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Title: Tasmanian Genocide
Author: Anonymous
Date: 2004
Language: en
Topics: anti-civ, Green Anarchist, history, indigenous, Oceania
Source: Retrieved on January 1, 2005 from http://www.greenanarchist.org
Notes: from Green Anarchist #73–74

Anonymous

Tasmanian Genocide

Once upon a time a people lived happy and free. They practiced no

agriculture, made no pottery, wore no clothes and were as gentle and

content as the other wild animals they lived with.

Then the civilisers came. And within seventy years all the native people

of Tasmania were wiped out. It was called the “The Black War of Van

Diemen’s Land”, the official campaign of extermination begun in 1803,

which decimated the native people of Tasmania in the usual brutal

civilised way.

“The Tasmanians were by missionaries and friends of man civilized under

the earth.”

— German anthropologist, Hellwald.

By 1830 the few remaining Tasmanian natives were rounded up and

imprisoned on Flinders Island where by 1843 only fifty survived.

“On Flinders Island Robinson was determined to civilize and Christianize

the survivors. His settlement — at a windy site with little fresh water

— was run like a jail. Children were separated from parents to

facilitate the work of civilizing them. The regimental daily schedule

included Bible reading, hymn singing, and inspection of beds and dishes

for cleanness and neatness. However, the jail diet caused malnutrition,

which combined with illness to make the natives die. Few infants

survived more than a few weeks. The government reduced expenditures in

the hope that the native would die out. By 1869 only Truganini, one

other woman, and one man remained alive.”

Jared Diamond (

www.cwo.com

)

The last survivor, Truganini, was defiant to the last.

“An old woman lay dying in a white-walled room, upon a white bed,

surrounded by whiteskinned doctors and nurses. In all that whiteness,

her dark skin glistened affirmatively; even with the sweat of death on

her face, a dominant vitality seemed to flow from her. She cursed at her

doctors, and sometimes, in a cracked voice, she sang and chanted. At

last she fell back against the pillows and whispered, ‘Bury me behind

the mountains’; and so she died.” (pg 137, “Fall of the Sparrow” by Jay

Williams, Oxford University Press, 1951)

Her mother had been stabbed to death by a European, her sister was

kidnapped by Europeans and her intended husband was drowned by two

Europeans in her presence, while his murderers raped her. Even in death

she was mocked — displayed in a museum in contradiction with her dying

wishes. (She was eventually, in 1976 allowed rest at sea after a lot of

fuss.)

What do we know about her people? No record remains, only impressions of

missionaries, anthropologists, invader settlers and government agents

who made no effort to try to understand Tasmanian culture. They were

hunter gatherers who lived in small bands, (nine widely dispersed tribes

at the time of the European invasion), breastfed their kids to a ripe

age, practiced no circumcision or cannibalism, sang and danced a lot,

were well-fed, strong, happy, and abhorred agriculture.

Archaeologists found certain peculiarities in the Tasmanians’ history:

They had started to wear clothes at some stage, but then abandoned

them again about 4,000 years ago. Although the climate was cold and wet

in winter, the Tasmanians wore nothing but a small pieces of wallaby

skin as necklaces.

They stopped using the bone tools they’d been using to make the

clothes and didn’t seem to have a need for weaving tools, axes,

spearthrowers or boomerangs.

They stopped eating scale fish. When the Europeans arrived the

Tasmanians preferred to swim further out into the open ocean to gather

abalone and other shellfish.

They had been using fire to flush out small animals and encourage

fresh plant growth, but discontinued this practice too.

They had no fire-making tools, but kept a fire stick burning and if

one tribe’s fire went out they had to go and ask another tribe for some

fire. Mainly used for ritual, sacred purposes, not to keep warm by.

All the changes occured about 4,000 years ago and neatly turn civilised

ideas of progress on its head. The usual argument, that ‘they didn’t

know how to’ do such and such, was clearly not true as, for example,

catching scale fish involved far less skill and knowledge than gathering

shellfish from far out in the sea. And in the other things, like

cloth-making, they obviously did know how to do them, just chose not to

for some reason.

We don’t have any testimonies from the Tasmanians themselves, so I’ll

just hazard a guess as to why these changes occurred. They felt more

free while naked, they were afraid of over-fishing the scale fish and

were guided by instinct and observance to see the destructiveness of

burning areas of bush land. They weren’t afraid of ditching an obviously

unusable idea if it hindered them in any way or damaged their home.

Being free was far more important than being comfortable.

Of course, we don’t know though because all the people were murdered

without telling anything of themselves. Anthropologists must surely be

wringing their hands over the rock paintings which will never reveal

their secrets to them (a large number of hieroglyphic rock carvings were

found) and spend many long hours hypothesing about what the natives

might and might not have ‘believed’ in. Perhaps the Tasmanians knew how

futile it is to talk to these white fellas who cannot understand

anything.

Perhaps their last defiance was to leave this earth without divulging

anything of themselves to the stupid, brutalised and brutal people who

visited their land and destroyed it. Fuck you! Miserable fellas from the

prisons of Europe you wouldn’t know what we are about even if we told

you. Better to die than live like you, as prisoners. We go to our deep

earth graves whole, intact, impeccable, while you must live in the hell

you’re creating.

The Tasmanians are an enigma, a glimpse of a way of life that could not

survive alongside the civilised invasion. They gave nothing to the nasty

morons who over-ran them, preferring to hold onto their dignity and

integrity, revealing none of their stories or songs, nothing of their

history, none of themselves. So we don’t even know what they called

themselves or the land they lived in. It wouldn’t have meant anything to

us anyway. And their stories and songs and philosophy of the universe —

we would understand them even less.