From Terror To Genocide Britains Tasmani PDF

From Terror to Genocide: Britain’s Tasmanian
Penal Colony and Australia’s History Wars
Benjamin Madley
I n 1997 a government inquiry found that Australia’s forcible removals of

Aboriginal children in previous decades “could properly be labeled ‘geno-
cidal.’”1 Nevertheless Prime Minister John Howard steadfastly refused to
apologize or offer reparations on behalf of his government. As a result, at least
150,000 people marched across Sydney Harbor Bridge on 28 May 2000.2 Later
that year, Australian writer Keith Windschuttle’s essay “The Myths of Frontier
Massacres in Australian History” refocused the debate on the colonial period,
during which Australia’s Aboriginal population declined from 750,000 or more
to fewer than 50,000.3 The British colonial era, 1788–1901, thus became the
focus of Australia’s “History Wars.”4 In 2002, Windschuttle self-published The
Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Van Diemen’s Land, 1803–1847. His attempt
to refute the idea that genocide took place on the island now known as Tasmania
made the question of genocide there a central and strategic Australian “History
Benjamin Madley is a doctoral candidate in history at Yale University. He is grateful to participants

and attendees of the Tasmania session at the 2006 Australian and New Zealand Law and History Society
meeting for their suggestions. He would also like to thank Anna Clark, Brian Cowan, Adam Jones,
Paul Kennedy, Ben Kiernan, Dirk Moses, Rachel Neiwert, Ian Pearce, Lyndall Ryan, Jan Simpson, and
the anonymous reviewers for the Journal of British Studies. The Yale Center for British Art and the
Yale Genocide Studies Program provided crucial financial support. This article is dedicated to the
memory of Robin Winks.
1
National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their
Families, Bringing Them Home: National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Children from Their Families (Sydney, 1997), 275.
2
Estimates ran as high as 250,000 (Australian, 30 May 2000).
3
Quadrant published Windschuttle’s three-part “The Myths of Frontier Massacres in Australian
History” between October and December 2000. Precontact Aboriginal Australian population estimates
range from 200,000 to 1,250,000. See David Horton, ed. The Encyclopedia of Aboriginal Australia,
2 vols. (Canberra, 1994), 2:889; Bain Attwood, “The Burden of the Past in the Present,” in Recon-
ciliation: Essays on Australian Reconciliation, ed. Michelle Grattan (Melbourne, 2000), 258.
4
For more, see Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, The History Wars (Melbourne, 2003).
Journal of British Studies 47 (January 2008): 77–106

䉷 2008 by The North American Conference on British Studies.
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77
78 䡵 MADLEY
Wars” battlefield.5 Two issues dominate the debate: is Australia “a nation founded
on genocide,” and did agents or citizens of the British Empire attempt to exter-
minate their Aboriginal Tasmanian subjects?6
When Britons arrived in Tasmania in 1803, they found 4,000–15,000 Aborig-
ines.7 By 1835, fewer than 400 “full-descent” Aboriginal Tasmanians remained.
British authorities incarcerated almost all of these survivors in camps, where all
but forty-seven perished by 1847.8 After 1876, only mixed-race survivors remained
in Tasmania.9 Despite over 170 years of debate over who or what was responsible
for this near-extinction, no consensus exists on its origins, process, or whether or
not it was genocide. The debate continued in 2007 with Theodore Dalrymple’s
“Why Intellectuals Like Genocide.”10 This article summarizes the Tasmanian gen-
ocide debate before explaining the origins and narrating the four phases of Ab-
original Tasmanian demographic decline. It then assesses the culpability of British
settlers and officials, while examining whether or not this catastrophe constituted
genocide.
In the early nineteenth-century British Empire, Tasmania was probably the most
terrifying place a white person could live. It ranks among the most violent of all
penal colonies in history. Isolation, official neglect, forced labor, incarceration,
torture, and executions traumatized convicts and free colonists and hardened both
to violence. Simultaneously, officials colonized Tasmania at the expense of Ab-
original land ownership, food supplies, and lives. This article will demonstrate that
Britain’s Tasmanian colonial project, in combination with a culture of terror and
official failure to protect Aborigines, opened the door to catastrophe.
Three nineteenth-century Britons first argued that settlers and their government
were to blame for Aboriginal Tasmanians’ near-annihilation. Henry Melville
reached Tasmania in 1828. As editor of the local Colonial Times newspaper from
1830 to 1839, he criticized whites in general and Tasmanian government decision
makers in particular for their treatment of Aboriginal Tasmanians. In an opinion-
5
Keith Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One, Van Diemen’s Land,
1803–1847 (Sydney, 2002).
6
Tony Barta, “Relations of Genocide: Land and Lives in the Colonization of Australia,” in Genocide
and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death, ed. Isidor Walliman and Michael N.
Dobkowski (New York, 1987), 238.
7
Precontact Aboriginal Tasmanian population statistics are contested. David Davies claimed an 1803
population of 15,000 (The Last of the Tasmanians [Sydney, 1973], 120). Archeologist Rhys Jones
estimated 3,000–5,000, but archaeologist Colin Pardoe argued, “Population estimates for [precontact]
Tasmania need upward revision. In ecological and evolutionary terms there is scope to question [Jones’s]
estimate of 3,000–5,000.” Pardoe also suggested reconsidering “carrying capacity data” (“Isolation
and Evolution in Tasmania,” Current Anthropology 32, no. 1 [February 1991]: 1–21, 11); historian
N. J. B. Plomley estimated 4,000–6,000 (The Aboriginal/Settler Clash in Van Diemen’s Land:
1803–1831 [Hobart, 1992], 10); Henry Reynolds suggested “5,000–7,000” in Fate of a Free People:
A Radical Reexamination of the Tasmanian Wars (Ringwood, 1995), 4.
8
N. J. B. Plomley, ed., Weep in Silence: A History of the Flinders Island Aboriginal Settlement with
the Flinders Island Journal of George Augustus Robinson (Hobart, 1987), 172. Two were hanged in
Melbourne and eleven sent to Hobart’s Orphan School; see Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians,
2nd ed. (St. Leonards, 1996), 197, 196, 200.
9
Several “full-descent” Aboriginal Tasmanians survived on Kangaroo Island (Rebe Taylor, Unearthed:
The Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island [Kent Town, 2002], 127).
10
Theodore Dalrymple, “Why Intellectuals Like Genocide,” New English Review (July 2007),
http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/8744/sec_id/8744.
FROM TERROR TO GENOCIDE 䡵 79
ated 1836 history of Tasmania, he claimed that Aboriginal Tasmanians “had been
treated worse than were any of the American tribes by the Spanish” and that “few
events have tarnished the history of any Colony more than in the manner in which
the civilized portions of society conducted themselves towards [Aborigines]”; fur-
thermore, the authorities exhibited “disgraceful” conduct.11 In 1842, Oxford po-
litical economist Herman Merivale asserted, “The nation of Van Diemen’s Land
[was] reduced to a few families by long maltreatment . . . settlers . . . shot them
down in the woods, or laid poisoned food within their reach.” He continued,
“The history of the European settlements in . . . Australia, presents . . . a wide
and sweeping destruction of native races by the uncontrolled violence of individuals
and colonial authorities, followed by tardy attempts on the part of governments
to repair the acknowledged crime.”12 In 1838 the Congregationalist minister John
West settled in Tasmania.13 In 1852, he described numerous violent crimes against
Aborigines and “men distinguished for the malicious vigour with which they
tracked and murdered the native people.”14 Later authors further detailed and
reinterpreted the Aboriginal near-extinction.15 Then, in the 1890s, Mark Twain
and H. G. Wells popularized the idea of Aboriginal Tasmanians’ “extermination.”16
In the mid-twentieth century, Nazi mass murder refocused the discussion. In
1944, Polish jurist Raphaël Lemkin minted a new word to describe an ancient
crime. He combined the Greek genos, or “race,” with the Latin -cide, or “killing,”
to define genocide as any attempt to physically or culturally annihilate an ethnic,
religious, or political group.17 Four years later, the United Nations adopted the
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Ac-
cording to the convention, “Genocide means any of the following acts committed
with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious
group, as such, (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or
mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group
conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in
part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e)
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” The convention
also outlawed, as a separate crime, “complicity in genocide,” which involves the
roles not of genocide perpetrators but of accomplices.18
11
Henry Melville, The History of Van Diemen’s Land, From the Year 1824 to 1835, ed. George
Mackaness (1836; Hobart, 1965), 30, 56–57.
12
Herman Merivale, Lectures on Colonization and Colonies, Delivered before the University of Oxford
in 1839, 1840, & 1841, 2 vols. (London, 1842), 2:150, 153. Merivale later became a senior colonial
office official.
13
Australian Dictionary of Biography, 17 vols. (Melbourne, 1966), 2:590.
14
John West, The History of Tasmania, 2 vols. (Launceston, 1852), 2:18.
15
James Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians; or, The Black War of Van Diemen’s Land (London,
1870); J. E. Calder, Some Account of the Wars, Extirpation, Habits, &c., of the Native Tribes of Tasmania
(Hobart, 1875); James Bonwick, The Lost Tasmanian Race (London, 1884).
16
Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World (Hartford, CT, 1897), 256;
H. G. Wells, War of the Worlds (London, 1898), 5.
17
Raphaël Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government,
Proposals for Redress (Washington, DC, 1944), xi–xii.
18
United Nations, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted
by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 9 December 1948, Treaty Series, vol. 78, no. 1021,
280.
80 䡵 MADLEY
Using this new concept and the 1948 international legal treaty, writers reex-
amined Tasmania’s colonization. In his 1948 Black War, Australian journalist Clive
Turnbull compared the “extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines” to the Ho-
locaust, while in his unfinished History of Genocide Lemkin himself devoted a
chapter to Tasmania and argued that “settlers and convicts,” but not British au-
thorities, were responsible for genocide.19 Then in 1975, following sustained Ab-
original activism and innovative historical scholarship, even the conservative Aus-
tralian journal Quadrant briefly acknowledged the genocide of Australian Ab-
origines.20
During the 1980s, scholars revisited the Tasmanian genocide question. In her
pioneering 1981 book The Aboriginal Tasmanians, Australian historian Lyndall
Ryan emphasized nineteenth-century Aboriginal Tasmanian resistance and sur-
vival, but also described “an existing [twentieth-century] community of Aborigines
who are victims of a conscious policy of genocide.”21 That same year South Af-
rican–born sociologist Leo Kuper wrote of their “systematic [nineteenth-century]
annihilation.”22 American historian Robin Winks next described “a war of geno-
cide” against them, and Australian historian Tony Barta argued that it “[brushed
the] classical mode of genocide, the direct sanctioning of violence by the state.”23
By 1988 the Tasmanian genocide argument even appeared in the journal Natural
History.24 However, with the exception of Ryan, none of these latter authors were
intimately familiar with Tasmanian history during the period in question, 1803–47.
More recently, scholars have continued to explore the genocide question. In his
1995 Fate of a Free People, Aboriginal history doyen Henry Reynolds focused on
government policies to argue that “losses sustained in war,” rather than genocide,
caused most of the “demographic disaster.”25 Then, in 2000, Australian historian
A. Dirk Moses argued that settlers demonstrated “radical exterminatory senti-
ments,” while officials tendered a “restraining hand.”26 Later, in 2004, Reynolds
modified his position: “Whether Governor Arthur strayed over the unmarked
border between warfare [and] genocide cannot be answered with any certainty.”27
Still, Reynolds did not endorse the genocide interpretation.
In 2002 Windschuttle’s Fabrication took the debate in a new direction by
19
Clive Turnbull, Black War: The Extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines (Melbourne, 1948);
Raphaël Lemkin, “Tasmania,” edited, and with commentary, by Ann Curthoys, Patterns of Prejudice
39, no. 2 (June 2005): 170–96, quotations on 179 and 178, respectively. Lemkin relied heavily on
James Bonwick’s work.
20
For Australian genocide-related articles in Quadrant and elsewhere, see Ben Kiernan, “Cover-up
and Denial of Genocide,” Critical Asian Studies 34, no. 2 (June, 2002): 163–92.
21
Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, 255.
22
Leo Kuper, Genocide: Its Political Uses in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT, 1981), 40.
23
Robin Winks, “A System of Commands: The Infrastructure of Race Contact,” in Studies in British
Imperial History, ed. George Martell (Hong Kong, 1986), 24; Barta, “Relations of Genocide,” 238.
24
Jared Diamond, “In Black and White,” Natural History 97, no. 10 (October 1988): 8–14.
25
Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, 53.
26
A. Dirk Moses, “An Antipodean Genocide? The Origins of the Genocidal Moment in the Colo-
nization of Australia,” Journal of Genocide Research 2, no. 1 (March 2000): 89–106, 99. Moses later
suggested, with respect to Australia, that, “where genocide was not consciously willed, then it was
implicitly intended in the sense of . . . silent condoning” (“Genocide and Settler Society in Australian
History,” in Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian
History, ed. A. Dirk Moses [New York, 2004], 30).
27
Henry Reynolds, “Genocide in Tasmania?” in Moses, Genocide and Settler Society, 147.
arguing against all previous scholarship on the Aboriginal Tasmanians’ demo-

graphic decline. He posited that they had caused their own demise. Windschuttle
claimed that their supposedly endemic misogynistic violence and internal warfare
had made them a “precarious population” that “quickly collapsed under the dual
weight of the susceptibility of its members to disease and [its] abuse and neglect
of its women.” He also claimed that only 118 “plausible” Aboriginal Tasmanian
deaths occurred at white hands and that because extermination “would . . . have
gone against the predominant religious and philosophical beliefs of the time,” it
would therefore have been nearly impossible for Britons to undertake genocide.
Finally, he asserted, “During the so-called ‘Black War,’ more than twice as many
whites were killed as blacks.”28 Many conservative Australians rallied to these ar-
guments. Many other Australians, from varied political viewpoints, excoriated
them; Windschuttle’s thesis became the subject of debate by scholars as far away
as Britain and the United States.29 In 2003, nineteen Australians published an
essay collection that challenged Windschuttle’s arguments by demonstrating myr-
iad contradictions between his claims and primary sources, as well as his exclusion
of many sources from the relevant period, 1803–47. Yet these essays provided no
unified response to Windschuttle’s claim that “Van Diemen’s Land was host to
nothing that resembled genocide or any attempt at it,” nor consensus on the
origins or process of the acknowledged Tasmanian catastrophe, or its legal status
under the Genocide Convention.30 This article addresses these important issues,
beginning with the question of origins.
PHASE 1: CREATING A CULTURE OF TERROR AND IMPUNITY,

1803–26
A culture of terror shaped early colonists’ lives, psyches, and behavior. As this
section will demonstrate, the culture of terror was the product of geographic
isolation, imperial neglect, state brutality, and exterminatory government cam-
paigns against escaped convicts, as well as fear of Aborigines. White-Aboriginal
interactions took place in the context of this severe culture. The physical and
psychological stress of penal society saturated early colonists’ lives. These condi-
tions provide insight into how whites rationalized violence against Aborigines.
American geographer Yi-fu Tuan has argued that, “under stressful conditions,
strong feelings of envy, hatred, and fear can easily exaggerate and distort the slight
cultural and biological differences between people into polarities of good and evil,
angel and beast. Strangers then become the enemy, who may be killed and their
homes demolished with a clear conscience.”31 Indeed, the trauma of early colonial
Tasmania exacerbated whites’ relations with Aborigines there.
28
Windschuttle, Fabrication, 386, 364, 297, 364.
29
For the Australian debate, see Robert Manne, “Introduction,” in Whitewash, ed. Robert Manne
(Melbourne, 2003), 10–11; British historian William Rubinstein quoted Windschuttle on Tasmania to
bolster his interpretation of British imperialism as benign paternalism (Genocide: A History [Harlow,
2004], 66–67). Historian Ben Kiernan attacked the veracity and logic of Windschuttle’s thesis (“Cover-
up and Denial,” 180–81).
30
Windschuttle, Fabrication, 399.
31
Yi-fu Tuan, Landscapes of Fear (New York, 1979), 213.
82 䡵 MADLEY
To begin with, colonists were profoundly isolated. Located over 5,500 miles
from Cape Town and more than 15,000 miles from London, they existed on the
British Empire’s margin. The journey to Britain took four to five months.32 Even
Sydney was eight to ten days sail from Hobart, the colony’s capital.33 However,
other remote British colonies, like New Zealand, did not develop a terror culture.
In Tasmania, isolation generated fear and danger, but official policies—and state
violence in particular—created a particularly terrifying imperial outpost.
During the colony’s first five years, British administrators rarely supplied ade-
quate imported food. Provisions arrived so infrequently and were of such poor
quality that both free settlers and convicts often faced starvation. During the austral
winter of 1804, the residents of Hobart suffered the effects of malnutrition, in-
cluding scurvy and diarrhea.34 In September of 1805, rations fell to two pounds
of flour per person per week, or about 450 calories per day. Lieutenant Governor
David Collins wrote to his superior expressing his anxiety: “On the hope of . . .
Ships from England, I have trusted for many a day, and until finding that hope
deferred has truly made my heart sick. We here have been strangely neglected at
Home.”35 By October 1806, settlers and convicts were eating seaweed, wild plants,
and kangaroo; Collins posted guards to deter the eating of livestock.36 Lieutenant
Governor Arthur later referred to this period as “amounting almost to a famine.”37
Hunger abated with the first successful harvest in 1808, but London’s neglect
instilled in the colonists a sense of abandonment and insecurity and resulted in
five years of very precarious existence.38
If not for Tasmania’s natural bounty, early settlers and convicts might have
starved. To supplement inadequate imported food, they hunted the island’s emu,
swan, wallaby, and kangaroo. In 1806, Collins reported that remaining imported
food supplies “are next to none” but that “our Supply of Kangaroo [is] abundant
as I could wish.”39 The initial harvest was rich, but the killing rate unsustainable.
Encouraged by officials and lucrative markets, white hunters stripped Tasmania of
much of the wild game that Aborigines needed for food and thus provoked in-
terracial conflict.
The increasing proportion of convicts among the white population compounded
the fear generated by living in a remote, poorly supplied outpost where finding
food was potentially dangerous. By 1822, of the 12,464 whites, 58 percent were
32
Hobart Town Gazette and Southern Reporter, 21 September 1816, 2; Thomas Atkins, Reminiscences
of Twelve Years’ Residence in Tasmania and New South Wales; Norfolk Island and Moreton Bay; Calcutta,
Madras, and Cape Town; the United States of America; and the Canadas (Malvern, 1869), 5, 10.
33
William Henry Breton, Excursions in New South Wales, Western Australia, and Van Diemen’s Land,
During the Years 1830, 1831, 1832, and 1833 (London, 1833), 341.
34
Lieutenant-Governor Collins to Lord Hobart, 3 August 1804, in Fredrik Watson, ed., Historical
Records of Australia, 3rd ser. (hereafter HRA.3), 6 vols. (Sydney, 1921–), 1:257.
35
Collins to Governor King, 28 September 1805, in Watson, HRA.3, 1:327–28.
36
Turnbull, Black War, 38; Collins to Governor Bligh, 18 October 1806, in Watson, HRA.3, 1:
380.
37
Lieutenant-Governor Arthur to Secretary Sir George Murray, 20 November 1830; Correspondence
between Lieutenant-Governor Arthur and His Majesty’s Secretary of State for the Colonies, on the
Subject of the Military Operations Lately Carried Out Against the Aboriginal Inhabitants of Van
Diemen’s Land; House of Commons Parliamentary Papers (HCPP), 1831 (259), IXI, 60.
38
Collins to Bligh, 26 January 1808, in Watson, HRA.3, 1:395.
39
Lieutenant-Governor Collins to Viscount Castlereagh, 2 August 1806, in Watson, HRA.3, 1:369.
convicts.40 This “jail on a large scale” absorbed deportees directly from Britain—
including “the worst offenders of England”—as well as convicts banished from
mainland Australian penal settlements.41 It was thus “a place of exile for the more
felonious of felons—the Botany Bay of Botany Bay—‘And in the lowest deep, a
lower deep!’”42 Convicts made the colony extremely dangerous. In 1824, Van
Dieman’s Land Company official Edward Curr reported “frequent . . . Daring
robberies [and] a continual feeling of insecurity.”43 Lieutenant Governor Arthur
likewise described “a vast deal of Crime amongst the Prisoners, murders, constant
robberies, and other atrocious acts.”44 An 1827 Land Commissioners’ journal entry
warned: “In no Country in the World is circumspection and a little knowledge of
the World more requisite than in this. It has been the Asylum of Sharpers, Swindlers
and Blacklegs, and a Gentleman emigrating here, must be armed at all points to
withstand attacks made on his Purse and Property.”45 That year, thieves even stole
“about £1,400” from the public treasury.46 Authorities addressed crime with ex-
treme coercion and violence. In a letter to Parliament, the governor’s secretary
emphasized that “they punish with inordinate severity.”47
The routine state violence of the convict forced-labor system acclimated white
Tasmanians to brutality. In 1824 Curr wrote, “The labourer is a slave, with no
motive to impel him but fear.”48 In 1827, traveler Peter Cunningham described
how convicts “[commenced] labour at sunrise . . . leave off at sunset,” and were
threatened with chain gangs.49 To maintain what Reverend Thomas Atkins called
a “system of domestic slavery,” authorities employed flogging, torture, chain gangs,
internal prisons, and execution.50 “Eighteenth-century England” was “a society
with a bloody penal code . . . schooled in the lessons of Justice, Terror and Mercy.”
In early colonial Tasmania, British administrators emphasized terror. For if in
eighteenth-century England “coercion was an exceptional act, to handle excep-
tional deviance,” in penal Tasmania coercion was an unexceptional act used to
handle many kinds of deviance.51 Flogging was ubiquitous. “That slavish punish-
ment the Cat o’nine tails”—a whip with nine knotted ends—caused welts.52 With
prolonged blows it stripped away skin and cut muscle. The Colonial Times criticized
this “torture” as “inhuman.”53 Fifty lashes was a typical punishment, although
40
Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore (New York, 1987), 371.
41
Melville, History, 13; James Ross, The Settler in Van Diemen’s Land (1836; Melbourne, 1975),
17.
42
West, History of Tasmania, 1:29.
43
Edward Curr, Account of the Colony of Van Diemen’s Land (1824; Hobart, 1967), 10.
44
Arthur to Earl Bathurst, 3 July 1825, in Watson, HRA.3, 4:289.
45
5 June 1827 journal entry, in Anne McKay, ed., Journals of the Land Commissioners for Van Diemen’s
Land: 1826–1828 (Hobart, 1962), 56.
46
Colonial Times, 22 June 1827, 2.
47
A. Maconochie, Convict Discipline, Van Diemen’s Land ([London], 1838), 6.
48
Curr, Account, 120.
49
Peter Cunningham, Two Years in New South Wales, 2 vols. (London, 1827), 2:192–93.
50
Atkins, Reminiscences, 16.
51
Douglas Hay, “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law,” in Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh,
John G. Rule, E. P. Thompson, and Cal Winslow, Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-
Century England (New York, 1975), 62–63.
52
Launceston Advertiser, 3 August 1829, 2.
53
Colonial Times, 1 December 1826, 2.
84 䡵 MADLEY
convicts and freemen might receive hundreds for serious offences.54 Most convicts
were not flogged, but until 1833 approximately 2,000 convicts, or one in six,
received an average of thirty-five lashes each year.55 Australian historian Lloyd
Robson concluded that up to 1840, “38 percent of all prisoners were flogged at
least once.”56
Public floggings inured colonial society to brutality. In 1826, the Colonial Times
argued that flogging “hardened those on whom it is inflicted.”57 The next year
Cunningham observed that flogging may “check the poor cowardly, pitiful thief;
but it only hardens the bold and courageous, while it essentially debases the feelings
of both.” The many witnesses to frequent flagellations became more likely to accept
violence as routine, which influenced attitudes toward Aborigines. Indeed, in 1829
the Launceston Advertiser complained, “The sound of the lash and the screams
of the tortured are forever ringing in our ears.”58 Cunningham recalled, “The first
time I saw a man flogged, every lash made me wince . . . but now I could see a
back sacrificed without moving a muscle.”59
Colonial administrators further eroded white resistance to violence by severely
punishing white women. In 1803, “one woman was flogged for stealing the cap
of a companion,” while the lieutenant governor “repeatedly flogged” another “for
stealing the provisions of her neighbors.”60 Solitary confinement, iron neck collars,
and public humiliation in stocks were other typical punishments for white women.61
Authorities even riveted a five-pound four-ounce iron collar around one nursing
mother’s neck prior to her forced departure on a thirty-five-mile journey by foot.62
Prisons of internal exile further amplified anxiety and routinized violence. The
most infamous were Macquarie Harbour and Port Arthur. Lieutenant Governor
William Sorell designated Macquarie Harbour a “Place of rigid Penal restraint and
coercion.”63 Some called it a place of “terrors,” others a prison of “hell-born
horrors,” where a “torrent of blood and tears . . . drenches its barren rocks.”64
James Bonwick wrote: “in the dreadful season of 1822 out of 182 men 169 were
punished to the frightful amount of 7,000 lashes.”65 Quaker missionary James
54
Atkins, Reminiscences, 16; Examination of Richard Pitt, 9 May 1820, in Watson, HRA.3, 3:486;
Hobart Town Gazette, 10 August 1816, 2, 14 December 1816, 1, 8 November 1817, 1; Melville,
History, 15.
55
A. G. L. Shaw, Sir George Arthur, Bart, 1758–1854 (Melbourne, 1980), 87.
56
Lloyd Robson, The Convict Settlers of Australia: An Enquiry into the Origin and Character of the
Convicts Transported to New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, 1787–1852 (Melbourne, 1965),
102.
57
Colonial Times (Hobart), 1 December 1826, 2.
58
Launceston Advertiser, 9 November 1829, 2.
59
Cunningham, Two Years, 2:261, 309.
60
West, History of Tasmania, 1:29, 32.
61
For solitary confinement, see Examination of J. B. Boothman, 15 April 1820, in Watson, HRA.3,
3:401; and John Henderson, Observations on the Colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land
(Calcutta, 1832), 20; for iron collars, see Hobart Town Gazette, 17 August 1816, 1, and 27 September
1817, 2; for stocks, see Hobart Town Gazette, 27 September 1817, 2.
62
Examination of R. W. Owen, 15 April 1820, in Watson, HRA.3, 3:408.
63
Report by Sorell, 9 June 1824, in Watson, HRA.3, 4:150.
64
David Burn, A Picture of Van Diemen’s Land: A Facsimile of a Work Published in “The Colonial
Magazine,” 1840–41 (Hobart, 1973), 63; Launceston Advertiser, 9 November 1829, 2.
65
James Bonwick, The Bushrangers; Illustrating the Early Days of Van Diemen’s Land (Melbourne,
1856), 21–22.
Backhouse added that between 1826 and 1828, 188 of the 312 prisoners received
6,280 lashes.66 Eighty-five prisoners died there over eleven years, only thirty-five
from natural causes. Another seventy-one died trying to escape.67 Death sentences
could be commuted to time at Macquarie Harbour, but Arthur wrote that some
prisoners “would rather suffer death than be sent back to Macquarie Harbour.”
He saw this as “proof that banishment to that station operates, as it is intended
. . . this is the feeling I am most anxious to keep alive.”68 However, Macquarie
Harbour was remote and expensive, and many prisoners escaped, so authorities
replaced it with Port Arthur. Whereas Macquarie Harbour was small and rustic,
Port Arthur was a sprawling, formidable “Earthly Hell.”69 It remains imposing.
The visitors’ center overlooks forty hectares of hewn stone walls, docks, and mul-
tistoried buildings. By 1835, 36,505 whites resided in Tasmania;70 1,181 were
Port Arthur prisoners.71 Even “young boys . . . of the tender age of ten” were
locked up and punished with “as much as one hundred lashes.”72 Port Arthur’s
trauma and violence touched thousands of colonists and convicts, presumably
eroding even cultural prohibitions against torturing children.
The state’s supreme contribution to the terror culture was capital punishment.
Frequent public hangings hardened whites to killing. Burglary, livestock theft,
rape, murder, and bushranging (by escaped convicts) were all capital offenses.
From 1 January 1823 to 24 August 1827, the colony, whose white population
then reached 17,000, witnessed some 134 public hangings; authorities hanged
approximately one out of every 127 people over this fifty-six-month period.73 By
comparison, between 1829 and 1830, 120 people were hanged in all of England
and Wales, whose population then exceeded 12 million.74 During these two pe-
riods, approximately one out of 2,500,000 people was hanged per month in En-
gland and Wales, while one out of 7,143 people was hanged per month in Tas-
mania. Britain had dozens of capital statutes, but judges regularly commuted death
sentences to transportation. Tasmanian capital convictions more often led to hang-
ing. Spectacles of horror were routine. Mass executions were common and gib-
beted corpses, rotting in iron cages at crossroads or on Hunter’s Island in Hobart
harbor, likely had a powerful psychic impact on the white community.75
Unsurprisingly, many convicts sought to escape. Escapees often became “bush-
66
James Backhouse, 18 June 1832 letter, in Extracts from the letters of James Backhouse whilst engaged
in a religious visit to Van Dieman’s Land, New South Wales, and South Africa, 2 vols. (London, 1841),
1:35.
67
James Backhouse, A Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies (London, 1843), 49, 50.
68
Robert Knopwood, The Diary of the Reverend Knopwood: 1803–1808, ed. Mary Nicholls (Laun-
ceston, 1977), 472; Arthur to Lieutenant Wright, 25 June 1824, in Watson, HRA.3, 5:632.
69
According to Thomas Lempriere, some called Port Arthur “Earthly Hell” (The Penal Settlements
of Early Van Diemen’s Land [1839; Tasmania, 1954], 60). Burn was one of them (Picture of Van
Diemen’s Land, 164).
70
Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (1839; New York, 1909), 471.
71
Bonwick, Bushrangers, 38.
72
Lempriere, Penal Settlements, 89, 94.
73
Colonial Times, 5 January 1827, 3, 12 January 1827, 4, 6 July 1827, 4, 24 August 1827, 4; for
1827 population see Plomley, Aboriginal/Settler Clash, 25.
74
V. A. C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868 (Oxford, 1994),
575. Census takers recorded 11,977,663 people in England and Wales in 1821 and 13,897,187 in
1831 (HCPP, 1822 [8] XXI, 631, 1833 [149] XXXVI–XXXVII, xii).
75
Hobart Town Gazette, 8 June 1816, 1; Curr, Account, 184.
86 䡵 MADLEY
rangers,” outlaws who took to the bush as a refuge from authorities. These bush-
rangers intensified the terror culture by attacking settlers and eliciting increasingly
violent government responses that included attempted annihilation. Artist Joseph
Lycett wrote, “So far back as the year 1808 . . . the daring outrages of these
lawless banditti had spread universal terror through the colony.”76 In 1816 the
Hobart Town Gazette reported “the depredations of the Bush-rangers” as “truly
alarming.”77 The “severe scourge” continued.78 In 1825 Henry Wallace wrote,
“The country at present is in a most deplorable state with the Bush Rangers it is
impossible to travel from one Township to another without being robbed. A few
days since a soldier of the 40th. Regt. was shot & one of the same Regt. yesterday
by a gang of Bush Rangers.”79 An 1826 description of Matthew Brady’s bushranger
gang expressed deep fear: “God only knows the number [of murders] they have
committed. . . . It is dreadful to think of the horrid deeds.”80 Fear of bushrangers
even informed colonial architecture: houses sometimes had gun loops and/or
towers with parapets.81
To combat bushrangers, officials employed severe floggings, executions, and
bounties for runaways or for their severed heads.82 In 1807, captured bushrangers
received up to 400 lashes. In 1815, Lieutenant Governor Davey imposed martial
law and set up a court martial with the power to execute.83 Then, in April 1817,
Sorell succeeded Davey and repeatedly offered rewards for the killing or capturing
of bushrangers.84 By September the Hobart Town Gazette announced their “nearly
total destruction.”85 The claim proved premature. In 1824, when Lieutenant Gov-
ernor Arthur took office, bushrangers remained a potent threat. Newspapers reg-
ularly reported attacks and on 14 October 1825 the Colonial Times printed a
“RUNAWAY LIST” of eighty-five names.86 To capture or destroy them, Arthur in-
creased police actions, recruited volunteers, and offered new bounties.87 His rule,
from 1824 to 1836, saw “about 260 executions.”88
Several whites described the killings of bushrangers, by police, soldiers, and
vigilantes as a desirable extermination campaign. In 1824 Curr chortled that bush-
rangers were “now happily exterminated,” Lycett that they were “completely ex-
76
Joseph Lycett, Views in Australia or New South Wales, & Van Diemen’s Land (London, 1824),
13.
77
Hobart Town Gazette, 23 November 1816, 1.
78
Cunningham, Two Years, 2:195.
79
H. Wallace, 10 September 1825 letter, in Tasmanian Letters, 1824–1852, ed. Jack Richards (Christ-
church, 1955), 10.
80
Knopwood, Diary, 479. Newspapers regularly reported murders by bushrangers.
81
Henderson, Observations, 43; Karl Von Stieglitz, Entally (1921): Pageant of a Pioneer Family:
1792–1912 (n.p., 1950), 23, 31.
82
For bushrangers’ beheadings see Hobart Town Gazette, 29 March 1817, 2; Ross, Settler, 23; Curr,
Account, 189.
83
Knopwood, Diary, 138, 143; “court martial” quoted in Knopwood, Diary, 201–2.
84
In 1817, the Hobart Town Gazette published rewards information in sixteen different issues.
85
Hobart Town Gazette, 6 September 1817, 1.
86
Colonial Times, 14 October 1825, 4.
87
The Colonial Times (6 January 1826) reported “upwards of 200 soldiers, and 100 volunteers . . .
in close persuit” of bushangers; for an example of increased and expanded bounties see the Colonial
Times, 10 March 1826, 1.
88
Richard P. Davis, The Tasmanian Gallows: A Study of Capital Punishment (Hobart, 1974), 13.
terminated.”89 In 1830, a long-term visitor celebrated how “an effective system

of police cut off [the] heads” of bushranger “villains.”90 Even the Quaker mis-
sionary Backhouse described the benefits of bushrangers’ having been “completely
extirpated.”91 This “total extinction of the bushrangers” set important precedents
for the treatment of Aborigines.92
What exactly did Curr and Lycett mean by “exterminated?” Leading Australian
historian Alan Atkinson has suggested that “the exact meaning of ‘exterminate’
was less clear at that time [the 1820s and 1830s] [than] it was to be in the following
century. . . . It then meant ‘drive out’ (its original sense) as well as ‘destroy.’”93
However, the source Atkinson cited, the 1907 Webster’s International Dictionary,
lists “drive out” as an extant meaning, not on the basis of 1820s or 1830s usage
of “exterminate,” but on the basis of a mid-seventeenth-century work.94 By the
1820s and 1830s, there seems to have been little confusion over the meaning of
“extermination” in Tasmania. From the Colonial Times editor to Lieutenant Gov-
ernor Arthur, whites directly equated “extermination” with physical destruction.
In 1827 the Colonial Times warned, “The Settler . . . will . . . omit no step
whereby he may destroy the black tribes even to utter extermination,” and in 1830
Arthur reported, “The aboriginal race [will be] exterminated . . . if they can
neither be conciliated nor taken; self-preservation will compel the inhabitants to
destroy them.”95
Before being wiped out, bushrangers contributed directly to the Tasmanian
Aborigines’ demographic decline. In 1828 Arthur reported that bushrangers “have
no doubt committed the greatest outrages upon the Natives” by abducting, raping,
and murdering Aborigines.96 James Hobbs told the 1830 Aborigines Committee
that “Lemon and Brown, the bush-rangers, committed every species of cruelty
upon the Natives; they used to stick them, and fire at them as marks whilst alive.”
The committee itself reported, “A person named Carrots . . . is known to have
boasted, that having killed a Native in his attempt to carry off his wife, he cut off
the dead man’s head, and obliged the woman to go with him carrying it suspended
round her neck.”97 Bonwick wrote that an ex-bushranger “confessed to me that
he would ‘as leave shoot them as so many sparrows.’”98 And Arthur himself in-
89
Curr, Account, 207; Lycett, Views, 14.
90
Augustus Prinsep, “Letter VII,” in The journal of a Voyage from Calcutta to Van Diemen’s Land:
Comprising a Description of that Colony During a Six Months’ Residence: From Original Letters, selected
by Mrs. A. Prinsep (London, 1833), 111.
91
Backhouse, 25 June 1832 letter, in Extracts, 1:44.
92
Melville, History, 55.
93
Alan Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia, 2 vols. (Oxford, 2004), 2:157.
94
Ibid., 2:374 n. 15; Websters International Dictionary (Springfield, 1907), 531. For the etymology
of “exterminate,” see Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination
from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, CT, 2007), 15.
95
Colonial Times, 5 January 1827, 2; Arthur to Murray, 20 November 1830, HCPP, 60.
96
Arthur to Secretary Huskinson, 17 April 1828, HCPP, 4; Report of the Aborigines Committee,
19 March 1830, and Arthur to Murray, 20 November 1830, HCPP, 39, 60.
97
James Hobbs to Aborigines Committee, 9 March 1830, and Aborigines Committee, 19 March
1830, HCPP, 49, 36.
98
Bonwick, Last of the Tasmanians, 61.
88 䡵 MADLEY
formed London in 1830 that “they treated them with the most unnatural
cruelty.”99
Free colonists also killed Aboriginal Tasmanians. In March 1819, missionary
Rowland Hassall expressed surprise at not seeing more Aborigines. He was told,
“We shoot them whenever we find them.”100 That same month Governor Sorell
proclaimed, “Cruelties have been perpetrated repugnant to Humanity and dis-
graceful to the British Character,” and “Miscreants . . . sometimes wantonly fire
at and kill [Aboriginal] Men.”101 Successive governors’ almost complete failure to
enforce official policies protecting Aboriginal Tasmanians compounded the issue.
When Lieutenant Governor Collins first set out to govern Tasmania in 1803,
British Colonial Secretary Lord Hobart had explicitly instructed him to protect
Aborigines: “You are to endeavour by every means in your power to open an
intercourse with the Natives, and to conciliate their good will, enjoining all persons
under your government to live in amity and kindness with them; and if any person
shall exercise any acts of violence against them, or shall wantonly give them any
interruption in the exercise of their several occupations, you are to cause such
offender to be brought to punishment, according to the degree of the offence.”102
However, during the colony’s first year, Aborigines had no legal protection. Only
in 1805, more than a year after his arrival in Tasmania, did Collins proclaim
Aborigines and their property to be under “the Protection of the British Laws.”103
Later lieutenant governors repeatedly threatened to punish whites for assaulting
or killing Aborigines.104 Yet administrators hardly ever did so and rarely protected
Aboriginal rights, property, or life.
According to Windschuttle, “The notion that the frontier was a place where
white men could kill blacks with impunity ignores the powerful cultural and legal
prohibitions on such actions.”105 Indeed, on 23 June 1824, Governor Arthur
proclaimed remaining Aborigines, later estimated to number 1,500, henceforth
“under the protection of the same laws which protect the Settlers,” so that “every
violation of those laws, in the persons or the property of the Natives, shall be
visited with the same punishment as though committed on the person or property
of any settler.”106 There is no reason to believe Arthur was being disingenuous,
and he was at least partly capable of enforcing his will on the white community,
as his energetic bushranger policy demonstrated. Yet, like his gubernatorial pre-
decessors, he chose not to enforce his own public pronouncements by protecting
Aborigines. Murders and abductions continued, but no Europeans were arrested
or tried. As Tasmanian historian N. J. B. Plomley asserted, “European settlers
could get away with murder, whereas the Aborigines could not.”107 Moreover,
99
Arthur to Murray, 20 November 1830, HCPP, 60.
100
Rowland Hassall to his father, 17 March 1819, Rowland Hassall Papers, vol. 2, pt. 1, 236–37.
101
Hobart Town Gazette, 13 March 1819, 1.
102
Quoted in Aborigines Committee, 19 March 1830, HCPP, 38.
103
General Orders, 7 January 1805, in Watson, HRA.3, 1:529.
104
See Collins’s January 29, 1810 proclamation quoted in Aborigines Committee, 19 March 1830,
HCPP, 38; and Sorell’s 24 May 1817 public warning, Hobart Town Gazette, 24 May 1817, 1.
105
Keith Windschuttle, “The Myths of Frontier Massacres in Australian History (Part II): The Fab-
rication of the Aboriginal Death Toll,” Quadrant 44, no. 11 (November 2000): 17–30, 23.
106
For population estimate see Plomley, Aboriginal/Settler Clash, 123; Arthur to Murray, 25 August
1830, HCPP, 19.
107
Plomley, Aboriginal/Settler Clash, 5.
“heathen” Aborigines could not be sworn into British courts and were thus barred
from giving testimony or serving as jurors. Aborigines were effectively excluded
from participation in or protection by the British colonial legal system. The Hobart
regime executed both Europeans and Aborigines for killing Europeans but never
a European for murdering an Aborigine, despite the fact that Aborigines were
frequently shot on sight. Even after the 3 May 1804 Risdon Cove killings, when
whites, including soldiers, killed at least three and possibly as many as fifty Abo-
rigines, Hobart officials charged no one and launched no investigation.108
Just as destructive to the Aboriginal population was abduction. The shortage
of European children and laborers led some whites to abduct Aboriginal children
as early as 1804.109 By 25 June 1813, Lieutenant Governor Davey publicly decried
the “barbarous and inhuman . . . robbery of children!” However, his announce-
ment did not stop the crime.110 Reverend Robert Knopwood later recollected that
“a number of children were forcibly taken from the Natives” in 1813 and 1814.111
By March 1819 Sorell publicly denounced “Miscreants” who “sometimes . . .
pursue [Aboriginal] Women for the purpose of compelling them to abandon their
Children.”112 Yet he too failed to punish child abductors. The scourge continued
for decades. An 1826 poem, “The Native’s Lament,” described ongoing child
abduction: “And thy children must fly, or submit to his chains.”113
The shortage of white women also contributed to abductions and rape. In 1828
Arthur reported that, among “stockkeepers and sealers . . . it was a constant
practice to . . . deprive [Aborigines] of their women whenever the opportunity
offered.”114 The gender imbalance in the white community continued. As late as
1836 Melville wrote, “The Colony is yet greatly deficient in females, there being
. . . very nearly three males to every female.”115 Writing to the colonial secretary
of New South Wales in 1815, William Stewart noted that among European sealers
“they have also a custom of getting the Native Women . . . who they mostly
obtain by force and keep . . . as Slaves.”116 George Augustus Robinson, who met
and spoke with more Aboriginal Tasmanians in the early nineteenth century than
any other Briton, labeled sealers’ treatment of Aboriginal women “the African
slave trade in miniature” and recorded multiple abductions, tortures, and mur-
ders.117 James Hobbs reported simply that “sealers in Basse’s Straits sometimes
stole the native women . . . they shot the men and carried their wives away.”118
108
Aborigines Committee, 19 March 1830, and Kelly to Aborigines Committee, 10 March 1830,
HCPP, 37, 51; Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, 88.
109
Former marine Robert Evans recollected that in 1804, “some children [were] taken” (Robert
Evans to Aborigines Committee, 16 March 1830, HCPP, 54).
110
Quoted in Aborigines Committee, 19 March 1830, HCPP, 36.
111
Robert Knopwood to Aborigines Committee, 11 March 1830, HCPP, 53.
112
Hobart Town Gazette, 13 March 1819, 1.
113
Colonial Times, 5 May 1826, 4.
114
Arthur to Viscount Goderich, 10 January 1828, HCPP, 2.
115
116
W. Stewart to Secretary Campbell, 28 September 1815, in Watson, HRA.3, 2:576.
117
George Augustus Robinson, 10 October 1829 journal entry, in Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian
Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829–1834, ed. N. J. B. Plomley (Kingsgrove, 1966),
82; for abductions see: 194, 246, 249, 271, 290–91, 293, 349, 417, 451–52, 461–62, 576, 675–76,
801; for murders: 246, 249, 293, 301; for torments: 184, 249, 256–57, 272, 274, 295, 308, 342.
118
James Hobbs to Aborigines Committee, 9 March 1830, HCPP, 50.
90 䡵 MADLEY
Abductions by sealers had disastrous demographic effects. Besides the accompa-

nying murders of male relatives and later of the women themselves, abductions
retarded population recovery by lowering birth rates and introducing syphilis and
gonorrhea.119
Free settlers, convicts—and soldiers also—bought, raped, kidnapped, and mur-
dered indigenous women. Both Reverend Knopwood and Robinson catalogued
Aboriginal women living with white men, and Robinson recorded that they were
frequently held as sexual and domestic slaves.120 Robinson also reported cases of
rape and murder.121 In one instance, free colonists gang-raped an Aboriginal
woman and left her hanging by her ankles to die.122 In 1836, Melville described
the violence of the abductions. “The stock-keepers may be considered as the
destroyers of nearly the whole of the aborigines . . . they thought little or nothing
of destroying the men for the sake of carrying to their huts the females of the
tribes; and, if it were possible in a work like this to record but a tithe of the murders
committed on these poor harmless creatures, it would make the reader’s blood
run cold at the bare recital.”123 Extant primary sources suggest that British au-
thorities never punished abduction or associated murder. Records indicate only
one white man being officially punished for crimes against Aboriginal Tasmanian
women. According to Australian historian A. G. L. Shaw, “In a case of ‘indescrib-
able brutality’ to some females in November 1824 a convict was sentenced to
twenty-five lashes (equal to the punishment he would have received for insolence
to his master).”124
PHASE 2: GUERRILLA WAR, DEHUMANIZATION, AND MASSACRE,

1826–28
In the autumn of 1826, some Aboriginal Tasmanians began a desperate low-

intensity guerrilla war, killing isolated white settlers and convicts.125 In response,
Arthur deployed troops and settlers privately organized new attacks. As losses
mounted on both sides, white fears intensified, spawning dehumanization and
hatred that, in turn, led to even more frequent and violent assaults.
119
Kelly to Aborigines Committee, 10 March 1830, HCPP, 51; for venereal diseases among Abo-
rigines in the 1820s, see Cunningham, Two Years, 2:45.
120
Knopwood, Diary, 182; Robinson, Friendly Mission, 257, 271, 293, 295, 751.
121
Robinson, Friendly Mission, 88, 344, 346, 506, 553.
122
Robinson, 21 April 1831 journal entry, in Friendly Mission, 344.
123
124
Shaw, Sir George Arthur, 128. Windschuttle has noted William Tibbs’s 1824 trial and conviction
for the manslaughter of a black man. James Boyce has persuasively argued that the victim was likely a
visiting ship’s nonwhite crewmember (“Fantasy Island,” in Manne, Whitewash, 36–37). Tibbs’s “sen-
tence was later reversed and he was discharged” (Plomley, Weep in Silence, 43 n. 42).
125
Windschuttle disputed Reynolds’s Fate of a Free People argument that Aboriginal Tasmanians
fought a guerrilla war. Windschuttle claimed that primary sources documented no Aboriginal Tasmanian
military strategies or nationalistic rhetoric and that their violence was never more than “robbery, assault
and murder” (Fabrication, 95–114, 130). However, Windschuttle’s argument ignored 1830s sources.
A letter to the Colonial Times described Aborigines’ “declaration of war” (Colonial Times, 26 February
1830, 3). Arthur’s Executive Council described Aboriginal “acts of warfare” (Executive Council
Minutes, 27 August 1830, HCPP, 63). Melville mentioned “the Guerilla war” repeatedly (History, 33,
91, 106).
Contemporary whites’ observations indicate that dispossession, destruction of

traditional food sources, abduction, rape, and murder were the five main reasons
Aboriginal Tasmanians went to war. On 1 December 1826, soon after hostilities
began, the Colonial Times opined: “They look upon the white men, as robbing
them of their land, depriving them of their subsistence, and in too many instances,
violating their persons.”126 In January 1828 Arthur reported, “They . . . complain
that the white people have taken possession of their country, encroached upon
their hunting grounds, and destroyed their natural food, the kangaroo.” He also
conceded that “all aggression originated with the white inhabitants.”127 Robinson
concluded, “They have a tradition amongst them that white men have usurped
their territory, have driven them into the forests, have killed their game and thus
robbed them of their chief subsistence, have ravished their wives and daughters,
have murdered and butchered their fellow-countrymen; and are wont whilst brood-
ing over these complicated ills in the dense part of the forest, to goad each other
on to acts of bloodshed and revenge for the injuries done to their ancestors and
the persecutions offered to themselves through their white enemies.”128 Backhouse
added, “Who can wonder that the atrocities committed upon the aborigines should
induce them to try to destroy and drive from their land, a race among whom
there were men guilty of such deeds?”129 Other evidence suggests Aborigines
attacked not only to drive whites away, but to bring them to the negotiating table.
Statements such as “Go away you white buggars, what business have you here!”
suggest the former, while historian Henry Reynolds has suggested that some Ab-
original Tasmanians fought to obtain a sanctuary protected by British authorities.130
Whatever their reasons, Aborigines were attacking and stealing from whites in
increasing numbers.
The convict labor system, in combination with government support for rapid
settlement, fueled the escalation of violence. To claim and exploit land, settlers
forced convict stockmen, under threat of physical punishment, to take up remote,
dangerous posts that no free laborer would have accepted. Close behind came free
settlers. Both groups were threatening to Aborigines and vulnerable to attack. As
Australian military historian John Connor has observed, “As settlers advanced into
[Tasmanian] valleys they created farms in exposed positions almost impossible to
defend from Aboriginal raids.”131 These raids, in turn, encouraged Arthur to aban-
don his relatively passive Aboriginal policy, loosen official restraints on the use of
force, and thus escalate the conflict.
On 29 November 1826, Arthur issued a government notice that read, in part:
“If it should be apparent that there is a Determination on the Part of one or more
of the Native Tribes to attack, rob, or murder the White Inhabitants generally,
any Persons may arm, and, joining themselves to the Military, drive them by force
to a safe Distance, treating them as open Enemies.”132 Arthur also deployed troops.
Both actions were within the rules of engagement Earl Bathurst had issued to
126
Colonial Times, 1 December 1826, 2.
127
Arthur to Goderich, 10 January 1828, HCPP, 4.
128
Robinson, 23 November 1829 journal entry, in Friendly Mission, 88.
129
Backhouse, 21 September 1832 letter, in Extracts, 1:57.
130
Quoted in Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, 48.
131
John Connor, The Australian Frontier Wars, 1788–1838 (Sydney, 2002), 89.
132
Hobart Town Gazette, 2 December 1826, 1.
92 䡵 MADLEY
Arthur’s superior, Governor Darling, in 1825: “The manner, in which the Native
Inhabitants are to be treated when making hostile incursions for the purpose of
Plunder, you well understand it to be your duty, when such disturbances cannot
be prevented or allayed by less vigorous measures, to oppose force by force, and
to repel such Aggressions in the same manner, as if they proceeded from subjects
of an accredited State.”133 Yet the British soldiers in Tasmania could neither quickly
vanquish their enemy nor adequately protect scattered European settlements and
outposts. The resulting experiences, for many whites, only compounded the de-
cades-old culture of terror.
Profound fear of Aborigines was one reason whites waged ferocious war against
them. That fear had been building for decades. As early as 1804, Collins anticipated
that due to the “Evil Impressions” that whites had made on Aborigines, “these
indiscriminating Savages will Consider every White Man as their Enemy.”134 Ab-
origines did kill whites, and in 1818 Reverend Knopwood recorded “The country
on fire by the natives.”135 In 1825, Wallace wrote, “We are very often troubled
by the Aborigines . . . if you meet them in the bush you are sure to be speared
without on horseback.”136
The “very barbarous Murders amongst the distant Stock keepers” that Aborig-
ines began committing in 1826 intensified this white dread.137 Settler David Burn
recalled, “This aboriginal warfare was much more dreaded by the settlers than the
attacks of the bushrangers.”138 In January 1827 the Colonial Times shrieked that
Aborigines “have repeatedly said they will, sooner or later, murder every white man
in the Island!!!” 139 Initially Hobart’s authorities were more sober. In October
1828, executive council minutes recorded “Great and well-founded alarm.”140 Yet,
the next month, Arthur himself wrote that Aborigines intended “to destroy, with-
out distinction of sex or age, all the white inhabitants who should fall within their
power.” As late as 1831, he reported to London: “Our continued warfare with
these miserable savages must continue to be a subject of anxious consideration.”141
As Tuan’s theory predicts, dread translated into hate and dehumanization, which
eroded cultural barriers to violence. Several whites referred to Aborigines as “our-
ang outangs” and in 1827 Cunningham wondered if Aborigines might be “the
connecting link between man and the monkey tribe?”142 In 1832 Backhouse sum-
marized white attitudes toward Aboriginal Tasmanians: “They have been consid-
ered the most degraded class of savages.”143 Whites who seized children and dashed
their brains out, or lined them up for musket practice, likely considered their
133
Earl Bathurst to Governor Darling, 14 July 1825, in Historical Records of Australia , ser. 1, 26
vols. (Sydney, 1919), 7:21.
134
Collins to King, 15 May 1804, in Watson, HRA.3, 1:238.
135
Knopwood, Diary, 273.
136
H. Wallace to J. Wallace, 10 September 1825, in Richards, Tasmanian Letters, 8.
137
Arthur to Under Secretary Hay, 15 November 1826, in Watson, HRA.3, 5:435.
138
Burn, Picture of Van Diemen’s Land, 22.
139
Colonial Times, 26 January 1827, 3.
140
Executive Council Minutes, 31 October 1828, HCPP, 11.
141
Arthur to Murray, 4 November 1828, and Arthur to Murray, 4 April 1831, HCPP, 9, 79.
142
27 November 1827 journal entry, in McKay, Journals, 67; Prinsep, Journal, 79; Breton, Excursions,
405; Cunningham, Two Years, 2:46.
143
Backhouse, 9 February 1832 letter, in Extracts, 1:15.
victims subhuman.144 Indeed, Atkins recalled that some “settlers . . . shot them
as native dogs.”145 Dehumanization—in combination with government brutality,
torture, and capital punishment—helps explain how a man could boast “that he
had thrown [an Aboriginal] woman upon a fire and burned her to death” and
how stockmen, “not contented with taking [Aboriginal] women . . . have been
guilty of the most horrid atrocities toward them, murdering them without scru-
ple.”146 Dehumanization also led to killing Aborigines “as mere beasts” in “a sport
almost as common as that of kangarooing.”147 Fear and dehumanization helped
some settlers, police, and soldiers to rationalize “diabolical” violence and anni-
hilationist attacks.148 Beginning on 1 December 1826—four years before Melville
became editor—the Colonial Times began warning, “THE GOVERNMENT MUST
REMOVE THE NATIVES—IF NOT, THEY WILL BE HUNTED DOWN LIKE WILD BEASTS,
149
AND DESTROYED!”
Eighteen twenty-seven was a violent year. On 5 January a Colonial Times editorial
warned: “The Settler . . . will . . . omit no step whereby he may destroy the
black tribes even to utter extermination.”150 Settler Michael Steel wrote to his
brother, on 21 February: “We fell in with [Aborigines] and poured a strong fire
into them and killed their leader and one more . . . had the country been even
and clear we should have killed or taken the whole of them.”151 On 11 May the
Colonial Times reported: “Not less than 30 of the blacks . . . shot dead [with]
the assistance of the military.” On 6 July, the paper printed a letter reporting,
“The people over the second Western Tier have killed an immense quantity of
blacks this last week. . . . They were surrounded whilst sitting around their fires,
when the soldiers and others fired at them about 30 yards distant. They report
there must have been about 60 of them killed and wounded!”152 Former chief
constable Gilbert Robertson reported that in 1827 “the Richmond police . . .
killed 14 of the Natives, who had got upon a hill.”153 Finally, in a December diary
entry, settler George Hobler wrote, after an Aboriginal attack: “I have armed four
men who I hope will get sight of their night fires and slaughter them as they lie
round it.”154
Killing continued in 1828. Traveler Rosalie Hare noted in her diary on 20
January, while at the Van Diemen’s Land Company headquarters: “We have to
lament that our own countrymen consider the massacre of these people an honour.
While we remained at Circular Head there were several accounts of considerable
numbers of natives having been shot by them (the Company’s men), they wishing
144
Robinson, 5 August 1830 and 23 November 1829 journal entries, in Friendly Mission, 194, 88.
145
146
Rodric O’Connor to Aborigines Committee 17 March 1830, HCPP, 54; Breton, Excursions, 400.
147
148
149
Colonial Times, 1 December 1826, 2. The paper later warned, “they must be removed; or they
will be shot like quails” (Colonial Times, 27 July 1827, 2).
150
Colonial Times, 5 January 1827, 2.
151
Quoted in Gwyneth Dow and Hume Dow, Landfall in Van Diemen’s Land: The Steels’ Quest for
Greener Pastures (Footscray, 1990), 45.
152
Colonial Times, 11 May 1827, 2, and 6 July 1827, 4.
153
Gilbert Robertson to Aborigines Committee, 3 March 1830, HCPP, 49.
154
George Hobler, The Diaries of Pioneer George Hobler, October 6 1800–December 13 1882, 5 vols.
(California, 1992), 1:40.
94 䡵 MADLEY
to extirpate them entirely, if possible. The master of the Company’s cutter Fanny,
assisted by four shepherds and his crew, surprised a party and killed twelve.”155
The next month, four Van Diemen’s Land Company shepherds ambushed a group
of Aborigines and shot thirty dead.156
PHASE 3: STATE-SANCTIONED MASS MURDER, 1828–35
In 1826 and 1827 dozens of Aboriginal assaults struck at whites and their property;
eighty-two were killed or wounded.157 To halt these losses, in April 1828 Arthur
adopted a peace plan, but it eventually failed. His plan had two tracks. The con-
ciliation portion included posting notice boards, divided into thirds. The top panel
depicted black and white men embracing, black and white children holding hands,
and black and white women holding each other’s babies. The middle panel illus-
trated a peaceful meeting between Aborigines and British officials. Finally, the
bottom panel portrayed hangings of an Aborigine for killing a white and of a
white for killing an Aborigine, thus suggesting equal justice.158 However, after
twenty-five years of injustice, Aborigines were unconvinced. Arthur’s second track
was forced segregation. In January 1828 he reported to London: “I am . . .
convinced of the absolute necessity of separating the Aborigines altogether from
the white inhabitants.” His April demarcation proclamation then divided the island
with “a line of military posts . . . along the confines of the settled districts” across
which “Aborigines shall not and may not . . . penetrate.”159 By deploying force
to contain habitually migratory people, Arthur’s proclamation, Melville wrote, had
“the effect of adding outrage to outrage.”160
Despite the posters, posts, and proclamations, Aboriginal attacks escalated. In
1828 Aborigines plundered three times as many white dwellings as they had in
1827, and white casualties rose from fifty-two to seventy-one.161 Why could pro-
fessional British soldiers neither effectively protect all settlers nor vanquish Ab-
original guerillas? British troops in Tasmania were poorly trained. Reynolds has
argued that the “450 soldiers . . . in the interior” by early 1828, “were unsuitable
for fighting a guerilla war” because they were “trained for . . . disciplined, formal
manoeuvres.”162 John Connor countered that, “through wars with other indige-
nous peoples, the British had developed a repertoire of strategies and tactics which
they applied as appropriate to Australian conditions,” but that “British peacetime
garrisons [including those in Tasmania] were not properly trained for any kind of
warfare.”163 Whether their training was inappropriate or inadequate, an 1830 Co-
155
Rosalie Hare and Ida Lee, The Voyage of the Caroline from England to Van Diemen’s Land and
Batavia in 1827–28 (London, 1927), 41.
156
For more on this massacre, see Ian McFarlane, “Cape Grim,” in Manne, Whitewash, 277–98.
157
Plomley, Aboriginal/Settler Clash, 26–27.
158
Reproduced in Bonwick, Last of the Tasmanians, 85.
159
Arthur to Goderich, 10 January 1828, and Arthur to Huskinson, 17 April 1828, HCPP, 2, 7.
160
161
Plomley, Aboriginal/Settler Clash, 26, 27.
162
163
Connor, Australian Frontier Wars, 12, 14.
lonial Times opined: “The military are not the most proper persons to be employed,
being unaccustomed as they are to the fatigues of the bush.”164
In contrast, Aboriginal Tasmanian warriors enjoyed internal lines of commu-
nication, intimate geographic knowledge, and the ability to live off the land. They
were also excellent tacticians and skilled warriors. The Colonial Times reported,
on 16 July 1830, that Aborigines’ “cunning and superiority of . . . [tactics] . . .
would not disgrace even some of the greatest military characters.”165 Superior mo-
bility and bushcraft helped Aborigines counter white firepower.166 Surveyor J. H.
Wedge wrote in his diary, “The Natives are . . . very expert in eluding . . . White
men.”167 Ross agreed that Aborigines had “the wonderful facility . . . of disap-
pearing on a sudden from the view.”168 Another observer recalled, “I saw one,
and, while in the act of leveling my gun at him, he disappeared as if by magic.”169
Mark Twain later dubbed them “the Spartans of Australia.”170
By burning farms, plundering and destroying private property, killing civilians,
and resisting set-piece battles, Aboriginal tactics violated traditional British military
rules of engagement and conduct. To Britons, such acts were unsavory, at best,
as in the case of allied Spanish guerillas fighting Napoleon. Many Britons consid-
ered guerilla warfare criminal, at least when conducted by their opponents. Ac-
cording to the Colonial Times, Aboriginal tactics made them a “brutal and atrocious
race.”171 Arthur found them “a most treacherous race.”172 Though their destruc-
tion of property and civilians resembled British practices toward the Aborigines,
both reversed still-dominant nineteenth-century British conceptions of war as con-
flict between designated military forces on assigned fields. In Tasmania, as in Spain,
attacks on noncombatants and property informed modes of retaliation on both
sides, each of whom in turn made little attempt to distinguish between combatants
and civilians.
Guerrilla warfare also compounded British dehumanization of Aborigines. Cun-
ningham wrote, “They can always steal in upon the whites, by gliding from tree
to tree [and] it is no easy matter to distinguish them from a burnt stick.”173 Police
magistrate Thomas Anstey described them to Arthur as nearly demonic: “the
natives have uttered their war whoop and that it is to be a war of extermination
even of defenseless women and children. Their disposition is nearer to the cold
malignity of a wicked spirit than to the frailty and passion of man.”174 The Laun-
ceston Advertiser called Aboriginal warriors simply “cunning . . . black devils.”175
Even official Aborigines Committee members, often sympathetic to them, con-
164
Colonial Times, 27 August 1830, 3.
165
Colonial Times, 16 July 1830, 3.
166
Settler W. Clark described whites’ superior firepower: “Two or three men, well armed, need never
fear an open attack from [Aborigines], however numerous” (Colonial Times, 13 November 1829, 3).
167
John Helder Wedge, 23 March 1828 entry, in The Diaries of John Helder Wedge, 1824–1835, ed.
Justice Crawford, W. F. Ellis, and G. H. Stancombe (Devonport, 1962), 44.
168
Ross, Settler, 26.
169
Colonial Times, 18 September 1829, 4.
170
Twain, Following the Equator, 267.
171
172
Arthur to Murray, 15 April 1830, HCPP, 16.
173
Cunningham, Two Years, 2:32–33.
174
Quoted in Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, 99.
175
Launceston Advertiser, 9 February 1829, 4.
96 䡵 MADLEY
cluded: “acts of violence on the part of the Natives are generally to be regarded
. . . as proceeding from a wanton and savage spirit inherent in them.”176
Unable to vanquish Aborigines or protect whites from them, Arthur and his
Executive Committee anticipated merchant John Sherwin’s 1830 suggestion that
“they must be captured or exterminated.”177 Arthur’s peace plan having failed, in
November 1828 he revoked state protection of Aborigines. By removing the last,
rhetorical, element of restraint, Arthur unleashed more frequent and more lethal
settler assaults. On 1 November 1828 martial law unleashed settlers, police, and
soldiers to slaughter Aborigines. Martial law remained in effect until February
1832. Arthur focused on Aboriginal guerrilla warfare in his martial law procla-
mation: “Whereas the black or aboriginal Natives of this Island have . . . carried
on a series of indiscriminate attacks . . . and have . . . perpetrated the most cruel
and sanguinary acts of violence and outrage; evincing an evident disposition sys-
tematically to kill and destroy the white inhabitants indiscriminately . . . martial
law is [declared] against the several black or aboriginal Natives [except in certain
areas].”178 Thus, Arthur used guerrilla warfare to justify falling back on familiar
tactics: violence and terror.179 After Arthur met with his council and decided to
enact martial law, the council recorded: “To inspire them with terror, the Council
fear, will be found the only effectual means of security.” Arthur then reported to
the British secretary of state for war and the colonies, Sir George Murray, “Terror
may have the effect which no proferred measures of conciliation have been capable
of inducing.” The next year, on receiving Arthur’s statement and the council
minutes, Murray sanctioned “terror” by approving the plan.180
Arthur did not entirely relinquish the goal or rhetoric of protection. His martial
law proclamation “[commanded] that the actual use of arms be in no case resorted
to, if the Natives can by other means be induced or compelled to retire.” Further,
he urged that “bloodshed be checked, as much as possible.”181 Yet in 1830 the
Colonial Times claimed that martial law had opened “the door for whatever treat-
ment individuals chose to practice toward the Aborigines with impunity.”182 Martial
law undercut Arthur’s own rhetorical restraints and also had the effect of legalizing
killing. The Tasmanian solicitor general Alfred Stephen dismissed the case against
a white man for the fatal 1829 shooting of an Aboriginal woman on the grounds
that martial law legalized killing Aborigines. Stephen also dismissed the case against
176
Aborigines Committee, 19 March 1830, HCPP, 38.
177
Sherwin to Aborigines Committee, 23 February 1830, HCPP, 47.
178
Arthur to Murray, 4 November 1828, HCPP, 11–12.
179
Arthur was not the last British colonial governor to trade conciliation toward nonwhites for martial
law and extreme force. Historian Catherine Hall has described how Edward Eyre was initially “sym-
pathetic to Aboriginal peoples, [and] became associated with Governor Grey’s policy of assimilation
in South Australia.” Later, as “lieutenant-governor of the South Island of New Zealand,” he “[at-
tempted] to foster amicable relations between black and white.” However, after some Jamaicans rebelled
in 1865, Governor Eyre declared martial law, and troops under his command “executed 439 people,
flogged more than 600 men and women, and burnt more than 1,000 homes” (Civilizing Subjects:
Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 [Chicago, 2002], xv, 43, 46, 23).
180
Executive Council Minutes, 31 October 1828, Arthur to Murray, 4 November 1828, Murray to
Arthur, 25 August 1829, HCPP, 11, 9, 14.
181
182
a second assailant who administered ax blows to the woman, on the grounds that
she was already fatally wounded when he attacked her with the ax.183
Beginning 1 November 1828 roving parties of “four to 11 . . . soldiers, district
constables, field police, volunteer guides, settlers, stock keepers and black-trackers”
began hunting down Aborigines.184 Two years later, the Colonial Times reported
that, as a result, “‘the dogs of war being thus let slip,’ all was ardour and emulation
among many of the Whites, trying who should hunt, kill and destroy the most.”185
Melville recalled in 1836: “At this point it was common for parties of the civilized
portion of society to scour the bush, and falling in with the tracks of the natives,
during the night to follow them to their place of encampment, where they were
slaughtered in cool blood.”186 British Army units, including the fortieth, fifty-
seventh, and sixty-third regiments, joined in. On 13 December the Hobart Town
Courier reported that a “party of the 40th regt.” had killed ten “Natives” near
“the Great Lake.”187 According to Melville, “The effect of the proclamation of
martial law, was to destroy, within twelve months after its publication, more than
two thirds of these wild creatures.”188
The death toll rose through 1829. On 2 January, the Colonial Times reported
that John Danvers “and his party lately attacked a tribe of natives [and] killed
ten.” On 30 January, the paper printed a letter describing how “David Rayner
shot a black man near Mr. Lynes’s on Monday last. Nine [Aborigines] were killed
. . . near St. Paul’s River, ten days back, and about the same time ten were shot
. . . near the Eastern Marshes.” On 18 September, the Colonial Times reported:
“Mr. Batman, and the party under his orders fell in with a tribe comprising 70 in
number . . . at Benlomond . . . about 15 were killed and wounded, and several
taken.”189 Unleashed by Arthur, driven by fear, and well-versed in violence, whites
began to articulate even more malevolent designs.
Calls for extermination multiplied in 1830. On 26 February, the Tasmanian
suggested: “Extermination seems to be the only remedy.”190 In March, Road
Inspector Rodric O’Connor told the Aborigines Committee: “Douglas Ibbens
would soon put an end to the eastern mob if he were employed; he has killed half
that tribe by creeping upon them and firing amongst them with his double-bar-
relled gun.”191 Justice of the Peace William Barnes suggested to Arthur that unless
peace could be achieved, “then the dreadful alternative only remains of a general
extermination.” Landowner Temple Pearson likewise advised the Colonial Sec-
retary in June: “Total extermination however severe the measure, I much fear will
be the only means left to the Government to protect the Whites.”192
183
Shaw, Sir George Arthur, 125–26.
184
Lyndall Ryan, “Who Is the Fabricator?” in Manne, Whitewash, 250.
185
186
187
Hobart Town Courier, 13 December 1828, 2.
188
189
Colonial Times, 2 January 1829, 3, 30 January 1829, 3, and 8 September 1829, 3; on 1 September
1829 Batman reported attacking and killing or mortally injuring thirteen Aborigines and then murdering
two captured during the attack: Alastair Cambell, John Batman and the Aborigines (Melbourne, 1987),
32.
190
Tasmanian and Austral-Asiatic Review, 26 February 1830, 7.
191
O’Connor to Aborigines Committee, 17 March 1830, HCPP, 55.
192
Quoted in Reynolds, “Genocide in Tasmania?” 141.
98 䡵 MADLEY
Extermination was no secret. In February, a letter to the Launceston Advertiser

proclaimed, “We have waged a war directly tending to extermination.”193 By Au-
gust, the Colonial Times warned, “The plan at present adopted will leave no other
chance of obtaining peace than the annihilation of the whole race.”194 In Septem-
ber, the paper printed the minutes of a Hobart meeting in which participants
debated initiating “a war of extermination.” A Mr. Horne commented, “I do not
see what other means of protection exist,” while a Dr. Turnbull stated that “the
war would be a war of extermination. It is so already.” Solicitor General Alfred
Stephen—speaking as “a private individual”—then urged his audience to protect
settlers, proclaiming, “if you cannot do so without extermination, then I say boldly
and broadly, exterminate!”195 Exterminatory sentiment apparently pervaded some
communities almost completely. In October, Robinson wrote to his wife, “Nothing
is heard of at Launceston but extirpating the original inhabitants.”196
The annihilationist rhetoric of 1830 was accompanied by reports of more killing.
On 3 March, Gilbert Robertson reported “a party of constables and some of the
40th Regiment [killed] 70 [Aborigines] by firing all their ammunition upon them,
and then dragging the women and children from the crevices in the rocks, and
dashing out their brains.”197 On 16 June, Robinson recorded a conversation in
which a man named Chamberlain claimed that he and three other Van Diemen’s
Land Company employees had killed thirty Aborigines in one day.198 In July, the
Colonial Times editorialized: “Settlers and their servants . . . consider the men as
wild beasts whom it is praiseworthy to hunt down and destroy, and the women
as only fit only to be used for the worst purposes.”199 In August, Robinson recorded
hearing that a “stockkeeper called Paddy Heagon . . . had shot nineteen of the
western natives with a swivel charged with nails,” while in October a man named
“Parish said that twenty natives was shot” along the coast.200 On 25 September,
Robinson recorded a conversation in which a stock keeper confessed that he had
“ripped up [an Aboriginal] man’s belly with his knife” and on another occasion
“shot nine of the natives.” Robinson concluded, “Gibson’s stockkeeper, like all
other stockkeepers, has massacred the natives.”201 The results of martial law were
now openly discussed. On 24 September 1830, the Independent warned, “Unless
something forthwith is done by the government, the end will be, horrible as the
idea is, EXTERMINATION.”202 Later, in an 1832 letter, Backhouse wrote, “It is a
question of doubt whether any act of the natives is to be compared with the cruelty
193
Launceston Advertiser, 15 February 1830, 3.
194
Colonial Times, 27 August 1830, 3.
195
196
Robinson, 10 October 1830 letter, in Friendly Mission, 435.
197
Robertson to Aborigines Committee, 3 March 1830, HCPP, 48. This massacre likely occurred
before 1830.
198
Robinson, 16 June 1830 journal entry, in Friendly Mission, 175. Later that month, Robinson
reported what was probably the same massacre. Aborigines told him that “at the Doughboys” Van
Diemen’s Land Company employees had “massacred thirty of them and threw them off a cliff” (21
June 1830 journal entry, in Friendly Mission, 181).
199
200
Robinson, 12 August 1830 and 23 October 1830 journal entries, in Friendly Mission, 197–98,
256.
201
Robinson, 25 September 1830 journal entry, in Friendly Mission, 219.
202
Independent, 24 September 1831, quoted in Reynolds, “Genocide in Tasmania?” 142.
of the martial-law of the colony against them, by which they are liable to be shot,
on being seen by the colonists, without there having any aspect of outrage at the
time.”203
The spears, wadis (wooden spear-throwing devices), and stones that had served
Aborigines well in hit-and-run attacks were insufficient to hold off roving parties
emboldened by Arthur’s legalization of Aborigine killing to murder men, women,
and children. These parties were sometimes mounted and always carried muskets
and/or pistols. Few Aboriginal Tasmanians had firearms and they rarely shot
whites.204 Thus, Melville estimated, the roving parties’ “murderous warfare, in the
course of a few years destroyed thousands of aborigines, whilst only a few score
of the European population were sacrificed.”205 Tested in the annihilation of the
bushrangers, vigilantes now served a similar purpose against Aborigines.
Arthur was concerned about presiding over the extermination of his Aboriginal
subjects. Thus, in 1829 he sent out a few men, including Robinson, to bring
surviving Aborigines into custody.206 In February 1830 he began offering “5£
. . . for every adult aboriginal Native, and 2£ for every child . . . delivered
alive.”207 These efforts failed to stop the slaughter of Aborigines or their attacks
on whites. Finally, Arthur launched the massive, “farcical,” Black Line.208 On 7
October 1830, a human chain of 2,200 soldiers, police, freemen, and convicts
began sweeping across southeastern Tasmania—an island roughly Ireland’s size—
attempting to push Aborigines into the Tasman Peninsula for incarceration.209
According to Connor, Aboriginal “bushcraft,” their small numbers, and “an
[in]effective cordon” led to failure.210 Just two Aborigines were captured.211
By November 1830, Arthur recognized that the annihilation war was nearing
a grim conclusion. He reported to London, “The aboriginal race [will be] exter-
minated . . . if they can neither be conciliated nor taken; self-preservation will
compel the inhabitants to destroy them.”212 Arthur defined this extermination as
destruction yet seemed only mildly concerned about his prediction. Following his
Black Line fiasco, Arthur still refrained from punishing whites for assaulting or
killing Aborigines. He did, however, give up his program of overwhelming military
force in favor of focusing solely on placing Tasmanian Aborigines on reserves
through negotiation, coercion, and capture.
London decision makers were more passive. For example, Secretary of State for
War and the Colonies Murray, to whom Arthur reported, foresaw potential ex-
tinction—“the whole race of these people may, at no distant period, become
extinct”—and understood that some whites desired it: “Such an event may be
looked forward to by . . . Settlers who have been sufferers by the Collissions
203
Backhouse, 9 February 1832 letter, in Extracts, 1:16.
204
Connor, Australian Frontier Wars, 89; Robinson, Friendly Mission, 579–80.
205
206
The Colonial Times reported, “several parties . . . in pursuit of the natives, to endeavour to
capture them” on 28 August 1829, 3.
207
Government order, 25 February 1830, HCPP, 35.
208
Launceston Advertiser, 29 May 1834, 3.
209
210
Connor, Australian Frontier Wars, 99.
211
212
Ibid., 60.
100 䡵 MADLEY
which have taken place.” Murray also felt guilty: “it is impossible not to contem-
plate such a result of our occupation of the Island, as one very difficult to be
reconciled with feelings of humanity or even with principles of justice and sound
policy.” Finally, Murray anticipated the censure later historians would heap upon
British policies in Tasmania: “The adoption of any line of conduct having for its
avowed or for its secret object, the extinction of the native race, could not fail to
leave an indelible stain upon the character of the British Government.”213 Yet he
failed to order Arthur to repeal martial law or stop the violence that Arthur plainly
said would annihilate these subjects of the British Empire.
For remaining Aboriginal Tasmanians the results of official policy and inaction
in Hobart and London were cataclysmic. Plomley has estimated that in 1824 there
were 1,500 Aborigines in Tasmania.214 In 1831 Robinson suggested a surviving
population of “not more than 700”; the same year John Henderson estimated
“about 600.”215 By 1835 there were fewer than 400 “full-descent” Aboriginal
Tasmanians. One Aboriginal leader recalled in an 1838 speech: “My brothers, in
our own country a long time ago we were a great many men, a great number.
The white men have killed us all; they shot a great many.”216
PHASE 4: INCARCERATION AND DEATH, 1829–47

While the Black War raged, colonial authorities launched the final phase of the
Aboriginal Tasmanian catastrophe. In 1829 they began incarcerating survivors in
the first of a series of transit camps and offshore detention centers and finally at
Wybalenna on Flinders Island. Removal was initially intended to protect whites
from Aborigines and to provide these survivors “a country where under the pro-
tection of the Government they would be protected from hostile whites.”217
In 1829, Robinson and others began assembling Aborigines from Tasmania’s
interior and relocating them. Then, on 3 February 1835, Robinson reported to
Arthur: “The entire Aboriginal population are now removed.”218 According to an
editorial in the Launceston Advertiser, “The result was security of life and property
throughout the island” upon which “it is certainly impossible to affix a pecuniary
value.”219 By 1835 all but seven of the last 317 full-descent Aborigines had been
removed from mainland Tasmania.220 Yet instead of saving surviving Aborigines,
incarceration proved lethal. Five out of six would die in captivity.
After dozens had died in camps and detention, Arthur’s administration estab-
lished Wybalenna in February 1833. It was, as Reynolds has argued, “likely . . .
by far the best equipped, most heavily funded and lavishly staffed of all colonial
institutions for Aborigines.”221 In 1835 it featured a vegetable garden, medical
213
Murray to Arthur, 5 November 1830, HCPP, 56.
214
Plomley, Aboriginal/Settler Clash, 29.
215
Quoted in Aborigines Committee, 4 February 1831, HCPP, 76; Henderson, Observations, 149.
216
G. A. Robinson, 14 April 1838 journal annotation in Plomley, Weep in Silence, 733.
217
Secretary of the Aborigines Committee, quoted in Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, 130.
218
Quoted in Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, 170.
219
Launceston Advertiser, 29 May 1834, 3, and 23 October 1834, 3.
220
By 1835, “about three hundred and ten” were captured (Melville, History, 106). In 1842 seven
more were captured and incarcerated at Wybalenna (West, History of Tasmania, 2:65).
221
officer, and forty-six European staff for just 123 prisoners.222 Yet Wybalenna has
been called “a concentration camp” and in 1999 Tasmanian Premier Jim Bacon
designated it “a site of genocide.”223 Hobart administrators did not expressly design
or operate Wyabalenna for mass murder. Yet they were extremely slow to provide
basic services and materials they knew were necessary to maintain prisoners’ ex-
istence. Some necessities, like clean fresh water—vital to any community—officials
never provided. Meanwhile London decision makers remained passive until most
of the 200 or so inmates sent to Flinders Island were dead.224 More importantly,
officials held prisoners at Wybalenna by force for over fourteen years despite warn-
ings and evidence that it was a place of death for Aborigines. Prisoners lived at
the state’s mercy, and until 1837–38 the state did little to alter conditions known
to be lethal. When Wybalenna closed, only forty-seven prisoners remained alive.
Facing into the open ocean and the powerful winds of the Roaring Forties,
which gather speed over thousands of miles of open ocean, Wybalenna is a wind-
swept spot where waves explode against granite boulders. In 1870 Bonwick ac-
curately described a winter day there: “The winds were violent and cold; the rain
and sleet . . . penetrating and miserable.”225 Keith Windschuttle is wrong to sug-
gest that Wybalenna must have been “like a balmy holiday resort” for some in-
mates.226 The dozens of Aborigines buried there attest to its grim reality.
Even before it was established, officials warned that Wybalenna would be in-
hospitable, if not deadly. In 1831, Tasmanian Supreme Court Chief Justice John
Pedder warned Arthur’s Executive Council that Aborigines held on any Bass Strait
island “would soon pine away when they found their situation one of hopeless
imprisonment.”227 Later, a soldier sent to examine Flinders Island as a potential
Aboriginal reservation warned, “The climate was bleak, the soil sterile, and des-
titute of springs.”228 More tellingly, Robinson repeatedly advocated relocation to
the Port Phillip district of New South Wales. By 1834 even Arthur proposed
returning inmates to “some tract of land in their own country” but then took no
action.229 Eventually, most prisoners died. Robinson blamed “the sad mortality”
on “the will of providence.”230 Nineteenth-century author James Walker, however,
suggested that Wybalenna’s conditions were “only too well calculated to induce
those severe pulmonary diseases which were destined to prove so fatal to them.”231
Impure water, inadequate clothing, insufficient blankets, and poor shelter pre-
cipitated lethal respiratory illnesses, including influenza, tuberculosis, and pneu-
222
223
Clive Turnbull, “Tasmania: The Ultimate Solution,” in Racism, The Australian Experience, ed.
F. S. Stephens, 3 vols. (Sydney, 1972), 2:230; Hughes, Fatal Shore, 423; Raymond Gill “A Closer
Look at Our Singing Ambassador,” Age, 14 April 1994; quoted in Andrew Darby, “Bacon’s Final Act
Hopes to End Fight for Cape Barren,” Age, 28 February 2004.
224
“About 200” were sent to Flinders Island (Turnbull, “Tasmania,” 231).
225
Bonwick, Last of the Tasmanians, 247. The author visited Wybalenna in winter.
226
227
Quoted in Peter Chapman, “Introduction” in Historical Records of Australia, ser. 3, 11 vols., ed.
Peter Chapman (Melbourne, 2006), 9:liv.
228
229
Quoted in Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, 154.
230
Quoted in Plomley, Weep in Silence, 314–15.
231
James Walker, Early Tasmania: Papers Read before the Royal Society of Tasmania during the Years
1888 to 1899 (1902; Tasmania, 1950), 242.
102 䡵 MADLEY
monia. In 1835, Flinders Island surgeon Dr. James Allen charged that “clothing
and blankets . . . have been too scantily supplied” and also reported to Robinson,
“the great mortality amongst the aborigines has been caused, in most instances,
by the application of cold, either in exposed situations or by irregular use of
improper clothing.” Allen added, “The water at this settlement is not wholesome,”
and “it is highly necessary for the natives to be located in a sheltered situation
. . . the [wattle and daub] huts . . . are decidedly very improper . . . being neither
warm nor dry.”232 In March 1836 Launceston Commandant Major Thomas Ryan
visited. His official report described inmates enduring “an artificial society where
most of their traditional food sources have been hunted out, and living in damp,
poorly ventilated huts with impure water and inadequate provisions.” He contin-
ued, “If it is the wish of the Government to propagate the species it is our bounden
duty to provide all the means that are in our possession for the accomplishment
of so desirable an end—if not, I tremble for the consequences, the race of Tasmania
. . . will . . . be extinct in a quarter of a century.”233
“Inadequate provisions” in the context of incarceration bordered on institu-
tionalized malnutrition. Adult prisoners’ set daily rations—one pound of salt meat,
one and a half pounds of flour, and two ounces of sugar—were nutritionally
inadequate over the long term, infrequently available, and unpalatable to Aborig-
ines.234 Wybalenna acquired hundreds of sheep and some cattle, but inmates were
rarely allowed to eat them before 1838.235 Inmates hunted to survive, but if they
became ill due to their inadequate clothing and blankets, poor housing, or impure
water, they could not hunt. Without the nutrition provided by hunting, they could
not recover from illnesses.
Authorities in Hobart became increasingly aware of Wybalenna’s lethal condi-
tions. Officials’ inaction in the face of clear warnings, continual population decline,
and high mortality rates suggests that they considered Aboriginal population de-
cline, though not a defined government objective, preferable to moving survivors
to a new location or providing them adequate water, food, housing, or clothing.
Adding to Dr. Allen’s and Major Ryan’s warnings, in 1836 Melville published a
History of Van Diemen’s Land in which he wrote, “It is generally believed, that
this race of human beings will soon become extinct altogether, as the deaths are
common, and the increase nothing equal in proportion.”236 In June of the next
year, Robinson warned the colonial secretary in Hobart, “Should . . . His Maj-
esty’s Government still object to their removal, and continue the settlement where
it now is, I have no hesitation in stating that the race in a very short period will
be extinct.”237
By 1837, inmates had spent four and a half years in these poor conditions.
Dozens were dead, many others terminally ill.238 As Plomley has observed, “There
232
Quoted in Turnbull, Black War, 176, 177.
233
Report of Major Thomas Ryan upon the Aboriginal Establishment, quoted in Ryan, Aboriginal
Tasmanians, 186.
234
Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, 186, 196.
235
Bonwick, Last of the Tasmanians, 256.
236
237
Report of the Aboriginal Establishment, 7, quoted in Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, 190.
238
Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, app. 3.
were few births, and of them nearly all died within weeks.”239 Near 100 percent
infant mortality, without evidence of infanticide, suggests extremely bad condi-
tions. Officials improved the situation in 1837, completing thatch-roofed brick
cottages in October, but five more inmates died that month.240 On 17 November
the editor of the Flinders Island Weekly Chronicle, a paper written by Aborigines
and managed by Robinson, wrote: “Let us hope . . . something may be done for
us poor people they are dying away.” The editor continued, “I am much afraid
none of us will be alive by and by” and urged, “Why dont the black fellows pray
to the king to get us away from this place.”241 Officials took further ameliorative
action two months later.
In January 1838 the new Tasmanian Governor, Sir John Franklin, toured Wy-
balenna. He agreed to move the inmates to Port Phillip. However, as Lyndall
Ryan has observed, “Franklin’s support came too late. The dispatch from the
secretary of state for the colonies in London, Lord Glenelg, leaving the decision
for removal in the hands of the governor of New South Wales, Sir George Gipps,
in whose jurisdiction Port Phillip lay, had already been sent.” Gipps decided against
accepting Wybalenna inmates and Franklin chose not to resettle them on Tasmania
proper.242 Officials added fresh meat to rations in 1838, but in April Robinson
reported that if deaths “continue much longer no vestige of their race will be left
behind.”243
Mortality persisted, but government improvements cut the annual death rate
dramatically. Between 1833 and 1838 approximately 100 Aborigines died on Flin-
ders Island, nearly half the population, or about seventeen per year. From 1835
to 1838, forty-three to forty-six died there, or about eleven per year. During the
next nine years—after changes were made—between twenty-nine and forty-eight
died and Wybalenna’s annual mortality rate dropped to between 3.2 and 5.3.244
Meanwhile, eleven children were also taken away to Hobart’s Orphan School.245
In 1844 some whites tried to bring Wybalenna’s few dozen inmates back to
mainland Tasmania. In 1852, West recalled, “A Finance Committee of the Leg-
islative Council proposed the restoration of the natives” to the mainland, but “the
measure was delayed.”246 Some inmates then appealed to the pinnacle of British
power. They petitioned Queen Victoria in 1846, asking her to intervene.247 Sec-
retary of State for the Colonies Earl Grey then “instructed the colonial government
to prepare for the removal of the Aboriginal community from Flinders Island.”248
Finally, “in October of [1847] they were landed in Van Diemen’s Land, and located
at Oyster Bay.”249
239
Plomley, Weep in Silence, 934.
240
241
Flinders Island Weekly Chronicle, 17 November 1837, 1.
242
243
Ibid., 186; quoted in Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, 184.
244
“About 200” were brought to Flinders Island (Turnbull, “Tasmania,” 231). Two were executed
on mainland Australia. Forty-seven returned to mainland Tasmania (Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, app.
3).
245
Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, 196, 200.
246
247
Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, 7–8.
248
Ibid., 15.
249
104 䡵 MADLEY
Only forty-seven disembarked.250 Along with earlier camps, Wybalenna had com-
pleted the near-annihilation of Tasmania’s “full-descent” Aborigines. In a con-
versation with Arthur, an Aborigine named Black Tom told the Lieutenant Gov-
ernor: “Put him in a gaol, Mata Guberna!! You take it him own country, take it
him black woman, kill’t right out, all him litta child—den you put him in your
gaol. Ah, Mata Guberna, dat a very good way. ’Pose you like dat way—’pose all
same dat black un! I nebber like dat way. You better kill it right out.”251
Today, the yellow, black, and red Aboriginal Australian flag flies before the
Flinders Island airport terminal. Its flutter and crack call attention to Aboriginal
Tasmanian survival. Thousands now claim part–Aboriginal Tasmanian identity.
“Official figures recorded 38 Aborigines in 1961 [and] 10,113 in 1994.”252 The
numbers continue to grow. In 2001, 15,773 Tasmanians claimed Aboriginal or
Torres Strait Islander identity.253
GENOCIDE
British policies and local whites’ actions almost annihilated Tasmania’s Aborigines.
From 1803 to 1847, settlement policies, murders, abductions, massacres, and
incarceration reduced them from thousands to less than 100 “full-descent” Ab-
original Tasmanians.
The Aboriginal Tasmanians’ near-annihilation fits the two-part legal definition
set froth in the U.N. Genocide Convention. First, multiple perpetrators articulated,
in word and deed, “intent to destroy.” Second, they committed at least four
genocidal acts listed in the convention. “Killing members of the group” has been
well documented. The rapes and assaults repeatedly described up to 1833
amounted to “causing serious bodily harm” on the basis of group identity. Further,
from 1833 Wybalenna employees and Hobart decision makers began receiving
evidence of their wards’ mass deaths, yet took almost no corrective action until
1837–38. By holding Aborigines in detention despite years of population decline,
these officials seem to have been “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions
of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” at
least until 1837–38. Individual whites were also involved in “forcibly transferring
children of the group to another group.” As with other crimes against Aborigines,
the state failed to punish abduction, and some whites exploited this permissive
policy. In light of the U.N. definition, sufficient evidence exists to designate the
Tasmanian catastrophe genocide.
The roles of disease, decision makers in Hobart and London, and nonstate actors
complicate this interpretation. Disease underpins Windschuttle’s argument that
“this small, precarious society quickly collapsed under the dual weight of the
susceptibility of its members to disease and [its own] abuse and neglect of its
250
Plomley, Weep in Silence, 172.
251
Melville, History, 75–76, editor’s footnote. This conversation probably took place in 1829.
252
Michael Roe, “Tasmania,” in The Oxford Companion to Australian History (New York, 2001),
635.
253
Australian Bureau of Statistics, http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/featurearticles
bytitle/06E6409495FF5247CA256DEA00053A04?OpenDocument.
women.”254 Yet apart from some exceptions, such as venereal disease, existing
primary sources conclusively document no “Old World” epidemics among Ab-
original Tasmanians prior to 1829.255 Though it reduced the birthrate, venereal
disease probably did not kill hundreds of Aboriginal Tasmanians. In contrast,
Reynolds has estimated that 250–400 were killed between 1804 and 1831, and
Ryan has estimated that whites killed some 700 between 1823 and 1832 alone.256
One intellectual legacy of the Nazi Holocaust is a widespread assumption that
“intent to destroy” must be articulated by a national leader like Hitler and doc-
umented in an official written plan like the 1942 Wannsee Conference Protocol.
Through that lens, designating the Tasmanian catastrophe genocide is impossible.
Extant sources do not document Arthur ever articulating any plan to “destroy”
Aboriginal Tasmanians “in whole or in part.” From this lack of evidence, one
could mistakenly conclude that colonial officials were innocent of genocide. How-
ever, prosecutors need not produce a written statement of intent to convict a party
of genocide.257
Another Holocaust legacy is the misconception that all genocide perpetrators
must be state actors. There is no such requirement in international law. However,
as West put it in 1852, “When [a convict] shot down the native, and acquired
distinction by his butcheries, justice became scrupulous: the laws were silent—
religion and humanity were silent; and the fallen black, like the uprooted forest,
was thought of as an encumbrance removed!”258 In the end, whoever the direct
agents, sustained mass murder rarely takes place without government collusion.
Britons destroyed Aboriginal Tasmanians not only out of racism, but also because
an official culture of terror created a white population so hardened to violence
that Aborigines could be “hunted down like wild beasts.”259 Should not London
have foreseen and acted to prevent such a result of establishing a colony 58 percent
of whose population in 1822 were criminals? Through the colony’s early years,
254
255
Anthropologist Josephine Flood has recently argued that “a strong oral tradition indicates that a
catastrophic epidemic occurred even before British settlement.” Her evidence for this is post-1829 only.
Paraphrasing a passage from James Bonwick’s 1870 book Daily Life and Origin of the Tasmanians
(87), Flood has written that “Robert Clark, a teacher at Wybalenna . . . reported that Aborigines told
him [that] ‘their numbers were very much thinned by a sudden attack of disease which was general
among the entire population previous to the arrival of the English.’” Flood has also argued that
“corroboration of depopulation through disease in the northeast comes from” Robinson’s writings
(Josephine Flood, The Original Australians: Story of the Aboriginal People [Crows Nest, 2007], 66,
67). However, the sources she cites date from 1830 and 1831—during the final phase when few
Aborigines remained on mainland Tasmania—and they provide unclear evidence of any epidemic prior
to 1829. No extant primary source that this author is aware of ever mentions any epidemic, apart from
venereal disease, among the Aborigines of Tasmania prior to 1829. Lyndall Ryan has concluded that
“recent archaeological research indicates that” Aboriginal Tasmanians were actually “increasing in pop-
ulation at the moment of British colonization in 1803” (“Abduction and Multiple Killings of Aborigines
in Tasmania, 1804–1835,” http://www.yale.edu/gsp/colonial, 1). Boyce has observed, “Only from
1832 is the leading role of disease in the Aboriginal death rate conclusive” (“Fantasy Island,” 44).
256
Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, 81–82; Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, 313, 174.
257
In 1998, for example, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda ruled that Jean-Paul Akayesu
was “culpable because he knew or should have known that the act committed would destroy, in whole
or in part, a group” (quoted in William A. Schabas, Genocide in International Law: The Crimes of
Crimes [New York, 2000], 212).
258
259
106 䡵 MADLEY
the culture of terror developed in tandem with ever-increasing brutality and vi-
olence against Aborigines. A succession of Hobart and London regimes spoke of
Aborigines as British subjects but, in practice, gave away their land and afforded
them neither protection nor rights, effectively sanctioning violence against them.
Later, when British soldiers were unable to defeat Aboriginal insurgents, colonial
officials responded with the same policies they had long employed to control
convicts and exterminate bushrangers: terror and killing. London condoned these
policies. In reservations—notably Wybalenna—officials forcibly detained Aborig-
ines and then chose, particularly between 1833 and 1837–38, not to provide
materials known to be necessary for their survival. Only after five out of six prisoners
had died did administrators free survivors. Officials thus bear responsibility for
destroying many of their prisoner wards.
Some Australian conservatives, Keith Windschuttle foremost among them, have
attempted to rewrite Tasmanian history in order to defend a triumphal narrative
of British settlement in Australia. They have tried to erase Melville’s contemporary
assessment that “the manner in which the Government of this Island acted toward
[Aborigines] will ever be a stigma on its history.”260 They blame Aborigines for
their own near-extermination and airbrush over many indefensible acts of settlers,
convicts, bushrangers, soldiers, police, and administrators in Hobart and London.
Yet primary sources document a darker story. Some Britons engaged in genocidal
massacres and some agents of the British Empire were complicit in or directly
responsible for a catastrophe that indelibly stained Australian and British history.
Some were passive bystanders, but others, like Melville, Herman Merivale, and
John West, bravely publicized the catastrophe for what it was: a series of events
behind which lurked human agency. It is difficult to cover this up now.
Australian historian Tony Barta has suggested that Australia is “a nation founded
on genocide.”261 Further regional studies are necessary to accurately assess this
statement, but Tasmania under British rule was clearly a site of genocide.
260
Colonial Times, 31 May 1836, 5.
261
Barta, “Relations of Genocide,” 238.

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From Terror to Genocide: Britain’s Tasmanian

Penal Colony and Australia’s History Wars

I n 1997 a government inquiry found that Australia’s forcible removals of

Benjamin Madley is a doctoral candidate in history at Yale University. He is grateful to participants

Journal of British Studies 47 (January 2008): 77–106

arguing against all previous scholarship on the Aboriginal Tasmanians’ demo-

PHASE 1: CREATING A CULTURE OF TERROR AND IMPUNITY,

terminated.”89 In 1830, a long-term visitor celebrated how “an effective system

Abductions by sealers had disastrous demographic effects. Besides the accompa-

PHASE 2: GUERRILLA WAR, DEHUMANIZATION, AND MASSACRE,

In the autumn of 1826, some Aboriginal Tasmanians began a desperate low-

Contemporary whites’ observations indicate that dispossession, destruction of

PHASE 3: STATE-SANCTIONED MASS MURDER, 1828–35

Extermination was no secret. In February, a letter to the Launceston Advertiser

PHASE 4: INCARCERATION AND DEATH, 1829–47

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