 75%were convicts. Along with the increase in the invader population, sheep numbers increased from zero in 1803 to 54,000 in 1816 to one million by1830. By 1830 all major Aboriginal hunting grounds had been occupied. In 1803, the Aboriginal population was around 6,000, by 1818 it wasless than 2,000 and by 1829 some 400 remained. From 1832 the surviving 200or so were transported to an open air prison at a place called Wybalenna, on Flinders Island in Bass Strait. In 1847, as a cost-cutting measure, the remaining forty five survivors of Wybalenna were removed to Oyster Cove, south of Hobart, and housed in a convict station that had been abandoned because it was permanently damp and infested with vermin. The so-called last of her race, a woman called Truganini, died in Hobart in 1876… The Australians were far more numerous - estimates vary from 300,000 to one million in1788 - and were seen to have survived colonisation despite their annihilation over much of the continent.” [1].
[1]. Dr Shayne Breen, “Extermination, extinction, genocide: British colonialism and Tasmanian Aborigines”, Academic.edu, 2008: http://www.academia.edu/2474043/Extermination_Extinction_Genocide_British_Colonialism_and_Tasmanian_Aborigines .