Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [85]
Perhaps the most tragic of all was the fate of the original inhabitants of Tasmania, of whom the word ‘genocide’ can be accurately used. These short, shy, nomadic people were ethnically distinct from the Aborigines of mainland Australia, from whom they are thought to have been isolated for perhaps 8,000 years. Apart from animal skins, they wore few clothes, smearing their bodies with red ochre and wearing simple necklaces of shells or bones. No one knows how many of them were living on the island when the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman arrived there in 1642 – they built no towns and migrated from place to place as the seasons changed. Theirs was an extremely unsophisticated culture: they were said to have been unable to start a fire, to have no specialized stone tools, to have been unable to cut down a tree or to hollow out a canoe, and their language seemed to Europeans to have no grammar. It is perfectly possible, of course, that their lack of development – tantamount to a crime in the minds of so many Europeans – was exaggerated, in order to justify their persecution. But when Captain Cook landed on the island in 1777 he had certainly found them unthreatening. What contact the native Tasmanians had with outsiders – mainly groups of sealers on the coast, who bought or abducted women – brought them nothing but misfortune, with venereal disease causing many to become infertile, and others dying from pneumonia, tuberculosis and influenza.
When the British decided to use the island as a penal colony in 1803 there were perhaps 8,000 of these unfortunate people left. They now faced a trial of strength with citizens of the most technologically advanced nation on earth. In the convicts who had been transported to Tasmania they met individuals already brutalized by a penal system which had shipped them across the world and then dumped them. The free settlers who followed were hardly more sensitive. Indigenous people were hunted down from horseback, caught in steel traps, shot, speared, bludgeoned, poisoned and mutilated. Not a single European was ever punished for the murder of Tasmanian Aborigines, although there is an account of a flogging ordered because a settler had forced a woman to wear the head of her freshly murdered husband on a string around her neck. The young Charles Darwin, who visited Tasmania in 1836, thought the extirpation of the Aborigines was ‘unavoidable’. ‘I do not know’, he noted drily, ‘of a more striking instance of the comparative rate of increase of a civilised over a savage race.’ As many as could be found of the original Tasmanians were rounded up by Christian missionaries and shipped to Flinders Island, a dozen miles away, ‘for their own safety’. Here they were given new names and introduced to the Bible and the meaning of money. Flinders Island has a strange Orcadian beauty, but the aborigines found its barren shores unutterably depressing, and while the evangelists preached, the Tasmanians perished. By 1847, fewer than fifty were alive and soon afterwards the project was abandoned, the natives shipped back to their island, to drink themselves to death under the gaze of visiting anthropologists.
In May 1876, the last full-blooded member of their community on the island, a woman named Truganini, died at the age of seventy-three. A tiny woman (she was said to be only 4 feet 3 inches tall) with a whiskery face, her mother had been murdered by Europeans. Her sister had been kidnapped by Europeans. Her stepmother had been abducted by Europeans. Her husband had been drowned by Europeans. She had been raped by Europeans. Sterile from sexually transmitted diseases, she became a settlers’ prostitute. Unsurprisingly, photographs of her in old age do not show her smiling. In later years she had paired up with the last surviving male in her community, and had been desolate when white scientists had dissected his dead body to feed the learned societies’ appetite