Captain James Cook arrived in 1777 and, like Du Fresne, he made contact with the island’s unique people, the Aborigines. His visit, however, was the beginning of a tragedy: “To some nations [Cook] opened the path of civilisation and religion,” says John West in The History of Tasmania, “[but] to this race [Aborigines] he was the harbinger of death.” What led to such a tragic outcome?

Food, however, was scarce at times. During these periods freed convicts and settlers used firearms to hunt the same game the Aborigines pursued with spears. Understandably, tensions mounted. Now toss into the explosive mixture white racial arrogance, the abundance of rum, and irreconcilable cultural differences. Europeans peg out boundaries and build fences; Aborigines hunt and gather nomadically. All that was needed was a spark.

A People Vanishes

The spark came in May 1804. A posse led by a Lieutenant Moore fired, without provocation, on a large hunting party of Aboriginal men, women, and children—killing and wounding many. “The Black War”—spears and stones versus bullets—had begun.

Many Europeans recoiled at the slaughter of the Aborigines. So distressed was the governor, Sir George Arthur, that he expressed his willingness to go to almost any length to ‘compensate for the injuries that government unwillingly inflicted upon the Aborigines.’ Thus, he initiated a program to “round up” and “civilize” them. In a campaign called the “Black Line,” about 2,000 soldiers, settlers, and convicts advanced through the bush in an effort to corner the Aborigines and resettle them out of harm’s way. But the exercise was a humiliating failure; they captured a woman and a boy. Then, George A. Robinson, a prominent Wesleyan, spearheaded a more conciliatory approach, and it worked. The Aborigines trusted him and accepted his offer of resettlement on Flinders Island, north of Tasmania.

In her book A History of Australia, Marjorie Barnard says of Robinson’s achievement: “In reality, though he was probably quite unaware of this himself, his conciliation had a Judas touch. The unfortunate natives were segregated on Flinders Island in Bass Strait with Robinson as their guardian. They pined and died.” The forced change in life-style and diet took over where the musket left off. One source says that “the last full-blooded Tasmanian Aborigine was Fanny Cochrane Smith, who died in Hobart in 1905.” Authorities vary on this. Some point to Truganini, a woman who died in Hobart in 1876, others to a woman who died on Kangaroo Island in 1888. Mixed-blood descendants of the Tasmanian Aborigines are alive and well today. Added to humankind’s ongoing litany of abuses, this episode has appropriately been called “the State’s greatest tragedy.” Moreover, it underscores the Biblical truth that “man has dominated man to his injury.”—Ecclesiastes 8:9.