MORRIS, James. Tasmanian Aboriginal Genocide - "The Final Solution Down Under"

James Morris is a historian (for others writing about the Tasmanian genocide see: http://www.cwo.com/~lucumi/tasmania-bib.html ).

James Morris in “The Final Solution Down Under” (1972): “As the white colony grew in number and confidence, the original Tasmanians found themselves treated more and more as predators or vermin. The free settlers wanted land, and ruthlessly drive the nomads from their hunting grounds. The shifting riffraff of bushrangers and sealers used the black people as they pleased, for pleasure or for bondage. By the 1820s horrible things were happening on the island. Sometimes the black people were hunted just for fun, on foot or on horseback. Sometimes they were raped in passing, or abducted as mistresses or salves. The sealers of the Bass Strait islands established a slave society of their own, employing the well-tried disciplines of slavery – clubbing, stringing up from trees or flogging with kangaroo-gut cat o’-nine –tails. We hear of children kidnapped as pets or servants., of a woman chained up like an animal in a shepherd’s hut., of men castrated to keep them off their own women. In one foray seventy aborigines were killed, the men shot, the women and children dragged from crevices in the rocks to have their brains dashed out. A man called Carrots, desiring a native woman, decapitated her husband, hung his head around her neck, and drove her home to his shack … Truganini was terrified that, like King Billy before her, she would be exhumed and dissected after burial. “Don’t let them cut me up,” she pleaded on her death bed. ”Bury me behind the mountains”. So when seventy-three years old, she died, in may 1876, her body was taken secretly through the night in a pauper’s coffin on a cart , to the Cascades Female Factory- the women’s reformatory, that is – in a cleft in the hills behind Hobart [web editor: I lived opposite and used to play there as a child]. There she was buried to the tolling of the reformatory bell, in the presence of the premier and the colonial secretary (for in the course of these events Tasmania graduated to self-government but without the attendance, we are told, of any of the factory inmates. She was the very last [full-blooded Tasmanian; there are thousands of aboriginal descendants today]. [1].

[1]. James Morris, “The final solution Down Under”, Horizon, vol. 14, no. 1 (Winter 1972), pp60-71; republished in Chalk, F. and Jonassohn, K. (1990), “The History and Sociology of Genocide. Analyses and Case Studies” (Yale University Press, New Haven & London), “The Tasmanians”, pp204-222.