Indigenous · History Classes · Grades 10–13 · College · University

Tasmania — The Palawa Are Living

History Class · Level band: Grades 10–13 · College · University

DRAFT — CULTURAL REVIEW PENDING. These history classes are a publisher’s draft blend of the Collection’s Indigenous history research, standing on its own website. Indigenous cultural review precedes any public release of this strand. Readings carry the research labels unchanged: Documented Fact · Tradition — the people’s own account · Debated / Claim. This page carries no advertising.

English edition — the language editions of the history classes are outstanding and will follow the site’s translation pattern; none is fabricated here.

For the teacher — teacher-facing guidance for this class stands in this box only; the reading below is the student reading. Senior band only. This class exists to teach a verdict and its refutation together, in that order, neither without the other: (1) the "last Tasmanian" story is taught as what it was — a colonial verdict, false when it was made — never as background fact, and the blood-quantum phrase inside it ("full-blood") is named as the verdict's mechanism, never used in the class's own voice; (2) Tasmania is filed separately from mainland Australia throughout — the island's record is its own, and the census files it per land; (3) the death figures are taught at Ryan's documented level with her own caution attached, and the word "genocide" only as classed in §6. Sacred and restricted Palawa knowledge is recorded in the research as existing and is not reproduced here.

The most famous extinction in the record — and the people who refute it

Class: RESEARCH. Compiled documented record. This class is arranged in the order the evidence demands: first the land and its nations, then the war and the removal at full strength — and then, front and centre, the living community, because a class that ended in 1876 or 1905 would be teaching the verdict, not the history.

1. Nine nations (Documented Fact, at the classification's level)

Before British settlement in 1803, Tasmania — cut off from the mainland by rising seas for roughly 8,000 years — was held by the Palawa in, on Lyndall Ryan's classification following Rhys Jones, nine nations: North West · North · North Midlands · Ben Lomond · North East · Oyster Bay · Big River · South East · South West — each of six to fifteen clans, more than sixty clans in all. The classification itself carries a caution the class prints: the earliest ethnographer, George Augustus Robinson, described political groups at clan level only, so "nation" is a modern grouping of clans sharing region and language. Population estimates before colonisation range from 3,000 to 15,000; no single figure is adopted. The languages are the thinnest record in this strand — for some western groups a dozen or so words survive, and no grammar at all — so Tasmania's languages are carried as a range only: 8–12 distinct languages, or 15 regional varieties on Crowley and Dixon's comparison, most of them mutually unintelligible.

2. The Black War, 1823–1834 (Documented Fact; the toll at its source's level)

As a million acres of hunting grounds were granted away and stocked with sheep, the clans resisted — Big River, Oyster Bay and North Midlands people spearing stock-keepers and making plain they wanted the settlers and their stock off their hunting grounds — and reprisal killing escalated into war. In November 1828 Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur declared martial law in the Settled Districts: Aboriginal people could be shot on sight by soldiers. It lasted more than three years, the longest martial law in Australian history on the record carried here. Ryan's accounting of the war's dead, carried at exactly her level: 1,079 people between November 1823 and August 1834 — 878 Aboriginal people and 201 colonists — with her own caution that the Aboriginal number is probably higher and will never be exact.

3. The Black Line, 1830 — and the removal (Documented Fact)

In October–November 1830, some 2,200 soldiers, settlers and convicts formed a moving human line across the island to drive the remaining people onto the Tasman Peninsula. It captured two people. Between 1830 and 1835, under George Augustus Robinson's "friendly mission," most of the survivors — about 200 people — were brought in and removed to the Wybalenna establishment on Flinders Island, on promises of a temporary exile. At Wybalenna they died at a high rate, principally of respiratory disease, exiled from their own countries. In 1847 the survivors were moved again, to the derelict convict station at Oyster Cove, south of Hobart.

4. The verdict — Truganini, 1876; Fanny Cochrane Smith, 1905 (Documented Fact that it was taught)

Truganini, a Nuenonne woman of Bruny Island, died on 8 May 1876, and colonial writing presented her as "the last Tasmanian." It was false when printed: other survivors outlived her, and the Bass Strait island communities — descendants of Tasmanian Aboriginal women and European sealers, never removed — had continued through the whole period, campaigning for land and a school on Cape Barren Island from the 1850s. Fanny Cochrane Smith (1834–1905), born at Wybalenna, was then presented in her turn as the "last": a wife, a mother of eleven, and a cultural teacher whose funeral drew more than 400 people. Between 1899 and 1903 she made, with Horace Watson, the only audio recordings of any original Tasmanian language — wax cylinders now inscribed on the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Register. She died on 24 February 1905, and the extinction story was told a second time, over a woman whose descendants are in the community today.

5. The living community, in figures (Documented Fact)

In the 2021 Census, 30,186 people in Tasmania identified as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander — 5.4% of the state's population (Australian Bureau of Statistics), up from 23,578 in 2016. The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, founded in the 1970s resurgence, stands as the community's peak organisation in the record carried here. On language, the class is precise in both directions: Tasmania's original languages all ended as spoken community languages — Fanny Cochrane Smith is carried as the last fluent speaker of the Flinders Island lingua franca — and what stands today is palawa kani, a composite language the community itself constructed from the 1990s out of the surviving wordlists and Fanny Cochrane Smith's cylinders: a deliberate act of retrieval, now carried in dual place names such as kunanyi / Mount Wellington and takayna / Tarkine. It is not filed as an original language surviving, and the original languages are not filed as living. Both halves are the record.

6. How this land files — and the word "genocide" (the census, and Debated)

Under the census method — a people is exterminated only when people, language and culture are all missing — Tasmania files no exterminated people: its nine nations file together as peoples whose separate polities ended and whose descendants continue in the Palawa people, and the Palawa as a whole file as the strand's largest guard case: original languages gone, people living. The word "genocide" for Tasmania is Debated: Lyndall Ryan concluded in her works that genocide occurred, pointing to massacre as an organised, government-sanctioned process; Henry Reynolds contended the British government acted as a restraint — a November 1830 dispatch warned that extinction would leave "an indelible stain" — and that what happened does not meet the 1948 United Nations Convention definition; Nicholas Clements extended that conclusion to the settlers, arguing the violence lacked ideological exterminatory intent. Each position is printed at its weight; the class adopts none, and no census line in it depends on the word.

Sources for this class

Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines: A History since 1803 (2012) — nine nations after Jones (1974); Black War accounting; Ryan, "Hard evidence" massacre-debate audit • ABS, 2021 Census QuickStats, Tasmania (30,186) • N. J. B. Plomley / Crowley & Dixon (1981), Tasmanian language materials • Fanny Cochrane Smith recordings record (Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery / National Film and Sound Archive; UNESCO Australian Memory of the World inscription, 2017) • Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, palawa kani Language Program • Henry Reynolds and Nicholas Clements positions as carried in the Tasmanian genocide historiography (Taylor 2013 survey) • UTAS, Companion to Tasmanian History (Palawa survival). Full research file: Australia and Tasmania — Frontier Wars, Removals, Missions and Child Removal, Genocide Record, Region 1 (Worldwide Census); census section: World Census — Australia + Tasmania.

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