The Total Eradication of Tasmania.
Tasmania is an island roughly the size of Ireland or Sri Lanka and is part of Australia today. The Dutch who first found it named it Van Diemen’s Land.
The island of Tasmania had been inhabited by indigenous Aboriginal peoples for over 40,000 years. They lived in harmony with the sea and forest, isolated from the rest of the world.
The British arrived in 1803. They looked at this ancient, self-sufficient island and saw only two things: a convenient dumping ground for British criminals, and land to be cleared of human beings.
They renamed the island Van Diemen’s Land and converted the entire geography into a giant, open-air penal colony. According to the British, this island was not a home for its native inhabitants; it was a British cage.
The British themselves live on an island. Yet when they confronted another island, their natural urge was to use its natural boundary as a prison wall.
The Island as a Cage
Between 1803 and 1853, Britain shipped over 75,000 male convicts to Van Diemen’s Land. Hardened criminals, petty thieves, and political rebels were dumped onto the island alongside British soldiers and land-hungry settlers.
As settlers seized ancestral hunting grounds to graze sheep, the indigenous Tasmanians resisted. They fought back with spears and fire to defend their families. The British declared this resistance a threat to colonial property. What followed from 1824 to 1831 is known in history as The Black War.
Governor George Arthur issued martial law in 1828, declaring that any Aboriginal person found in settled districts could be shot on sight. Bounty hunters were paid cash for capturing or killing native men, women, and children. But individual killings were not fast enough for the colonial administration. They wanted a systematic solution.
The Black Line: A Human Chain of Extermination
In October 1830, Governor Arthur executed one of the most extraordinary military operations in colonial history: The Black Line.
The British government organized a human hunting grid across the island. A human chain of 2,200 armed men, composed of British soldiers, police, free settlers, and convicts promised early pardons, was formed, stretching over 120 miles across Tasmania.
Equipped with muskets, handcuffs, bugles, and searchlights, this human wall marched shoulder-to-shoulder southwards across the island for seven weeks. Their explicit objective was to sweep the entire island like a giant net, driving every single Tasmanian Aboriginal person into the narrow Tasman Peninsula, where they could be trapped and permanently confined.
The Black Line was the ultimate expression of British inhuman obsession. It turned an entire island into a physical trap to purge it of its original human inhabitants.
Lie to Kill and Convert
The few surviving Tasmanians who escaped the net were hunted down by a preacher named George Augustus Robinson, who promised them safety, food, and land if they surrendered peacefully.
It was a lie.
Roughly 200 people, out of an original population of thousands, were exiled to Wybalenna (“Black Man’s Houses”) on Flinders Island, a desolate, windswept rock in the Bass Strait.
At Wybalenna, the British instituted a regime of cultural erasure. The captives were stripped of their names, forced to wear heavy wool European clothes, compelled to attend daily Christian services, and forbidden from practicing their culture. Deprived of their land and spirit, the captives died rapidly of heartbreak, pneumonia, and disease. Within fifteen years, almost all of them were dead.
The Gendered Slaughter and the Lie of “Survival”
There is a sinister demographic detail about Tasmania that colonial historians love to gloss over.
When the British sent convict ships to Van Diemen’s Land, virtually no white women were sent. The island was populated by male soldiers, male convicts, and male sealers.
During the Black War, British hunting parties systematically slaughtered the male Aboriginal population. But Aboriginal women were not killed immediately; they were hunted, captured, and taken as sexual captives by British sealers and settlers on the Bass Strait islands.
These women were spared their lives, but only in exchange for forced sexual servitude.
Today, Western institutions point to the descendants on the Bass Strait islands and claim that the Tasmanian Aborigines “survived.” In America, a similar narrative trick is used: promoting mixed-race demographics as a story of “racial integration” and the “melting pot.”
Neither is true.
In Tasmania, they are sold as historical survival. In reality, both are the genetic residue of male slaughter and forced sexual captivity. The presence of mixed descendants does not prove survival or integration. It proves that an entire male population was exterminated, and the surviving women were reduced to sexual property. It also proves that even after several generations of breeding British still do not consider them as their own.
Truganini: Human Guinea Pigs
Among those exiled was a woman named Truganini. Her life story is a complete chronicle of British barbarism.
As a young girl, Truganini watched her mother be butchered by British whalers. She saw her sister abducted by sealers and murdered. Her fiancé was mutilated and drowned by timber cutters while she was forced to watch. By the time she was a young woman, her entire culture had been wiped out around her.
Truganini lived long enough to become the last known full-blooded Tasmanian Aboriginal person on the island. She spent her final years in Hobart, watching the very society that had murdered her family walk past her on the street.
As she lay dying in May 1876, Truganini knew what the British did to dead bodies. She remembered how British collectors and scientists dug up Aboriginal graves, decapitated corpses, and boiled skulls to ship them to museums in London for “scientific study.”
On her deathbed, Truganini made a single, desperate plea to her medical attendants:
“Don’t let them cut me up. Bury me behind the mountains.”
The Corpse on Display
The British cannot live without cruelty. They exist to inflict cruelty upon others, and even the dead are not spared. Nor was Truganini spared even after her death.
After her death in 1876, Truganini was buried in a secret plot at the former convict station at Female Factory in Hobart. But her rest did not last. Just two years later, in 1878, the Royal Society of Tasmania exhumed her body.
They stripped her flesh, wired her skeleton together, and placed her skeleton on public display in a glass case at the Tasmanian Museum in Hobart.
Tourists, school children, and British visitors walked past the glass display case, gawking at the wired bones of the woman whose people the British had exterminated. It continued from 1904 to 1947. It ended 71 years later, with the collapse of the British Empire.
Recall Oliver Cromwell’s head from Chapter 1. The British spiked Cromwell’s head, stole it, and sold it to freak-shows for pennies. A century later, they did the exact same thing to Truganini by displaying her skeleton in a museum box as a trophy of complete extinction.
Only a full century after her death were her remains finally cremated, and her ashes scattered in the waters of the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, as she had begged a hundred years before. This was the year 1976, when the British went to the IMF with a begging bowl for the first time.
Humanity in the British seems to rise in waves coinciding with their diminishing power.
Final Deceit on History
An entire human race on Tasmania was wiped out. The ethnocide is complete, but it is kept hidden from history books. They display the descendants of British sexual predators as proof to deny the systemic ethnocide they committed many generations earlier.
Historians wrote about it, but their accounts were buried under nuanced linguistic niceties. Humans other than the British were never counted as civilization.
If the argument is that this destruction was inevitable, the British should look at North Sentinel Island in the Andaman territory of India, where an ancient uncontacted island civilization still exists in complete freedom. When a white American missionary (John Allen Chau) surreptitiously and illegally invaded North Sentinel Island in November 2018 to forcibly convert the tribe to Christianity despite explicit legal warnings, the Sentinelese defended their sovereignty and killed him on the beach. The Indian government respected the tribe’s sovereign protection laws, refusing to dispatch military forces to arrest the islanders or interfere with their ancient isolation.
Today, the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area is one of the largest temperate wilderness regions in the Southern Hemisphere. It consists of ancient rainforests, alpine plateaus, wild rivers, and dramatic coastlines. It is the home of the world’s tallest flowering trees (Eucalyptus regnans). Cape Grim is often cited as having some of the cleanest air on Earth.
The British Empire collapsed before they could destroy the environment too.
In the next chapter, we shall examine how identical policies of land theft, massacres, and legal erasure were carried out across mainland Australia.
References:
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Ryan, Lyndall. Tasmanian Aborigines: A History Since 1803. Allen & Unwin, 2012. ISBN: 978-1742370682. (The primary academic authority documenting the Black War, Governor Arthur’s martial law, and colonial dispossession).
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Clements, Nicholas. The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania. University of Queensland Press, 2014. ISBN: 978-0702250064. (Detailed historical research on the Black Line military sweep and frontier violence).
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Pybus, Cassandra. Truganini: Journey Through the Apocalypse. Allen & Unwin, 2020. ISBN: 978-1760877545. (Comprehensive biography of Truganini, documenting the destruction of her family and the exhumation of her remains).
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Boyce, James. Van Diemen’s Land. Black Inc., 2008. ISBN: 978-1863954136. (Groundbreaking history of the Tasmanian penal colony and the rapid destruction of the indigenous environment and people).
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Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India. Andaman and Nicobar Islands (Protection of Aboriginal Tribes) Regulation, 1956. Official legal framework enforcing strict isolation of North Sentinel Island, and official police documentation of the November 2018 illegal intrusion by John Allen Chau.
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BBC News. “John Allen Chau: Man killed by uncontacted Andaman tribe told family ‘I think I may die’.” Published November 22, 2018. URL: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-46304193 (Documenting the death of the American missionary attempting surreptitious Christian conversion of the uncontacted Sentinelese tribe).