This page sets out the war fought in lutruwita (Tasmania) between 1824 and 1831 and its aftermath. Tasmanian Aboriginal Peoples are referred to here as the Palawa people, a collective contemporary term covering between eight and twelve original language groups.
The frontier in Tasmania
The Frontier Wars ran across Australia from 1788 into the twentieth century. Tasmania's phase was early, short and concentrated. The University of Newcastle's Colonial Frontier Massacres project documents 34 massacres in Tasmania with 478 Aboriginal victims, and 29 of those massacres fall in the single decade of the 1820s.
Read more about frontier massacres across Australia.
Two things made Tasmania different. It is an island, so there was nowhere to withdraw to. And the pastoral push into the midlands, the country between Hobart and Launceston, put settlers directly across the seasonal routes Palawa people had used for thousands of years.
Risdon Cove and the first years
On 3 May 1804, soldiers fired on a Palawa hunting party at Risdon Cove on the Derwent. Accounts of the number killed vary and the event is still contested, but it is commonly treated as the opening of frontier violence in Tasmania.
For the next two decades the violence was mostly local and unrecorded. Sealers working the Bass Strait islands took Palawa women, by trade and by force. Shepherds and stock keepers on remote runs operated without oversight. In February 1828, Van Diemen's Land Company men killed around thirty Palawa people at Cape Grim in the far north west.
The Black War
By 1824 the conflict was open. Palawa groups, principally the Oyster Bay and Big River peoples, attacked huts, stock and settlers across the settled districts. They used fire, ambush and detailed knowledge of country. Settlers had firearms and numbers.
In November 1828 Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur declared martial law across the settled districts. It stayed in force until 1832. In practice it meant a settler could shoot an Aboriginal person without answering for it.
The Black Line
In October 1830, Arthur put roughly 2,200 soldiers, settlers and convicts into a human chain across the settled districts and marched it south east, intending to drive the remaining Oyster Bay and Big River people onto the Tasman Peninsula and hold them there.
It ran for seven weeks. It captured two people, a man and a boy. Everyone else walked through the line at night.
The operation was the largest mobilisation in the colony's history and it emptied the treasury. Its failure ended the argument for a military solution and made Robinson's alternative the only one left on the table. It also demonstrated, to the Palawa as much as to Arthur, the scale of force the colony was prepared to put in the field.
Robinson's mission
George Augustus Robinson was a builder and lay preacher who arrived in Hobart in 1824. In 1829 he was given charge of the Aboriginal establishment on Bruny Island, and from 1830 to 1834 he travelled the island persuading surviving Palawa groups to surrender and relocate. He was not Chief Protector of Aborigines in Tasmania. That appointment came later, in 1839, and it was for the Port Phillip District.
Robinson worked through Palawa intermediaries, among them Truganini, Woorady and Mannalargenna, without whom he would not have found anyone. He learned language and custom, and he promised safety, provisions and eventual return to Country.
The return never happened. Whether Robinson believed his own promise is argued over. What is not argued over is the outcome: the people who accepted it were removed from the island.
Wybalenna
From 1833 the surrendered groups were shipped to Wybalenna on Flinders Island, a name usually translated as Black Man's Houses. Housing was inadequate, rations were poor, and respiratory disease moved through the settlement continuously. People were required to take European names, wear European clothing and attend chapel.
Around two hundred people passed through Wybalenna. Most died there. Robinson left in 1839 for the Port Phillip appointment.
In 1846 the residents petitioned Queen Victoria, in writing, protesting that the terms of their removal had been broken. It is one of the earliest documents of its kind in the country, and it is the clearest evidence available that the people at Wybalenna understood exactly what had been done to them.
Oyster Cove
Wybalenna closed in 1847. Fewer than fifty survivors were moved to a disused convict station at Oyster Cove, south of Hobart, on low ground with bad water. Conditions were no better. The population continued to fall.
Truganini died in Hobart in 1876. Against her explicit wishes her body was exhumed, and her skeleton was displayed in the Tasmanian Museum for much of the twentieth century. Her remains were not cremated and scattered in the D'Entrecasteaux Channel until 1976, a hundred years after her death.
The islands
The extinction story rests on Oyster Cove, and it is wrong because it looks in the wrong place.
From the early 1800s, Palawa women taken by sealers had established communities on the Bass Strait islands, principally Cape Barren and Flinders. Those families were outside the Wybalenna system, they were never counted in it, and they continued. Every Palawa person alive today descends from that line or from other survivors the colonial record did not track.
The consequence of not being counted was a further century of being treated as not quite real. Palawa families on Cape Barren Island were subject to their own legislation and their own removals. Children were still being taken from the island in the 1960s.
Read more about the Stolen Generations.
Palawa today
Fanny Cochrane Smith recorded Tasmanian Aboriginal songs onto wax cylinders in 1899 and 1903. They are the only sound recordings of the language that exist. She died in 1905, having been described in her own lifetime as the last of her people, which she was not.
The Palawa community in Tasmania is active in land return, language revival through palawa kani, and cultural practice including shell stringing, kelp work and bark canoe making. Country has been returned at Wybalenna, Oyster Cove and Risdon Cove.
ART ARK operates from Launceston, in the middle of the country the Black Line marched through. Eumarrah, who led resistance in the midlands, is buried at St John's, a few streets from where we work.
References
- Colonial Frontier Massacres in Australia 1788-1930, Stage 5.0 (2024), Centre for 21st Century Humanities, University of Newcastle
- Nicholas Clements, The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania (University of Queensland Press, 2014)
- Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines: A History Since 1803 (Allen & Unwin, 2012)
- Henry Reynolds and Nicholas Clements, Tongerlongeter: First Nations Leader and Tasmanian War Hero (NewSouth Publishing, 2021)
- Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre
- Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS)
