The British Governors in Australia such as Arthur, Bourke and Gipps did honestly try to see that the Crown's native subjects enjoyed the protection of British law and that murderers were brought to trial.
Time to revisit The Fatal Shore for me. I agree it's very Blood Meridian-esque, and I wish the grim specifics were more widely known, rather than the amorphous shame that haunts us here in the present.
Are you familiar with Joe Heinrich's comments about the first Tasmanians re technology in Secret to Our Success?
Mark Twain also wrote an account describing the beginning of this horror story, and of the man who, apparently in good faith, devoted a part of his life to 'opening up' Tasmania, only to spend his dying days in lasting regret.
This essay’s sources are almost entirely secondary and literary: Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore, Niall Ferguson’s Empire, and Jan Morris.
Please read Keith Windschuttle’s work. His method was the opposite—systematic checking of colonial archives, newspapers, official correspondence, and the footnotes of the academic historians (Lyndall Ryan, Henry Reynolds, Lloyd Robson) whose figures and atrocity stories the popular books recycled. He concluded that those historians had inflated, mis-cited, or invented evidence.
An essay that leans on Hughes without that archival filter reproduces the same errors.
Windschuttle accepted the basic demographic fact that the full-blood Tasmanian population collapsed after 1803 and that Truganini (d. 1876) was conventionally treated as the last. But that fact is not the causal story told here.
This essay is the popular version of “history” today: The British presence produced a unique imperial genocide! Sealers, convicts, bushrangers and settlers hunted the Tasmanians “for sport,” abducted and mutilated women, and the Black Line plus Robinson’s removals finished the work. Ferguson’s phrase “hunted down, confined and ultimately exterminated” is endorsed.
Windschuttle’s real history is grounded in the same period’s *actual records*: There was no government policy of extermination. Lieutenant-Governor Arthur and the Colonial Office repeatedly instructed that Aborigines were British subjects entitled to protection; Sir George Murray’s 1830 warning about an “indelible stain” is real, but it was a warning against any such policy, not evidence that one existed.
Windschuttle’s tally of plausible, documented violent Aboriginal deaths at settler hands is approximately 118; documented settler deaths at Aboriginal hands in the same years run higher (around 187). Most of the population decline occurred through introduced respiratory and venereal disease (an epidemiological shock to a long-isolated group of perhaps only 2,000 people) and through the removal of women by both Bass Strait sealers and,m some Aboriginal men themselves trading women. Reproductive collapse followed.
*That is cultural disintegration, not Lemkin’s genocide.*
The essay’s vignettes of ear-cutting, hand-chopping and “killing for sport” come from the same pool of isolated convict, sealer and bushranger incidents that colonial officials themselves recorded and sometimes prosecuted.
Windschuttle finds them to be real but unrepresentative of settler society or official policy. The Black Line of 1830 was an acknowledged military fiasco that captured two people; it was not an efficient killing machine. Robinson’s “Friendly Mission” and the Flinders Island settlement were humanitarian (if medically disastrous) attempts at protection and “civilisation,” not a concentration camp designed for extinction. Deaths there were overwhelmingly from disease and the psychological effects of deracination, which the records of the period already described.
Windschuttle agrees the Tasmanians had been isolated for millennia, possessed an extremely simple material toolkit (wooden spears and clubs, digging sticks, no pottery, no metal, no watercraft capable of reaching the mainland after the land bridge drowned), and lived by hunting and gathering. He cited contemporary observers that they carried fire rather than routinely kindling it and that they lacked words corresponding to European notions of exclusive landed property, ownership or trespass. He therefore rejected the idea that the 1820s raids constituted territorial “resistance warfare.” The raids, he argued from the pattern of targets and loot, were overwhelmingly for flour, sugar, tea, blankets and other novel goods, plus revenge killings—criminality and plunder, not a patriotic defence of “country” as later historians recast it. Windschuttle notes that their behaviour showed no exclusive territoriality of the Polynesian type. The first two decades of settlement saw little organised violence; a people who regarded the island as exclusively theirs would not have waited twenty years to act.
Present-day Tasmanian Aboriginal identity politics is a late-twentieth-century construction. After Truganini the official and scientific consensus was that the full-blood population had ended; mixed-descent people on the Furneaux Islands and elsewhere were not then treated as a continuing “nation” with land-rights claims. Windschuttle shows that it is absurd to treat those later claims as compensation for a genocide that the records do not show.
This essay’s tone - “doomed from first contact,” - belongs to the literary tradition Windschuttle placed on the wrong side of the History Wars. The British colonisation of Tasmania was, by the standards of the age, unusually constrained by law, evangelical sentiment and official paperwork. Disease and the disruption of a tiny, isolated hunter-gatherer society did the demographic work that later writers attributed to organised massacre.
A strange post. Not one reference to either academic research or to contemporary analysis - for example the Nicholas Clements chapter in The Australian Wars (2025), which provides a clearer look at the resistance to British expansion and the resultant increase in violence against the Aborigines. A glance around google search will show estimates for the population much higher than the 4000 stated here - eg 15,000 at https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/the-black-line.
One of the strengths of The Australian Wars is to show that the British of the 19th century were not unwilling to acknowledge the intent to remove and kill as needed. The silence came in the 20th century (as Henry Reynolds for example has set out).
At first glance, which is all it appears to merit, this contains many unsupported assertions. It’s premise that the genocide was merely some sort of careless accident is contradicted by most authoritative sources.
Why oh why do the strong & ignorant always make this world poorer by eradicating what they don’t even try to understand. The knowledge this world has lost is irreplaceable.😡
The British Governors in Australia such as Arthur, Bourke and Gipps did honestly try to see that the Crown's native subjects enjoyed the protection of British law and that murderers were brought to trial.
Harrowing stuff, thanks for writing.
Hmmm, we really haven’t learnt much, have we? Interesting article, a bit depressing, but I’ll take that over ignorance. Thanks for writing.
This article only deepens ignorance.
Time to revisit The Fatal Shore for me. I agree it's very Blood Meridian-esque, and I wish the grim specifics were more widely known, rather than the amorphous shame that haunts us here in the present.
Are you familiar with Joe Heinrich's comments about the first Tasmanians re technology in Secret to Our Success?
Love that book, don’t recall what he said though about them. Will look it up
Mark Twain also wrote an account describing the beginning of this horror story, and of the man who, apparently in good faith, devoted a part of his life to 'opening up' Tasmania, only to spend his dying days in lasting regret.
First red flag: Niall Ferguson.
This essay’s sources are almost entirely secondary and literary: Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore, Niall Ferguson’s Empire, and Jan Morris.
Please read Keith Windschuttle’s work. His method was the opposite—systematic checking of colonial archives, newspapers, official correspondence, and the footnotes of the academic historians (Lyndall Ryan, Henry Reynolds, Lloyd Robson) whose figures and atrocity stories the popular books recycled. He concluded that those historians had inflated, mis-cited, or invented evidence.
An essay that leans on Hughes without that archival filter reproduces the same errors.
Windschuttle accepted the basic demographic fact that the full-blood Tasmanian population collapsed after 1803 and that Truganini (d. 1876) was conventionally treated as the last. But that fact is not the causal story told here.
This essay is the popular version of “history” today: The British presence produced a unique imperial genocide! Sealers, convicts, bushrangers and settlers hunted the Tasmanians “for sport,” abducted and mutilated women, and the Black Line plus Robinson’s removals finished the work. Ferguson’s phrase “hunted down, confined and ultimately exterminated” is endorsed.
Windschuttle’s real history is grounded in the same period’s *actual records*: There was no government policy of extermination. Lieutenant-Governor Arthur and the Colonial Office repeatedly instructed that Aborigines were British subjects entitled to protection; Sir George Murray’s 1830 warning about an “indelible stain” is real, but it was a warning against any such policy, not evidence that one existed.
Windschuttle’s tally of plausible, documented violent Aboriginal deaths at settler hands is approximately 118; documented settler deaths at Aboriginal hands in the same years run higher (around 187). Most of the population decline occurred through introduced respiratory and venereal disease (an epidemiological shock to a long-isolated group of perhaps only 2,000 people) and through the removal of women by both Bass Strait sealers and,m some Aboriginal men themselves trading women. Reproductive collapse followed.
*That is cultural disintegration, not Lemkin’s genocide.*
The essay’s vignettes of ear-cutting, hand-chopping and “killing for sport” come from the same pool of isolated convict, sealer and bushranger incidents that colonial officials themselves recorded and sometimes prosecuted.
Windschuttle finds them to be real but unrepresentative of settler society or official policy. The Black Line of 1830 was an acknowledged military fiasco that captured two people; it was not an efficient killing machine. Robinson’s “Friendly Mission” and the Flinders Island settlement were humanitarian (if medically disastrous) attempts at protection and “civilisation,” not a concentration camp designed for extinction. Deaths there were overwhelmingly from disease and the psychological effects of deracination, which the records of the period already described.
Windschuttle agrees the Tasmanians had been isolated for millennia, possessed an extremely simple material toolkit (wooden spears and clubs, digging sticks, no pottery, no metal, no watercraft capable of reaching the mainland after the land bridge drowned), and lived by hunting and gathering. He cited contemporary observers that they carried fire rather than routinely kindling it and that they lacked words corresponding to European notions of exclusive landed property, ownership or trespass. He therefore rejected the idea that the 1820s raids constituted territorial “resistance warfare.” The raids, he argued from the pattern of targets and loot, were overwhelmingly for flour, sugar, tea, blankets and other novel goods, plus revenge killings—criminality and plunder, not a patriotic defence of “country” as later historians recast it. Windschuttle notes that their behaviour showed no exclusive territoriality of the Polynesian type. The first two decades of settlement saw little organised violence; a people who regarded the island as exclusively theirs would not have waited twenty years to act.
Present-day Tasmanian Aboriginal identity politics is a late-twentieth-century construction. After Truganini the official and scientific consensus was that the full-blood population had ended; mixed-descent people on the Furneaux Islands and elsewhere were not then treated as a continuing “nation” with land-rights claims. Windschuttle shows that it is absurd to treat those later claims as compensation for a genocide that the records do not show.
This essay’s tone - “doomed from first contact,” - belongs to the literary tradition Windschuttle placed on the wrong side of the History Wars. The British colonisation of Tasmania was, by the standards of the age, unusually constrained by law, evangelical sentiment and official paperwork. Disease and the disruption of a tiny, isolated hunter-gatherer society did the demographic work that later writers attributed to organised massacre.
Mate, impossible to find windshuttle. If you have copes I can buy...
No-one buys these books, they have been very effectively suppressed and are not on the market.
However, you have options like this:
https://libgen.li/edition.php?id=148648855
https://libgen.li/edition.php?id=148648869
(You'll need a VPN via a country that isn't censoring Windschuttle for his truth-crimes.)
A strange post. Not one reference to either academic research or to contemporary analysis - for example the Nicholas Clements chapter in The Australian Wars (2025), which provides a clearer look at the resistance to British expansion and the resultant increase in violence against the Aborigines. A glance around google search will show estimates for the population much higher than the 4000 stated here - eg 15,000 at https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/the-black-line.
One of the strengths of The Australian Wars is to show that the British of the 19th century were not unwilling to acknowledge the intent to remove and kill as needed. The silence came in the 20th century (as Henry Reynolds for example has set out).
Thanks, Ill check out
Sounds like a tall story to me. No evidence presented to support the claims.
In my opinion there were no Tasmanian aborigines.
All stories of such were fabricated, I believe.
At first glance, which is all it appears to merit, this contains many unsupported assertions. It’s premise that the genocide was merely some sort of careless accident is contradicted by most authoritative sources.
No
Why oh why do the strong & ignorant always make this world poorer by eradicating what they don’t even try to understand. The knowledge this world has lost is irreplaceable.😡